The books

2020In print

Ronald K. Edgerton

University Press of Kentucky

Pershing’s years among the Maranao and in Sulu, as a captain at Lake Lanao and as governor of the Moro Province, and the mix of diplomacy and force he learned there.

2020In print

Oliver Charbonneau

Cornell University Press

The American project in the Moro South set against the other colonial empires of its day, and the Moros’ own uses of it, from the archives of three continents.

2018In print

Rey Luis Adeva Montesclaros

New Day Publishers

The Spanish campaigns against the Maranao in the 1890s, set against the revolution that broke out in Luzon at the same time.

2013In print

Michael C. Hawkins

Northern Illinois University Press

How the American officers who ruled the Moro Province wrote its people into a story of savagery and progress, and used that story to govern.

2011In print

James R. Arnold

Bloomsbury Publishing

The American campaigns against the Moros under Wood, Bliss and Pershing, from Bud Dajo to Bud Bagsak, as a military history for the general reader.

2007In print

Robert A. Fulton

Tumalo Creek Press

The first years of the American occupation of the Moro country, from Bates’s treaty with the Sultan of Sulu to Bud Dajo, told campaign by campaign from the army’s records.

2004In print

Miguel A. Bernad

Ateneo de Manila University Press

Essays on the exploration of Mindanao and the Christian missions there from the sixteenth century on, by a Jesuit historian who spent his later life in Cagayan de Oro.

2002Out of print

Federico V. Magdalena

Mindanao State University

Essays on the history of the Moro South, the title essay on the 1902 battle in which American troops stormed the Maranao forts at Bayang, Lanao.

2000In print

Patricio N. Abinales

Ateneo de Manila University Press

How Cotabato and Davao were drawn into the Philippine state in the first half of the twentieth century, through the datus and settler elites who learned to work it, and what that made of Mindanao politics.

1986Out of print

Mamitua Saber

Mindanao State University

The Spanish assault on the Maranao kotas at Marawi in 1895, from Spanish accounts and Maranao memory, by the Maranao sociologist who founded the university’s research centre.

1977Out of print

Peter G. Gowing

Philippine Center for Advanced Studies, University of the Philippines

How the United States ruled the Moro Province and the Department of Mindanao and Sulu, from the Bates Treaty to the start of Filipinization, from the records of the men who governed. Reprinted by New Day in 1983.

1973In print

Cesar Adib Majul

University of the Philippines Press

The standard history of the Muslim peoples of the Philippines: the coming of Islam, the sultanates of Sulu and Maguindanao, and three centuries of Spanish wars against them, told from the Moro side of the record. Reissued by the University of the Philippines Press in 1999.

1971Out of print

Reynaldo C. Ileto

Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications

Datu Uto, who ruled the upper Pulangi against the Spaniards in the last decades of their rule, and what his rise and fall show of Maguindanao politics. Ileto’s first book, reissued by Anvil in 2007.

1936In print

Vic Hurley

E. P. Dutton

A popular history of the Moros and their wars with Spain and the United States, by an American who had lived in Zamboanga; vivid, partisan and long the only book of its kind in English.

1923Free to read

Sydney A. Cloman

Doubleday, Page & Company

The memoir of a US Army officer posted to Sulu at the start of American rule, and what he made of the datus and the people he was sent to govern. Out of copyright and free to read.

1908Free to read

Najeeb M. Saleeby

Bureau of Public Printing, Manila

Sulu from its earliest written genealogies to the American arrival, drawn from the sultanate’s own documents, Spanish records and the author’s years in Jolo. Out of copyright and free to read.

1906Free to read

Jacinto Juanmartí, SJ

United States Government Printing Office

Juanmartí’s 1892 grammar translated into English for the American army by Captain C. C. Smith of the 14th Cavalry. Out of copyright and free to read.

1905Free to read

Najeeb M. Saleeby

Bureau of Public Printing, Manila

The first English account of Maguindanao’s genealogies and of the law codes and Islam of Maguindanao and Sulu, translated by an American colonial official who read the originals. Out of copyright and free to read.

1892Free to read

Jacinto Juanmartí, SJ

Tipografía Amigos del País

The Jesuit mission’s Maguindanaon–Spanish dictionary, the first for the language, compiled at Tamontaka. Out of copyright and free to read.