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Please join New Lines Magazine and Nighthawk for a conversation with historian Lisandro Claudio about his new book "The Profligate Colonial: How the US Exported Austerity to the Philippines."

About the Book
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. In his new book The Profligate Colonial, historian Lisandro 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 20th 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.

About the Speaker
Lisandro Claudio, an intellectual and cultural historian of the Philippines, is an associate professor in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of two previous books, Liberalism and the Postcolony: Thinking the State in Twentieth-Century Philippines and Jose Rizal: Liberalism and the Paradox of Coloniality, which examines how turn-of-the-century liberalism informed the birth of Filipino literature and nationalism.

The discussion will be moderated by New Lines Politics Editor Danny Postel.
This event is part of the series Juxtapositions: Conversations on Art, Ideas and Global Cross-Currents, a co-production of New Lines Magazine and Nighthawk.

Free of charge and open to the public.