The Profligate Colonial: How the US Exported Austerity to the Philippines

by Lisandro E. Claudio

Overview

In The Profligate Colonial, Lisandro E. Claudio reveals how austerity, long before it became a buzzword of modern technocracy, was a tool of US empire.

Austerity is often praised as prudence in hard times, a responsible response to crisis. In the Philippines today, it is treated as common sense, an unquestioned commitment to a strong currency, low inflation, and fiscal restraint. Claudio argues that this orthodoxy is in fact a colonial inheritance—a legacy of American rule that cast Filipinos as reckless spenders and imposed monetary discipline as a civilizing force. At the center of this logic is the "profligate colonial," a feminized, racialized figure who wastes public funds and so requires the steady hand of imperial governance.

Focusing on key moments in Philippine economic history across the twentieth century, Claudio charts how austerity was first exported through empire, then domesticated in line with nationalist ambitions. He shows that generations of Filipino policymakers, central bankers, and intellectuals absorbed the lessons of American "money doctors," transforming what was a means to build a colonial state on the cheap into a postcolonial moral imperative. Austerity became not just policy, but an ideology that transcended political divides and reshaped the boundaries of the Philippine economic imagination.

As austerity politics rise once more in response to global inflation, The Profligate Colonial is a vital, incisive reminder of how austerity's appeal is less about economics than about a deep-rooted politics of control—one born in empire and still alive in policy today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501784088
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	11/15/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	228
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lisandro E. Claudio is an associate professor in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Liberalism and the Postcolony.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Hidden Empire, Hidden Austerity
1. Austerity Contracted: A Colonial Cross of Gold, 1902–1913
2. Austerity Defended: The Tragedy of the Philippine National Bank? 1916–1921
3. Austerity Nationalized: The Politics of "Independent" Central Banking in Independent Philippines, 1949–1960
4. Austerity Democratized: Dear Money, the Dictator, and the Miserly Left, 1970–1986
Conclusion: Profligate Others Everywhere

What People are Saying About This

Barry Eichengreen

Claudio offers a remarkable analysis of the connections between the classical gold standard and US imperialism on the one hand and between the gold standard 'mentalité' and modern Philippine attitudes toward fiscal and monetary profligacy on the other. An original work of historical and social-scientific scholarship that bravely crosses traditional disciplinary lines.

Daniel Bessner

This excellent, deeply researched book explains how 'austerity' became a key discourse and policy regime in the Philippines. It is of significant interest to those intrigued by one of the most important economic frameworks of our era—one that shapes peoples' conception of the economically possible.

Clara Mattei

At once ambitious and crucial, The Profligate Colonial shows the racist prejudices that ultimately signal how economic theory is not neutral but based on highly moralistic and political assumptions.

Onur Ulas Ince

In The Profligate Colonial, Claudio turns Philippine monetary policy into a window to the history of austerity, US dollar supremacy, and good governance discourse. He offers us a forceful reminder of the disavowed imperial genealogy of the latter while exposing the moralizing mechanism of the austerity doctrine, which spins out of complex dynamics of global political economy simplified melodramas of sinners and savers. A welcome contribution.

Patricio N. Abinales

The Profligate Colonial establishes a different, largely unstudied connection between the US-as-colonizer and the Philippines-as-colonized, pointing at a more powerful, durable-but-'hidden' element in that relationship—economic austerity.

Caroline Hau

The Profligate Colonial is a judiciously researched, riveting, and spirited polemic against some of the most enduring yet overlooked shibboleths of the US-led empire of austerity, shibboleths that continue to haunt contemporary thought, economy, culture, and politics in the Philippines and elsewhere.

Eric Helleiner

In a very engaging analysis, Lisandro E. Claudio examines – and laments - how the ideology of austerity came to the Philippines via American imperialism and was then widely embraced locally across the political spectrum. Beautifully written, this compelling book provides an important new perspective on the history of austerity as a dangerous idea.