Reading discussion with Justin Jackson

Discussion with the author (Justin Jackson) of "An Army of Workmen: The Politics of Military-Colonial Public Works," chap. 3 of The Work of Empire: War, Occupation, and the Making of American Colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines (University of North Carolina Press, 2025).

This chapter of The Work of Empire, a study of how Cubans' and Filipinos' labor for the US military between the Spanish-American War and World War I affected American colonialism and these nations' histories, explores the politics and political economy road-building in these war-torn islands, under US military occupation. While US occupiers coerced and recruited Cubans and Filipinos to build streets and highways to facilitate military and police mobility, sanitation, and economic recovery, Cuban and Filipino elites and laborers seized infrastructure's politics of taxation and revenue to turn the logic of empire-building against US policy aims. The result were infrastructural states in Cuba and the Philippines that empowered Cubans and Filipinos to resist labor coercion and adapt the political economy of public works to their own ends.