Since being taken from imperial Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Philippines had existed as a de facto American colony, one maintained along the lines of the long-established European model. On the one hand, that had meant schools and hospitals and roads. On the other, it had meant rank economic exploitation and the swift crushing of any aspirations for self-determination; in the failed war for independence that followed the American takeover, some twenty thousand Filipino and four thousand American combatants were killed, figures that dwarfed the estimated quarter-million
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