The Scientific Bureaucracy of the American Colonial State and the Fishes in the Philippine Islands, 1898-1946

Brian P Giron

My thesis studies the history of science and empire in the context of American ichthyology and fish sciences in the Philippines between 1898 to 1946. It investigates the relationship between science and imperialism while looking into the particular circumstances of the scientists who came to work for the Bureau of Science in Manila. I argue that these circumstances, in turn, created an insular scientific space that was distinct from the ichthyological communities of academic institutions and government agencies in the United States. Within this insular space were further divisions between the bureaucrats who saw science primarily as a means to attain the goals of the colonial government and the ichthyologists of the Bureau of Science in Manila who viewed science beyond its ties to colonialism and empire. Beyond it was a vast scientific network that collected fishes from the field, transported specimen materials to Manila, Stanford, and Washington, and produced a broad spectrum of fish and fisheries knowledge for the colony and the US. The thesis also considers the matter of movement of fishes between the above-mentioned spaces. Fishes were collected in the hundreds of thousands and transported as specimen materials to be worked up in laboratories, while others were taken alive for display at the Manila Aquarium. Some species, such as the largemouth black bass and the Gambusia mosquitofish, were transported over large distances from the US to the Philippines and introduced into the environment as game fish and food fish, or as a means to control mosquito populations. Finally, I examine the legacy of American colonial science in the Philippines with respect to the construction of scientific knowledge. I argue that the relationship between the national and the insular scientific communities was mutually transformative and that science only approximated the framework of empire but was not contained by it. By using the correspondences, journals, logs, and other personal papers of these scientists along with their scientific publications and the reports of both the insular and the national governments, the present work presents a more thorough view of the deployment of fish sciences in the Philippine colony.

The Scientific Bureaucracy of the American Colonial State and the Fishes in the Philippine Islands, 1898-1946

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