Verge: Studies in Global Asias

Abstract:

Between 1903 and 1928, élites in Lima and Manila had to face the prospect of losing their remote territories in the Putumayo and Sulu-Mindanao regions to Colombia or the United States. This essay proposes the concept of Inherited Destiny as a framework to analyze the rhetoric deployed by these élites to claim as inheritance territories over which the Spanish state never truly exercised sovereignty or only did so in an indirect or very diffuse, temporary, and precarious manner. As a result of this process, a profound contradiction permeated their relationship with these territories: they were understood by said élites as simultaneously already owned, yet also destined for conquest and assimilation.