CONQUEST, PESTILENCE AND DEMOGRAPHIC COLLAPSE IN THE

EARLY SPANISH PHILIPPINES

By;

Linda A. NewsonDepartment of Geography, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK

Reporters:

Alberto, Kenny Conson, Michael

Geraldino, Gromyko Tangub, EduardVenezuela, Leighton

Conquest

- the act of conquering a country or people.

- something won or acquired by physical or moral victory.

Pestilence

- a deadly epidemic decease, especially the bubonic plague.

Demography

- the statistical study of populations (birth rate, death rate, structure by age and sex etc.)

through census returns and records of births, marriages, deaths etc.

The Issue

In America, native population may have declined from about 50-60 million in 1492 to 6.5 million in 1650.

In the Philippines , Spanish conquest did not unleash a sharp decline of the Filipino population.

The aim of this article is to examine the extent of the demographic decline in the early conquest period, to analyse its underlying causes and to assess the relative importance of conquest and disease.

Claims

Most scholars agree that a significant factor in the decline of American populations was their lack of immunity to Old World diseases.

In the Philippines, population had acquired some immunity to Old World diseases in pre-Spanish times through trading contacts with Asia where the main acute infections had become endemic.

later colonization of the Philippines. More enlightened colonial policies were developed to protect the native population from abuse.

Conquest was more benign because the long distance from Spain and lack of precious metals. Alienation of native lands proceeded more slowly.

The decline is often located in the first half of the seventeenth century, rather than during the period of initial contact. This decline is associated not with Spanish conquest, but with the demands of defence generated by Moro raids from Mindanao and Sulu, which began at the very end of the sixteenth century.

the Hispano-Dutch War between 1609 and 1648.

The Philippines in 1565

The Philippines comprise about 7000 islands, but only about 500 exceed one square mile in area and only eleven are over 1000 square miles (Fig. 1).

-About 1567 Miguel de Legazpi reported to the Spanish Crown

that ‘the settlements in this land are not cities or even towns. They are communities of thirty to one hundred houses or less, and others are scattered in the form of caserı´as, in twos, six or ten’.

These relatively small communities, known as barangays, were held together by kinship, friendship and common interest.

There were no well-developed systems for the extra-communal exaction of tribute or forced labour that characterised some societies in the Americas, such as the Inca and Aztec.

Most settlements were located on the coast or a riverbank where their inhabitants subsisted primarily on rice and fish, supplemented by a variety of fruits and vegetables.

A few larger settlements had emerged as a result of trading contacts with the Chinese and Arabs, while Brunei traders had established towns at Pasig and Tondo in Manila Bay.

Even in the most densely settled parts of the Philippines, such the Central Plain of Luzon, around Manila Bay and in Laguna de Bay, very few settlements exceeded a few thousand people and most were considerably smaller.

The inhabitants of the interior mountain regions generally practised shifting cultivation or subsisted by hunting and gathering and here settlements were even more dispersed and some groups were semi-nomadic.

Overall, the low population density and limited production of surpluses meant that Philippine societies offered the Spanish few opportunities for wealth creation, while the absence of strong political leadership and the lack of an overarching political structure made it difficult for them to establish political control in the islands.