Paul Kramer's intervention is that he collapses the metropole and the fringe (Kramer, The Blood of Government 4). Kramer further argues that his book "is about the transnational politics of race and empire" (Kramer, The Blood of Government 4). In 1899, the U.S., having announced its ascendance as a world power during the Spanish-Cuban-American War, began its imperial takeover of the Philippine Islands (Kramer, The Blood of Government 5). Over the next 50 years, the imperialists in the United States justified their colonial empire by developing new racial ideologies and adapting to conditions that required they collaborate with the elite Illustrados and deal with Aguinaldo's anticolonial resistance.



According to Kramer, "The result of these struggles was a novel racial formation whose specific contours and texture emerged from a particular local convergence of transnational forces, rather than the "export" of U.S. racial idioms and institutions or the installations of generic "colonial" discourses" (Kramer, The Blood of Government 5). In this book, Kramer articulates how he sees racial politics assisted U.S. Empire, and conversely how empire-building transformed ideas of race and nation in both the U.S. and the Philippines (Kramer, The Blood of Government 7-14). Kramer intervention is novel. First, he argues that Philippine-American colonial history focused on the struggles over sovereignty and recognition (Kramer, The Blood of Government 7-14). Starting with the Blood Compact between Rajah Sikatuna and Legaspi, U.S. colonialists, used the proto-nationalism setup by Spanish colonialism to effect a exchange of ideas (and commercial interest) with Filipino Illustrados, in the process bifurcating the Philippine population into "civilized" Christians and "savage" animists and Muslims (Kramer, The Blood of Government 88-158). According to Kramer, the former were subjected to a measured and unique form of colonialism that resulted in self-government as they demonstrated their "capacities" (Kramer, The Blood of Government 5, 31, 199, and 288). The latter were administered first by Americans, then eventually by Christian Filipinos who had proven themselves worthy of shouldering the "white man's burden" (Kramer, The Blood of Government 11-12, 121, 195, 227, and 378). Kramer argues that it was less about Filipinos being savages but more about whether the elites in the Philippines could control their own savages (Kramer, The Blood of Government 33-34). In the end, conversely, a racial vision of imperial nation building collided with U.S. nativist efforts to isolate the United States from its colonies - resulting in what Kramer argues was Philippine independence (Kramer, The Blood of Government 347-432). Kramer moves, "beyond the conventional conceptual borders of the Philippines and the Untied States, which for over a century have nto captured their connected histories... toward [what he sees as] an elusive goal: a history without boondocks" (Kramer, The Blood of Government 34).