The PBA sent economic botanists and plant explorers to Java, Sri Lanka, and Ceylon to investigate tropical crops. These travels resulted in the PBA’s first report on the coconut plant and copra trade, authored by William S. Lyon in 1903. Lyon’s report detailed the impressment of the coconut into an emerging military-industrial complex as an oleochemical, a general term for a vegetable fat with industrial applications. “Chemical science,” Lyon wrote, “produced from the cocoanut a series of food products whose manufacture has revolutionized the industry and placed the business of the manufacturer and of the producers upon a plane of prosperity never before enjoyed.”French chemists in Marseilles distilled from copra lauric acid, an essential washing agent, and incorporated coconut oil into oleomargarine, a solid fat composed of beef tallow, water, and a vegetable oil such as coconut valued for its shelf stability. By 1902, four or five large factories in France met the “world’s demand for ‘vegetaline,’ ‘cocoaline,’ or other products with suggestive names, belonging to this infant industry.”The high triglyceride content of coconut oil led British chemists to investigate its potential as a source of nitroglycerin when heated under pressure with an alkali such as lye. According to one mid-twentieth century account, the “recovery of [nitro]glycerin” from copra was twenty-five to thirty percent higher than that of other high lauric acid vegetable oils.The coconut tree—and by extension its planters, pickers, and Pacific landscapes—were incorporated into an industrial war machine. So valuable were coconuts during the Great War that the British Home Office imposed high duties on copra exports from the colonies. The shredded husks, meanwhile, became gas mask filters protecting soldiers from chemical weapons. The war that began as a response to the geopolitical rivalries of technological imperialism was fought over and with the biological materials of empire.In addition to detailing the economic potential of copra, Lyon offered a set of proscriptions for the growth of a Philippine copra export industry. This included bioengineering a tree best suited to the needs of a plantation economy. Coastal palm trees fruited infrequently due to the need to expend more energy on root growth in search of subterranean nutrition. Inland trees, by contrast, directed that energy toward trunk growth which, when paired with top pruning, encouraged greater flowering. Far from the spindly tree of the tropical imagination, the coconut tree of the plantation economy was a short and squat prolific flowerer.

Further travels through the coconut zone endowed PBA botanists with insight into how to manipulate trees to frequent flowering. Thomas P. Hanley, a special agent in charge of farm machinery, reported that a chance train ride from Colombo to Kandy placed him “in the acquaintance of an educated Singalese” who owned a plantation “upon which he made coconut growing a specialty.” The unnamed informant shared that the trees generated best when spaced twenty-five to thirty feet apart, which in turn mandated more acreage for each plantation. The resulting dwarf trees better withstood strong winds and “the fruit can easily be gathered by our native boys, who are accustomed to the work.”The biggest challenge to the potential coconut planter, though, was attracting investment capital while the tree took seven years from planting to mature. Here, agents of the colonial state filled in, proving the efficacy of large coconut plantation by using forced labor on penal farms. PBA scientists and colonial administrators moved seamlessly between service to the colonial state and their own private agricultural entrepreneurial schemes. Key to this rotation was their access to unfree Filipino laborers and their ability to attract American investors to the archipelago. No figure better embodies this set of relations than Dean Conant Worcester. Worcester, a University of Michigan-trained zoologist, made two late-nineteenth-century collecting expeditions to South America and Southeast Asia along a Brazil to the Philippines route first blazed by British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace.Worcester may have remained in Michigan had not the American war against Spain generated press and political interest in its largest Pacific colony. Worcester and his former expedition partner, Frank S. Bourns, published a series of articles detailing the history of Spanish misrule, the archipelago’s untapped natural wealth, and the Philippine “types” too divided to constitute an independent nation.Worcester’s deft pen and expert self-promotion earned him a post on the governing Philippine Commission, a seven-member body appointed by the US president. Worcester served as the commission’s “director of the interior” until 1913, making him one of the longest-serving US administrators in a colonial government known for short tenures. Worcester’s longevity was due, in part, to his portrayal of US rule as a defense of upland “tribal peoples” from more Hispanicized yet vicious lowland “Malays.” The portrayal earned Worcester the enduring ire of the Philippine landowning elite but was nonetheless embedded into the racial geography of empire.

While elite power forced Philippine commissioners to work out power-sharing agreements in the form of an elected Assembly, commissioners and the American military retained direct oversight in areas deemed “non-Christian.” The racial division effectively gave Worcester’s Interior Bureau an open hand to mine Luzon’s upland Cordillera for mineral wealth and to work alongside the US military government in the southern “Moro Province,” a vast area that included the island of Mindanao. Among Worcester’s many initiatives were explorations into gold mining in Benguet, Luzon; the introduction of cattle grazing in Bukindon, Mindanao; and ample assistance to Bourns’s Philippine Lumber and Development Company,maceta 40 litros which maintained interests across the islands. Finally, with the PBA under his purview, Worcester was in close touch with Lyon and the chemists who had turned their attention toward the copra.Worcester’s 1911 pamphlet, “Coconut Growing in the Philippines,” beckoned investors to the islands.His rhetoric is an exemplar of the strategies agricultural entrepreneurs invoked to draw financial capital to the growing fruit empires in the Pacific and Central America. Agricultural entrepreneurs balanced their praise for the natural capacity of equatorial lands with a condemnation of the “native” practices that failed to develop robust export economies. “The agricultural methods of the natives,” Worcester wrote, “have violated every known rule. Seldom has the ground been really prepared for planting. The trees invariably stand too thickly. The Filipino cannot rid himself of the idea that the more seed he sows the greater will be his harvest.” Such carelessness produced the dreaded “tall spindling trees” that bore “nuts sparingly.” Yet, despite the waste, “the Philippine Islands produced during the fiscal year ended June 30, 1909, approximately 231,787,050 pounds of copra … This output excels that of Java, of the Straits Settlements, of Ceylon, or of the South Sea Islands, and places the Philippines at the head of the list of coconut growing countries. In fact, during the year mentioned the Philippines produced about one third of the world’s output.”Worcester asked his investor-reader to imagine the potential if Philippine labor could be disciplined to scientific methods. “If this result has been obtained under the haphazard methods in vogue, what may be anticipated when due care is exercised in selecting suitable land, when it is properly cleared and planted, and when suitable cultivation is continued while the young trees are growing and after they begin to produce?”The pamphlet paid immediate dividends. Worcester boasted to the army general Frank McIntyre that he was “glad the publication was insisted upon, because it has already brought a good bit of money out here for investment in coconut growing. There are two men in the islands now hunting land.

One of them has $250,000 available, and the other has $50,000 with the assurance of more as fast as it is needed.”The prison was the institution by which Americans disciplined Philippine labor to copra exports. The declared end of war in 1902 saw the transformation of insurgents from enemies of the state to criminals. The Philippine Constabulary, an archipelagic wide police force composed of American leadership and Philippine recruits, continued the wartime practice of concentrating subversive communities, policed new crimes such as vagrancy, and accompanied US land surveyors and scientific expeditions throughout the islands. The Constabulary’s arrest policies effectively created a pool of laborers to build an extractive infrastructure of roads, plantations, and penal farms. Five hundred “well-behaved” prisoners constructed a road between the Province of Albay’s Tabaco and Ligao municipalities. “In this way,” wrote one commissioner, “one of the most beautiful roads in the archipelago was constructed, and served a most useful purpose, as it tapped a region very productive of Manila hemp.”In southern Luzon’s Laguna province, an additional five hundred prisoners constructed roads to serve the young coconut industry. Laguna Provincial Governor Cailles requested that “Moros, Ilocanos, Bicols, and Visayans, but not Tagalogs” be sent to the Tagalogspeaking province so that the prison laborers would not escape. Cailles ordered each man to wear a “light chain welded around his ankle and fastened to his belt, so that he cannot move without making a slight clanking sound” and displayed the bullet-ridden body of one unfortunate soul who attempted to escape.In Mindanao, military governor Leonard Wood oversaw a prison labor road-building project between Overton and Marahui, an area that American officials hoped to devote to rubber plantations.The two largest were the San Ramon colony in Zamboanga, Mindanao and the Iwahig colony on the island of Palawan. The San Ramon penal farm in Zamboanga, Mindanao housed Muslim dissidents and an early order called for the planting of cacao, rubber, hemp, coffee, and a variety of vegetables in addition to coconuts on the prison’s approximately one thousand four hundred and fifteen hectares.The cacao orchard failed, and rubber did not take but coconut thrived. Bureau of Agriculture officials “urgently” recommend that “labor, farming tools, and draft animals be found to ready the ground for an additional 200,000 coconut trees.”By 1915, the colony’s coconut plantation had twenty-five thousand mature trees, nine thousand seedlings awaiting transplanting, and five thousand sprouts in seed beds. The penitentiary also included a state-of-the-art drying house, which sped the drying process by controlling the heat. Officials selected Iwahig for a penal farm due to its proximity to the deep-water port, Puerta Princessa. As “virgin” land, that plantation required vast amounts of wartime labor to clear the site’s dense and bio-diverse rain forest.