Constructing A Colonial People

Constructing Colonial People provides a new and comprehensive interpretation of how the United States attempted to transform Puerto Rico from a neglected backwater of the Spanish empire into one of its key props in establishing hegemony in the western hemisphere. The book looks at the formative three-and-one-half decades of U.S. colonial rule, when the colony's key institutions, economic structures, and legal doctrines were transformed. Policy papers, speeches, newspaper articles, and memoirs fr