Cornell University Library Digital Collections

Agrarianism in Empire: Select images of the Philippines from the Gerow D. Brill papers

The creation of Agrarianism in Empire: Select images of the Philippines from the Gerow D. Brill papers was supported by the Grants Program for Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences, awarded to Claire Cororaton, PhD Candidate in History, along with collaborator, Emily Zinger Southeast Asia Digital Librarian, Cornell University Library, in 2020. The following introduction to the collection was written by Claire Cororaton.

This online collection includes digitized photos of glass negatives taken by Gerow D. Brill during the early years of the US Occupation of the Philippines. These glass negatives were selected from the Gerow D. Brill papers, #1379, which are housed in Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. The goal of the digital collection is to highlight unexplored themes in the historiography of Philippine Studies--particularly the relationship between imperialism, agricultural extension projects, and ideas of development--as well as to increase accessibility and awareness of Philippine-related materials in Cornell University’s collections. This digitization is part of a larger dissertation project that explores how discourses of agricultural productivity informed the American imperial project in the Philippines. Brill's photos provide a unique lens into an important moment in Philippine history when many were still reeling from war. Based on his letters of correspondence, these photos were likely taken during his time in the archipelago in 1900 and in 1902.

Brill was a scientific explorer for the United States Department of Agriculture who had been stationed in China. He was in charge of the Hupeh Agricultural College and Experimental Farm in Wuchang, China and was planning to explore the upper Yangtze Valley around the time of the Boxer Rebellion (1899 -1901). His work involved plant introduction, agricultural education in new scientific fields such as horticulture, and investigations of potential transplantations of seedlings from the Far East into the United States. Soon after the outbreak of the Philippine-American War in 1899, perhaps because of his experience in China, Brill was selected to organize an experimental station and agricultural school in Negros Island, the primary sugar-producing island in the archipelago. While waiting to start his post, Brill traveled throughout the Philippines in 1902 to survey agricultural conditions and to provide recommendations for a new school, initially intended to be established on La Granja, the sugar plantation of Juan Araneta. Throughout the US period, experimental agricultural stations and schools would be established throughout the archipelago to conduct experiments on subjects such as seed and crop selection and soil quality. These institutions reveal two foci of the American imperial project in the Philippines: the expansion of public works projects and the strengthening of industrial education. Justified under the logic of so-called “benevolent imperialism”, these reveal the discursive and political contours of U.S. imperialism and prefigure the Philippine postcolonial state’s attempts at national development.

This digital collection supports research and teaching by an interdisciplinary set of scholars, including scholars of science and technology studies, environmental history, political ecology, military history, and colonial histories of Southeast Asia and beyond. It can also complement historiography on visual studies, vision and empire, and colonial photography. To contextualize these photos, scholars can use an unpublished report in Brill’s papers held by Rare and Manuscript Collections (“Agricultural Conditions in the Island of Negros and Suggestions in Regard to an Experiment State & School of Agriculture”, Box 2, Folder 2-11), as well as a narrative of his journey published in the 1902 Report of the Philippine Commission. In both of these reports, Brill makes observations about the fertility of the soil, the supposed inefficiency of labor systems, and the lack of tools and good roads that were considered necessary for modern agriculture.

Scholarship on colonial photography in the Philippines has highlighted the discourses of race and savagery in representations of inhabitants of the archipelago. Brill’s photos, on the other hand, mostly focus on subjects that might interest an engineer or a scientist: soil science, pests, topography, agricultural implements, infrastructure, home industries, and markets. The seemingly apolitical nature of some of the photographs, however, belies the violent intersection between science, violence, and empire underpinning the American innovations in colonial governance. Indeed, the language of American pragmatism and progressivism—the focus on practice and experimentation—provided a language for redefining the meaning of empire. Brill’s photos reveal the traces that the Philippine-American war left on the landscape, as well as how people related with a changing physical environment.

The collection sheds light on the relationship between science, agriculture, empire, and war via photos on the rinderpest epidemic and the reconcentration period. The Philippine-American War triggered a devastating wave of rinderpest across the archipelago. Around 629,000 cattle died in 1902 with about 50,000 animals dead in each of the key provinces of Negros, Bohol, Cebu, Iloilo, and Leyte (Doeppers, 2016, 237). Scholars have suggested that rinderpest increased due to the American army obtaining carabao for military transportation and from refugees taking surviving carabao into new regions for small-scale farming. Photos in the collection include men pulling horse-drawn carriages (which might have been shocking at that point to many inhabitants of the archipelago not used to human-drawn rickshaws prevalent in other parts of Southeast Asia). Brill’s photos do not deal with this larger context, but focus instead on the so-called successful American-led vaccination campaign of cattle.

Similar absences are evident in Brill’s photos of the reconcentration period in the Philippines (~1898 through 1906), still an unexplored aspect of the Philippine-American War. For instance, one of Brill’s photos is titled “Family returning from concentration camp, with house, household goods, pig & chickens, on carabao cart over new road built by Americans”. Read against the grain, the bucolic representation of this period obscures the close link between violence, militarization, and the discourses of agricultural development in the Philippines.

Beyond themes of war and violence, one unique aspect of Brill’s photos is their collective focus on everyday life. It is unclear whether Brill intended these photos to be for his personal collection or published for a wider audience. Some photos have a documentary-like quality, at times taken from the deck of a moving boat. Some of the people in the photos are in motion—working in the fields, walking to the market—rather than posing in a studio. Ruptures within the aesthetic regime of colonial representation might be glimpsed in candid photos taken of children smiling while working in the farm, or a group of farmers working while listening to a musician play a guitar. Overall, these photos offer a unique visual depiction of the archipelago, during a tumultuous time in Philippine history.

Scholars interested in exploring themes described here might be interested in looking at non-Philippine related materials in the rest of Cornell’s Gerow D. Brill papers collection. Gerow Brill’s correspondence can also be found in the Special Collections of the USDA National Agriculture Library. Scholars of Southeast Asia and the Philippines can visit the University of Michigan’s digital collection, “The United States and its Territories: 1870-1925: the Age of Imperialism” as well as other Southeast Asia collections through the Committee on Research Materials on Southeast Asia (CORMOSEA). Finally, the Cornell Rare and Manuscript Collections contains voluminous materials on the Philippines, given the role of the university in the early years of the US Occupation of the Philippines.

A note about this collection

Due to the nature of capturing images from glass plate negatives, some of the images presented in the digital collection were captured multiple times using different light exposures. For the ease of navigating the materials, a single representative image was selected for the publicly accessible digital collection. Researchers may find some details not easily visible in the selected capture are better viewed using a capture of a different exposure of the glass plate negative or when using the original, un-inverted, higher bit depth, negative captures. The additional copies have been preserved and are available upon request by emailing rareref@cornell.edu.

As you look through the collection, please remember that every device monitor displays images differently, causing images to look slightly different on different devices. However, images in this collection are publicly accessible and downloadable. Researchers are welcome to download the images to their personal device and use their own editing software to enhance the image, such as adjusting the image’s contrast, which may help make certain details easier to view, or researchers can request higher bit depth files for further editing. The original label of the photo handwritten on the envelope is included in the photo description details.