Once Upon A Time in the Philippines
Once Upon A Time in the Philippines January 2026 The 1910 proposal to trade Mindanao and Palawan for Greenland reveals how colonial governance treated Philippine territory as negotiable imperial property; this episode—documented in Ambassador Maurice Francis Egan’s correspondence—illuminates the commodification of land, the erasure of indigenous sovereignty, and enduring questions about memory and national dignity. Context and thesis The suggestion that the United States might exchange Mindanao and Palawan for Greenland appears in diplomatic correspondence from 1910, when Maurice Francis Egan served as U.S. Ambassador to Denmark and described the idea as “very audacious”. This episode is not merely an oddity of diplomatic imagination; it is a revealing prism through which to examine colonial spatial logic, the instrumentalization of islands as bargaining chips, and the epistemic violence of treating inhabited territories as fungible assets. --- Historical background (facts) - Maurice ...