Enduring Empire: U.S. Statecraft and Race-making in the Philippines. Forthcoming July 2025. Stanford University Press.
In 1898 the United States became a formal overseas empire and claimed sovereignty over the Philippine islands, justifying its rule in explicitly racial terms. Less than fifty years later, in 1946, the United States recognized Philippine independence, even as they continued to exert influence over the domestic and foreign affairs of the newly decolonized Republic. Despite some differences, U.S. control remained racial and imperial.  

Enduring Empire shows how U.S. federal state actors translated their ideas of race into state structures. Through innovating constitutional law, bureaucratic administration, and legislation, state actors built a durable and flexible system of racial-imperial rule that not only lasted beyond the period of formal empire but continues to this day. katrina quisumbing king traces debates among U.S. presidents, federal legislators, administrators, and justices about what kind of state the United States should be, the place of nonwhite people in the polity, and the best way to maintain U.S. white hegemony. In charting how state actors’ positions—some nativist, isolationist, and protectionist and others expansionist, interventionist, and imperialist—evolved from 1898 to 1946, quisumbing king identifies key moments when they cemented racial ideas into law and reshaped the terms of U.S. racial-imperial formation.

Gradations of Citizenship, Sovereignty, and Racial Eligibility in U.S. Empire, 1848-1979
Today, nearly 4 million people live in U.S. territories. They live under the U.S. flag and hold U.S. passports, but they cannot vote in federal elections. To address how the United States arrived at this state of unequal citizenship, I analyze how U.S. state actors concretized ideas of racial difference in decisions about who and what belonged. From 1848-1917, the United States acquired new territories, among them: New Mexico, Alaska, Guam American Sāmoa, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. While existing work focuses on popular racial depictions of Hawaiʻi, Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, I ask how bureaucrats, legislators, and judges made decisions about civic and political status during this period and through the 1970s. In this extended timeframe, I analyze the variations in racial management across multiple sites of U.S. empire. This project illuminates the racial limits to U.S. democracy and the experiences of colonial populations