President William McKinley’s decision to appoint William Howard Taft governor-general of the Philippines was unconventional. The Cincinnati judge was silent on the War of 1898 and cool toward the American annexation of the Philippines. But the appointment turned Taft into the nation’s most ardent imperial retentionist. Where previous biographers and political historians have speculated that Taft was open to or even supported independence for the Philippines upon his return to the United States, Adam Burns’s meticulous reconstruction of Taft’s correspondence reveals otherwise.

Burns makes the case that the “Taft Era” lasted beyond his term as governor-general of the Philippines by dividing the book into sections on Taft’s time in and out of the Philippines. The first half of the book turns to the “policy of attraction”—the mix of incentives by which Americans “attracted” potential allies to the colonial state. Taft framed annexation as a fait accompli, thereby positioning himself as a reluctant but duty-bound administrator working for the good of the Filipinos. Burns acknowledges the racist nature of this position but is mainly concerned with the sociocultural (chapter one), political (chapter two), and economic (chapter three) components of attraction. Yet Taft’s ambivalence toward Filipinos resulted in deeply contradictory stances. He proclaimed the “Philippines for Filipinos” but urged Chinese migration as a solution to labor shortages. He relied on an elite he famously condemned as “as ambitious as Satan” (41) while encouraging their formation of a federal party (the Partido Federal) whose hopes for statehood he knew had no chance of succeeding. For all his emphasis on procedure, institutions, and law, Taft was “convinced that his personal touch was essential for the success of the policy of attraction” (39).

Taft’s conviction that he alone could forge a successful policy shaped his tenure as secretary of war (chapter four) and his one-term presidency (chapter five). Burns argues that Taft believed a multigenerational period of tutelage would end with a U.S.-Philippine relationship modeled on that of the British-Canadian dominion status. For this reason, Taft refused to commit to a promise of independence. Even as Roosevelt came to view the Philippines as a regional liability, the secretary of war spoke boldly and openly about retaining the islands “permanently” (83). The revised tariffs during his presidency, meanwhile, sought to tether the islands to the United States through trade (92). Taft later marshaled his reputation as “the nation’s expert on the Philippines” to criticize his Democratic successor’s moves toward gradual independence (chapter six). In all, Taft thoroughly deserved the moniker bestowed on him by William Jennings Bryan a decade earlier: when it came to Philippine independence, Taft was “the Great Postponer” (80).

Burns’s narrow focus on Taft allows him to mine through private correspondence and public speeches while allowing ample primary source quotations to immerse the reader in the period. But this focus may be a source of frustration to those engaged with postcolonial scholarship. Taft’s need to hear that Filipinos awaited his return with “love” (84) and his characterization of the Philippines as a “first love” (95), for instance, merit consideration of Taft as a gendered and raced figure with the power to frame himself as a neutral expert. One also wonders how the tensions of collaboration with educated and landed elites shaped the policy of attraction. Readers might also question Burns’s contention that Taft’s blueprint failed. Though the Philippines may not be an American dominion, the economic and labor migration policies of the colonial period bound the Philippines to the United States throughout the twentieth century—just perhaps not in a manner the Great Postponer would have understood.