The war that David Silbey refers to in the subtitle of his concise new history, “A War of Frontier and Empire” (Hill and Wang, 254 pages, $26), is not one you will find in any textbook’s index. The long conflict that gave America control of the Philippines is usually remembered, if at all, as a minor sequel to the Spanish-American War. The only episode from that conflict that remains in the popular memory, even in a small way, is the Battle of Manila Bay, when Commodore George Dewey sank a Spanish fleet. But as Mr. Silbey shows in this timely study, the American war in the Philippines didn’t really begin until the Spanish-American War was over. Our victory over the Spanish took a matter of months; our victory, if that’s the right word, over the native Filipinos took four years, and led us into a bloody war of counterinsurgency that eerily prefigured Vietnam and Iraq.

Mr. Silbey’s title is a reminder that ours is not the first generation of Americans to wonder, uneasily, whether our country is destined to become an empire, and what toll that destiny might inflict on our republican institutions. The brief war that America fought with Spain, between April and December 1898, was recognized at the time as our first imperialist adventure. Until then, every American war of expansion could be accounted for as a case of manifest destiny: We had to defeat the Mexicans and the Indian tribes in order to grasp our allotted share of the continent. In fighting Spain, however, we were leaving our shores behind, and entering into a treacherous game of geopolitics that had previously been reserved for the old European powers.

The main theater of the Spanish-American War, at least initially, was the Caribbean, and especially Cuba. Starting in 1897, Cuban revolutionaries sought to overthrow the island’s Spanish government, a development that inevitably concerned America. The battleship Maine was dispatched to the island to watch over American interests; and in February 1898, when the ship exploded in Havana harbor, war with Spain became inevitable. Exactly what happened to the Maine is still a historical mystery, but at the time, the American public, egged on by the Hearst papers, had no doubt that the Spanish were to blame. In a matter of months, we had swept the Spanish from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and its other Caribbean possessions, some of which remain under American control to this day.

When the war began, then, few Americans were thinking about the Philippines, another Spanish colony in revolt. Cuba lay just 90 miles from the American border; the Philippines, an archipelago of some 7,000 islands, was on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, far from America’s traditional sphere of influence. The conquest of the islands was almost an accident, and can be laid to the account of Theodore Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy and one of the country’s leading imperialists. Shortly after the Maine sank, Roosevelt, left in charge while his boss was home sick, ordered the American Pacific fleet to Hong Kong. Dewey was to wait there until the official declaration of war, whereupon he was to sweep into Manila Bay and destroy the antiquated Spanish fleet. This he did, triumphantly, on May 1, sinking seven Spanish ships without losing a single ship, or even a single sailor.

This lopsided battle was catnip to the glory-hungry Stateside audience: Mr. Silbey quotes one writer comparing Dewey to Francis Drake and Lord Nelson. But now that the Americans had the Philippines, it became clear that nobody knew what to do with them. President McKinley concluded, with a notable lack of enthusiasm, that “whatever it might prefer to do, America is in a situation where it cannot let go.” The Philippines were far away, hard to supply and defend. To make matters worse, they were nearing the end of their own revolutionary war, which had given the Filipino Army of Liberation under Emilio Aguinaldo control of most of the archipelago. When American troops entered Manila, Aguinaldo’s forces were about to capture the city themselves; only by shrewd tactics did America keep the rebels out.

The result was a dangerous stand-off between occupiers and insurrectos, which stretched into the beginning of 1899. The Philippine-American War proper, which forms the core of Mr. Silbey’s book, began on February 4, when a nighttime run-in between an American patrol and a Filipino detachment sparked a general engagement. It quickly became clear that the insurrectos, who had defeated the Spanish, were no match for American tactics and equipment. Mr. Silbey, a professor of European history at Alvernia College, expertly shows how these American advantages, combined with the Filipinos’ uncertain command structure and poor morale, led to a series of major American victories. By the fall of 1899, it seemed, the Philippine-American War had been won.

In fact, the war was only beginning. Aguinaldo, who comes across in Mr. Silbey’s telling as a weak and vacillating figure, nevertheless was canny enough to see that a conventional war against the Americans was hopeless. Instead, Mr. Silbey writes, “the Filipino revolutionaries … managed to reconstruct themselves organizationally and turn to an unconventional form of warfare that relied on ambush, concealment, and the avoidance of conventional set-piece battles.” These new tactics prolonged the fighting throughout 1900. They also forced American troops, under the command of General Arthur MacArthur (the father of Douglas), to engage in the kind of jungle warfare that made the Vietnam War a nightmare.

“Whenever a village was approached,” remembered one American soldier, “the natives came forward and offered lukewarm water in coconut shells. They were all very profuse in their assertions of good will, smiling all sorts of welcome, but who were at heart insurrectos and who bona fide partisans of the American invasion it was hard to say.” American troops trying to track down Vietcong in the 1960s, or Sunni terrorists in Iraq, could tell much the same story.

Yet unlike Vietnam, the Philippine War ended in a decisive American victory. Aguinaldo hoped that, if his forces could inflict enough suffering, the war would become so unpopular in America that McKinley would lose the 1900 election to William Jennings Bryan, an anti-imperialist. When McKinley was re-elected, Aguinaldo began to despair, and in March 1901 he was captured in a daring commando raid.

This blow crippled the Filipino resistance, but did not end it. The worst single episode of the war, for the Americans, came in September 1901, when a group of insurgents on the island of Samar infiltrated an American mess hall and fell upon the unsuspecting soldiers, killing 40. In a sickeningly familiar pattern, this attack provoked savage reprisals. General Jacob Hurd Smith launched a campaign of terror, reportedly telling his men to turn the interior of the island into “a howling wilderness.” Smith’s actions would later be the subject of a Senate hearing. But by the summer of 1902, such punitive measures — working in tandem with the effective and benevolent efforts of many other officers — had put an end to the Army of Liberation. On July 4, President Roosevelt, elevated to the White House after the assassination of McKinley, had the satisfaction of putting a formal end to the war he had helped start.

Mr. Silbey tells this little-known story in exemplary fashion. “A War of Frontier and Empire” is a short, fast-paced book, which offers a good summary of the military history while making room for fascinating excursions into economic, social, and cultural issues. Mr. Silbey is especially interested in the strange plight of African-American soldiers in the Philippines, who were acutely aware that they were helping to spread the same kind of racist dominion they suffered under back home. “I feel sorry for [the Filipinos] and all that have come under control of the United States,” wrote one black soldier quoted by Mr. Silbey. “I don’t believe that they will be justly dealt by. The first thing in the morning is the ‘Nigger’ and the last thing at night is the ‘Nigger.'” Indeed, racist ideology was an essential part of the justification for the war. Witness Rudyard Kipling’s famous hymn “The White Man’s Burden,” subtitled “The United States and the Philippines,” which spoke of “Your new-caught sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child.”

Wisely, Mr. Silbey does not press too closely the parallels between the Philippine War and later American conflicts. The Philippine War was less defensible, on ideological or strategic grounds, than Vietnam; at the same time, its long-term consequences were happier. Indeed, Mr. Silbey expresses a qualified admiration for the American legacy in the Philippines. Certainly the benevolent paternalism of American rule compares favorably with the brutal exploitation practiced by other imperial powers — the Belgians in the Congo, or for that matter, the Japanese who occupied the Philippines during World War II.

After that war ended, the country was granted independence, and remained a client. of America throughout the Cold War. Ironically, Mr. Silbey writes, the American conquest itself helped to create a Filipino national identity: “The Philippine-American War was part of a Filipino experience, one that had the potential to bring a national vision to an archipelago full of people of different races, creeds, religions, cultures, and languages.” Yet he doesn’t allow us to forget the terrible price paid, in human lives and national honor, for that legacy.

akirsch@nysun.com