Import of the Archive examines the role of archives in the United States' colonization of the Philippines between 1898 and 1916. During this period the archives played a critical part in the United States' entrenchment of a colonial state, exhibiting the flexibility and authority to enable arguments of the former colonial power's incompetence and the native population's incapacity. Based on extensive research of and in archives in the Philippines and the United States, this book urges readers to consider archival history within the context of America's imperial history. This book defines the archives broadly, as the accumulation material about a time proclaimed as "historic," as well as the records of the Bureau of Insular Affairs and the United States' Philippine Government, and the archives ceded by Spain per the treaty that ended the Spanish-American War.