History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos

THE PHILIPPINES

INTRODUCTION

NO COUNTRY IS AN ISLAND, THOUGH THE COUNTRY THAT IS THE subject of this book, the Philippines, claims as its territory more than 7,000 islands. On the eastern edge of insular Southeast Asia, these islands stretch for more than 1,150 miles, bookended in the north by Taiwan and in the south by Indonesia and Brunei. The mighty Pacific Ocean interposes itself between the archipelago and North and South America on the other side of the globe, with Hawai’i at roughly midpoint. To the west the South China Sea links the Philippines to continental Southeast Asian countries, among them Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand.

As a republic, it is barely more than six decades old, gaining emancipation from U.S. colonial rule in 1946, less than a year after Japan surrendered and brought the Pacific War to a halt. From 1946 to 1950, even as the United States and the Soviet Union were defining the world through the prism of the Cold War and their competing ideologies, the colonial order in Asia was disintegrating. India and Pakistan sprung into bloody being, twins separated at birth in 1947. Two years later, in 1949, the world took notice of yet another quarrelsome pair: Mao Tsetung and his Communist army, having defeated the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek, lay the foundation of the People’s Republic of China—and indirectly, of the Republic of China in Taiwan, Chiang having fled across the straits in defeat. At the end of the same year, the Dutch recognized Indonesia as a sovereign nation.

Gaining independence, while exhilarating, was no panacea for a Southeast Asian archipelago that had continuously been occupied by a foreign power since 1565. Along with the metaphysical thrill, and challenge, of managing one’s own destiny, one still had to pay bills (as well as pass them). There were hungry mouths to feed, an economy and infrastructure to build and rebuild, and institutions of governance to be either revamped or set up. The devastation wrought by World War II made recovery an excruciatingly difficult task. The fact that a triumphalist United States imposed certain inequitable conditions as a sine qua non of independence rendered establishing bona fide sovereignty an even harder challenge. What the great Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, in his Child of All Nations, said bears repeating: As to defining what is colonial, isn’t it just the conditions insisted upon by a victorious nation over the defeated nation so that the latter may give the victor sustenance—conditions that are made possible by the sharpness and might of weapons?

Nevertheless, the Philippine republic could now choose its own path. The odyssey to that point had been long and hard and violent. Though founded in 1898, the republic had seen its flowering delayed because of two wars: the Spanish-American War, which the United States won handily; and the subsequent 1899 Philippine-American War, when the revolutionary government under General Emilio Aguinaldo refused to accept its role as booty for the Americans. It was a brutal conflict that lasted a decade and resulted in U.S. occupation for half a century. And while 1946 signaled the birth of a nation, one of the first to take its place in the ranks of post-colonial states, the Philippines was indelibly marked by the DNA of colonialism. How could it be otherwise? Embedded and incarnated endlessly over the course of four hundred years, what and who had been strangers from foreign shores—to slightly alter Ronald Takaki’s memorable phrase—had metamorphosed into the familiar. The country’s very name encapsulates its colonial history. The Anglicized Philippines or the Spanish Filipinas is forever a reminder that this Southeast Asian archipelago was so named in 1543 by Ruy López de Villalobos in honor of the sixteenth century Spanish crown prince who would in 1556 become King Felipe II.

There have been ill-fated attempts to toss out the Hispanic appellation and adopt a new one. The nineteenth-century revolutionary General Artemio Ricarte once proposed naming the country the Rizaline Islands, after its foremost national hero, José Rizal (with Filipinos henceforth to be known as Rizalinos). In 1978, during martial law, Ferdinand Marcos half-heartedly tried through the Batasan Pambansa, or National Assembly, to rename the nation "Maharlika," a Tagalog word meaning nobility—part of his skewed notion of aristocratic lineage and dressed-up history. (One foreign writer, eager to believe the exotic Orientalist bit fed to him by some clever jokers, wrote that it was a glorified term for the penis.) Neither name gained much traction; Filipinos of all ideological stripes, most of whom bore and continue to bear Hispanic names, were simply too used to the moniker to seriously consider changing it. Besides, whether one acknowledged it or not, by overstaying its welcome, Spain provoked the formation of a nationalist consciousness. Just as the name New York recalls its partly English provenance (replacing the Dutch Nieuw Amsterdam), so too does Las Islas Filipinas reflect the partly Hispanic roots of Filipino nationhood.

This book is a modest endeavor to introduce the reader with little or no knowledge of this Southeast Asian country to the realities that have marked the journey of becoming Filipino, from pre-colonial times to the first decade of the second millennium. No attempt at a definitive history is being made here; a mission impossible, at any rate. And let me be the first to acknowledge that this is an incomplete history, as every history must be. Significant new archaeological finds may and will probably be made; new interpretations will be offered, as well they should be. For what is past never stays put and lives on in us; it is, according to the late Filipino historian Renato Constantino, a continuing past, illuminating the present just as surely as light from a distant star. Nevertheless I believe that this book summarizes clearly and concisely the different forces that have, for better or worse, transformed an archipelago into a republic, and imparted to its inhabitants a notion, however imperfect, of a nation.

Who were the Indios Bravos? Brilliant nineteenth-century polymath, doctor, bon vivant, and writer José Rizal and his friends gave themselves the name, half in jest and half in all seriousness, after having watched a Wild West show in Paris in 1889. Indio, of course, was the disparaging term the Spanish used for the indigenous populations in their colonies. Rizal and these other expatriate ilustrados, or the enlightened ones, as they were referred to, admired both the excellent horsemanship and the dignity of the Native American performers—and recognized in them kindred spirits. They were indeed brave Indians, their peculiar status in the world mirroring somewhat that of the Filipinos themselves, who were highly critical of the Spanish colonial regime in Manila and who in Madrid and Barcelona advocated far-reaching reforms at the same time that they professed loyalty to Mother Spain. By appropriating the term meant to put them in their place, Los Indios Bravos were signaling the Spanish their intent to take charge of their own destiny. It was a highly symbolic act, representing a paradigmatic shift in the burgeoning nationalist consciousness.

In addition, the term resonates for me, personally. I first heard the term when I barely had any inkling of the richness, complexity, and contradictions of the history behind it. Los Indios Bravos was a café my late oldest brother Henry and sister-in-law Beatriz Romualdez, along with some writer friends, opened in the 1960s in the then-genteel district of Malate, once a suburb of old Manila. The café interior was a conscious effort to re-create a proper nineteenth-century literary salon, or tertulia, though this being the 1960s, the zeitgeist could hardly be called genteel. Café Los Indios Bravos was filled with bohemians; argumentative students, myself included, flush with radical ideas if not with cash, aiming to remake the world, or simply being on the make; writers of every stripe; dowagers hoping for a Roman spring; American and European expatriates; and fashionistas. We all trooped to Los Indios Bravos; in a sense we were Indios Bravos ourselves, not just intensely aware of but embodying the legacies of the Spanish and the North Americans, in our lives and ways of thinking, even in our blood—to be wrestled with, confronted, transformed, but not eliminated. Only the besotted romantic could ever believe that the imprint of four centuries of foreign presence could be cleansed by the waters of some imaginary pre-colonial river Jordan. For better or worse, the adaptability of the modern Filipino can be traced to the age-old commingling of the foreign and the familiar, resulting in a decidedly mestizo culture.

As did Andrés Bonifacio, Macario Sakay, and other working-class stalwarts of the 1896 Revolution against Spain (who wrestled with the same issues as the ilustrados but with a pronounced urgency given that they were in a more precarious position physically, socially, and financially), Rizal and his peers foreshadowed the existential dilemma of the contemporary Filipino/a who must grapple with divided loyalties and with a central government, no longer Spanish (nor American) but made up of fellow citizens, whose policies and actuations are often at odds with the well-being of the electorate.

In a very basic sense, these islanders who dared to cast themselves as separate from Spain also viewed themselves as bound together not simply by their opposition to colonial rule but by their affinities for one another, artificial as these affinities might have seemed. They may not necessarily have expressed themselves in this manner but their approach to history was, I believe, as an inventive but necessary fiction. Those who have assailed and continue to assail the concept of a collective identity based on a construct cobbled together from myriad loyalties, languages, and geographic boundaries are right to do so. Yet their very insistence only proves that veracity can be crippling and lead paradoxically to an intellectual and spiritual cul de sac. Even when regimented by logic, facts sans imagination remain limp and bloodless. But the idea of a nation can inspirit dry facts by creating space for a transcendent imagination. And what is colonialism finally but the denial of space—geographic, political, and psychological—for the collective imagination of a people?

The gap between the colonial governors—the target of reformist zeal and revolutionary ire—and the governed, objects of colonial desire, still exists, still yawns dangerously. Spanish rule served as the centripetal force that yoked together three clusters of islands: Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. Without it, these islands may have gone their separate ways as independent states or been subsumed in part or in toto by a neighboring nation such as Indonesia or Malaysia. Colonialism then, in its various facets, its effects and aftereffects, including indigenous resistance, is the book’s main focus. Even the condition of the Muslim, the Moro or Moor, a reluctant, some would say second-class, member of the Philippine polity, has been shaped almost as much by colonialism’s permanent legacy as by Islam: the Christianization of the islands, coming some seventy odd years after Ferdinand and Isabella, Los Reyes Catolicos, had in 1492 reclaimed Granada and finally driven out the Moors from Al-Andalus, the urbane and tolerant (more so than the Catholic monarchs) kingdom that ruled the southern part of the Iberian peninsula for seven hundred years. The reunification of the different Spanish kingdoms unforgivingly cast the Moor as the unassimilable Other. And so was he assigned that role in Spain’s only Asian colony, particularly in Mindanao. While church and state are formally separate in today’s republic, the reality is that the former still wields considerable power not too far off from the dominant role it once exercised for more than three centuries in the islands, Catholic crucifixes in a mostly minareted sea. So intertwined with the state was the Spanish colonial church that the late Filipino diplomat-cum-writer León María Guerrero—a modern-day ilustrado himself—could open The First Filipino, his 1961 biography of Rizal, with a somewhat exaggerated but fairly accurate summation: The Spanish history of the Philippines begins and ends with the friar.

Out of the five centuries the book spans, from the sixteenth to the first decade of the twenty-first century, nearly four hundred years saw three foreign powers separately at the helm: Spain, the United States, and Japan (this last for barely more than three years). For all the cultural, racial, and political differences among the three, they exhibited the same attitude towards the indigenous population: couched in official rhetoric, the natives were to be saved from themselves—whether through Spanish Catholicism or U.S. democracy or Japanese ascetism; unofficially, the Indios constituted a resource to be cultivated, exploited, made use of, particularly in the extraction of bounty from islands rich in natural resources.

The Indios who were to be bettered didn’t exactly roll over and play along. They resisted individually or collectively. They moved out of population centers into the thickly forested interior, or to the mountains. They often took up arms against their would-be exploiters. Until the 1896 Revolution, however, rebellions were local and easily quelled, with some notable exceptions. On the other hand, one of the characteristics of any colonial occupation has been the collaboration of certain of the colonized with the colonizer, positing themselves as mediators. They almost always came from the chiefly class. Their role, after all, was to deal with outside forces—a role that often turned out to be materially rewarding and thus prone to corruption.

One reason, perhaps, that the contemporary body politic survives and even flourishes, in spite of the many shortcomings of the state, is that its members have become so habituated over the centuries of dealing with governments they couldn’t quite trust, that they have come to rely on informal networks, on their respective clans and local patronage, rather than on public institutions. There has always been a tradeoff between the national leadership, whether colonial or post-colonial, and local leaders, with the latter acting as go-betweens between the former and their own constituents. The blessings of the state, thus, have almost always flowed down through the calculated beneficence of individual but powerful clan leaders, going back all the way to when the datus or chiefs ruled over the barangay, the pre-Hispanic foundational social and political unit whose borders were coterminous with that of the clan. With its roots therefore in pre-colonial times, the political sphere has almost always been overwhelmed by the personal.

Aside from the first chapter, which looks at what life in the pre-Hispanic archipelago may have been like, the initial half of this book deals with both the formal Spanish and U.S. colonial periods, including the World War II occupation by the Japanese Imperial Army. The other half examines a post-World War II, post-colonial Philippines, ending in 2009, with national elections slated to take place in May of 2010. My intent was to construct a historical narrative that would be more than just a notation of events, signal dates, and relevant personages; that would serve as a useful guide in understanding what it is we see when we cast our eyes on that uniquely situated and multifaceted republic and simultaneously push against what surrounds the Filipino in the diaspora: the anonymity and oblivion against which there is, as Kierkegaard wrote, no weapon so dangerous as the art of remembering. To all those for whom remembering remains a vital, even courageous, act, I offer A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos.

In the writing of this book, I was immensely aided by the critical and peerless eye of Vicente Rafael, as well as, for certain sections, by Andrew Hsiao and Allan Isaac. My older brother Joseph H. Francia, an economist and college professor, helped me understand some basic truths about the Philippine economy. My wife Midori Yamamura provided, as always, much-needed encouragement and sustenance while my editor Juliet Grames, who first proposed the idea of the book, carried out the role of General Reader conscientiously. The Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University helped fund a research trip to Manila. To them all, my heartfelt thanks, mil gracias, domo arigato, maraming salamat. Whatever shortcomings the book may have are to be attributed solely to me.

—LUIS H. FRANCIA

New York City

1.THE ISLANDS BEFORE

THE CROSS: PRE-1521

"Hail! In the Saka-year 822 [900 C.E.], in the month of March-April, according to the astronomer, the 4th day of the dark half of the moon, on Monday, At that time, Lady Angkatan, together with her relative, Bukah, the child of His Honor Namwran, was given, as a special favor, a document of full acquittal by the chief and commander of Tundun, the former Leader of Pailah, Jayadewa, to the effect that His Honor Namwran through the Honorable Scribe, was totally cleared of a debt to the amount of 1 kati and 8 suwarna, in the presence of His Honor, the Leader of Puliran, Kasumuran; His Honor, the Leader of Pailah, namely Ganasakti,; and His Honor, the Leader of Binwagan, Bisruta. And His Honor Namwran with his whole family on orders of the Chief of Dewata representing the Chief of Mdang, because of his loyalty as a subject of the Chief, therefore all descendants of His Honor Namwran have been cleared of the whole debt that His Honor owed the Chief of Dewata. This document is issued in case there is someone, whosoever, some time in the future who will state that the debt is not yet acquitted of His Honor …"

—The Laguna Copperplate Inscription, translated by Antoon Postma, quoted in E.P. Patanñe, The Philippines in the Sixth to the Sixteenth Centuries

THE FULL STORY BEHIND THE LAGUNA COPPERPLATE INSCRIPTION (LCI) may never be known. Discovered in 1989 buried in a riverbank in Laguna Province, south of Manila, the LCI was drawn up in 900 C.E., the equivalent of the Sanskrit calendar date inscribed on it—more than five hundred years before the barangay (village or settlement) of Maynila turned into a Muslim community, and more than six centuries before the Europeans first learned of the archipelago’s existence. The inscription—the oldest known document of pre-Hispanic times in the Philippine archipelago—is vital to understanding how people in the islands, at least in certain parts, lived and what kind of society or societies they might have constructed.

The LCI writing bears remarkable similarities to the ancient Kawi script of Indonesia. Analyses by experts in both ancient Philippine and Indonesian scripts reveal a language that contained not only Sanskrit but also old Javanese, old Malay, and old Tagalog words. It antedates baybayin, the native script in use when the Spanish came calling in the sixteenth century, one that, with variations in alphabet according to the region, essentially consisted of twenty letters. The LCI script, no longer extant, lingered on in the baybayin’s formative influences such as Sanskrit and Arabic. With the advent of the Spanish, and the intervention primarily of the friars, the Castilian alphabet replaced the native scripts, but those communities in the interior that managed to steer clear of Spanish rule and the new faith kept their old systems of writing. A form of baybayin can still be seen, for instance, in the script of the Hanunoo Mangyan of Mindoro Island, off the southwestern coast of Luzon, a tribe that continues to inscribe on bamboo a form of its poetry known as the ambahan, with seven-syllable lines meant primarily to be chanted.

The copperplate mentions place names that still exist in latter-day Bulacan, a province abutting the northern edge of Tondo, another ancient settlement that faced Maynila across the Pasig River delta. More significantly, it persuasively attests to the Hindu influence of the Sumatra-based Srivijaya empire, which had spread beyond the central part of the Philippine archipelago—and to which the colonists had affixed the name Visayas—to the strategically located barangays of Tondo and Maynila, where the river empties out onto a magnificent bay and the South China Sea. Through the two barangays, which would have controlled river traffic, some form of Hindu influence would have spread to other areas in Luzon where the Tagalogs (the principal tribe of Tondo and Maynila) were also dominant. Indeed, modern-day Tagalog possesses words that are Sanskrit in origin: budhi (conscience), mukha (face), guro (teacher), tala (star), dukha (needy), diwata (muse, goddess), among them.

Perhaps most tellingly, the LCI indicates the crucial role that slavery played in barangay pre-colonial life. Lady Angkatan, Bukah, son of Namwran, and members of their immediate family were almost certainly debt slaves, and this document would have given them a tremendous sense of relief. We will never know whether Lady Angkatan was Namwran’s widow, aunt, mother, or sister; nor what the Honorable Namwran did to acquit the family of this debt. Had he distinguished himself in battle, giving up his life for the sake of his chief? Or was it Bukah who bore arms bravely? It seems clear that this was a seemingly well-born family that through misfortune or Namwran’s misguided business dealings found itself unable to pay back a substantial loan.

Now, they could hold their heads high once more. In a sense, they were fortunate to have been indebted to the paramount chief of their clan. It would have been worse had they been abducted by their clan enemies or by tattooed raiders from the Visayas, the cluster of islands in the archipelago’s center, whom the Spanish called pintados, or painted ones. The number and intricacy of a Visayan warrior’s tattoos signaled to friend and foe alike his strength and abilities as a warrior. More than land or goods, slaves were a sure sign of one’s wealth and status, especially slaves captured in raiding parties on other barangays. As war booty, not only were they tangible proof of a datu’s leadership and martial prowess (more so than homegrown, as it were, slaves), they were more likely to be treated as disposable property, sometimes put to death when the master moved on to the next world.

Another basis of slavery was as punishment for crimes. These included bearing false witness against someone; the transgression of taboo customs, such as, according to the sixteenth-century account of the Jesuit Pedro Chirino, failure to preserve silence for the dead or happening to pass in front of a chief who was bathing; murder; adultery; or failing to do one’s duty (during war, for instance) when the chief, or datu, asked for it. Such crimes could be forgiven if the transgressor could pay the proper fee of goods or gold to the aggrieved party.

Colonial rule under the Spanish, which lasted for 333 years, from 1565 to 1898, eliminated certain aspects of barangay life, such as slavery, though modern-day critics might assert that slavery persists in disguised forms in today’s highly inequitable society; introduced Christianity and Western concepts such as bureaucratic state rule and private property; and modified, if not strengthened, some features of pre-colonial ways of living, e.g., the melding of the private and public spheres of life.

In the archipelago, the Iberians had come upon different societies, at once static and dynamic, with well-defined frameworks within which the world made sense. To the Spanish, of course, infected with an overbearing sense of racial superiority and entitlement, the native way of life was savage and therefore had to be supplanted with the European notion of civilization. The conquistador Miguel de Legazpi, who led the 1565 expedition that successfully brought most of the islands under the dominion of the Spanish Crown, after grudgingly noting that the island men treated and loved their wives well, summed up rather succinctly what he and most of his compatriots really thought: They are all barbarians and have no manners or politeness.

What kind of archipelagic societies did the Spanish first encounter? What were the various island communities like before the advent of the West? How did the pre-Hispanic Filipinos relate to the rest of Southeast Asia? To draw a portrait, which must of necessity be forever incomplete since history is a never-ending process of revisions and counter-revisions, one needs to begin with geography, for geography helps shape destiny. It is a major element in determining how history and hierarchy in the islands evolved.

The archipelago known today as the Republic of the Philippines lies on the northeastern rim of Southeast Asia, a necklace of 7,107 isles strung from north to south over 1,152 miles, situated between the vast and mighty Pacific Ocean to the east and the gentler, lesser South China Sea to the west. The islands cover a total area of 115,831 square miles, roughly the same size as Italy. Only 2,773 of the islands bear names, with elongated Luzon in the north the largest, and Mindanao to the south the next in size. These two islands constitute two-thirds of the country’s land mass. Between them are the Visayan Islands, consisting mainly of Samar, Leyte, Cebu, Negros, Bohol, and Panay. The western edge of the country is taken up by the mini-archipelago of Palawan Province, made up of the island of Palawan and 1,700 satellite isles.

This semi-tropical island chain has only two—but very distinct—seasons: dry and wet. The northern and eastern regions lie within the typhoon belt: areas directly affected by storms that come raging out of the Pacific during the latter half of the year. On the average, typhoons maul the eastern Visayas and Luzon twenty times annually, at one time prompting a frustrated lawmaker to propose a bill outlawing them. In the Cordilleras of Northern Luzon the weather can be downright chilly, when winds from as far north as Siberia, along with migratory birds, travel south. With the typhoons breaking against the eastern flanks of mountain ranges, there is less of a pronounced dry season on the Pacific side. Hence, more people and businesses reside in the western part of the country, rendering the west more industrialized and economically developed.

Island geography owes much of its ruggedness to being part of the Pacific Rim of Fire, a line of volcanic formations that extend, in the northern hemisphere, from Alaska and the Aleutian Islands to Japan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. The Philippines contains thirty-seven volcanoes, the majority thankfully dormant, though one volcano blowing its top is always a reminder that others could follow suit. Such was the case with Mt. Pinatubo which, six hundred years after its last awakening, erupted in 1991 with such ferocity over five days that gaseous plumes ascended to as high up as twenty-four miles and spewed out seven cubic kilometers of ash and rock—the worst such eruption in the country’s history and possibly of the twentieth century. On the other hand, volcanic deposits are one reason the land is fertile, generating life where once it buried it.

East of the archipelago, off the coast of northeastern Luzon south to Halmahera Island in Indonesia, the Philippine Deep, also known as the Mindanao Trench, stretches for close to a thousand miles, measuring roughly nineteen miles across. At its deepest it extends 34,850 feet below sea level—deeper than Mt. Everest is tall. The Philippine Deep rests on the Eurasian and Philippine Sea tectonic plates, which constantly shift and grind against each other.

As an entity that gained political independence only in 1946, the nation is quite young, a little more than six decades old. Geologically, however, it is a different story. Large swaths of Luzon and Mindanao are more than 25 million years old, while the age of the rest of the country varies, from 100,000 to 10 million years old. During the late Pleistocene era, some islands were linked to the Asian mainland; among these were Palawan, Mindoro, and Panay. Palawan, having once been part of Borneo, has flora and fauna not found in the rest of the country. Evolution and the formation of a rather isolated archipelago has resulted in an astonishing biodiversity over a landmass of 30 million hectares, or 66 million acres, with a number of endemic species, e.g., 70 percent of its reptiles and 44 percent of its avian creatures are not to be found anywhere else.

However, the rate of population growth is quite high. In 2008, with a population of 90 million, it was 2 percent a year, in large part due to an exceedingly influential and conservative Catholic hierarchy that rails against government-sponsored family planning. (In contrast, the 2008 rate for the United States was less than 1 percent.) This, along with a depressed economy, has resulted, perhaps most critically, in an environment continually under siege. Many species have a tenuous hold on life, as they require primary-forest habitats. Such is the case with the Philippine Eagle, more popularly known as the monkey-eating eagle—a large and magnificent avian predator with a wingspan of nearly seven feet. A pair needs approximately twenty-five to fifty square miles of forest to sustain themselves and to propagate.

AS WE WERE: PRE-COLONIAL BARANGAY SOCIETY

It was long held as common wisdom that populations in the archipelago were the result of migrations that took place in neat, successive waves, between 30,000 B.C.E. and 200 B.C.E.—the last wave composed of Malays from the south who had more advanced forms of metallurgy and crafts, such as the weaving of cloth and the manufacture of glass ornaments. This theory’s biggest proponent was the late American anthropologist H. Otley Beyer, at one time head of the anthropology department at the University of the Philippines, who based his conclusions on pioneering fieldwork done from the 1920s to the early 1940s.

While the artifacts recovered from the field were indeed valuable, his theory has since fallen out of favor. According to linguists, various languages were already being spoken throughout the archipelago thousands of years ago. Too, archaeological evidence reveals that trade was flourishing in the region in the first millennium B.C.E., probably even earlier—both pointing to the fact that groups of people of different origins came and stayed or went, sometimes in larger numbers, sometimes in smaller, but never so methodically as envisioned in Beyer’s grand theory.

There seem to have been at least two discrete movements of people that, over time, dispersed through insular Southeast Asia: the Australoids, characterized by dark pigmentation, and the Austronesians, or brown-skinned peoples, who started to arrive about six millennia ago, from the south via Borneo and Indonesia, and the north from southern China and Taiwan. Later migrations included people from Champa, a Hinduized kingdom of seafarers and traders in southern and central Vietnam that flourished from the seventh century to the fifteenth century C.E.

It wasn’t just one way, apparently. The eminent archaeologist Wilhelm G. Solheim II adds another layer to this diffusion when he suggests that the cultures of the natives of Southeast Asia, whom he calls Nusantao, and their descendants, had their beginnings in, or at the very least were influenced by, maritime-oriented tribes of insular Southeast Asia, dating to 5000 B.C.E. or even earlier. Islanders came and went, as did the coastal dwellers of mainland eastern Asia, the twain meeting—and mating—repeatedly over the course of millennia.

According to Solheim, long-distance seafaring vessels known as balangay and outfitted with innovative bamboo outriggers may have been devised about 4000 B.C.E., initiating major outmigrations by water. The buoyant outriggers helped balance the shallow-draft vessel while at the same time enabling it to navigate smoothly and speedily over the water—a feature remarked upon in later accounts of European navigators used to bulkier and slower ships. The larger ones, equipped with sails, could be used in war as well, with rowers on each side. These war vessels, known variously as karakoas and prahus, had platforms above the outriggers upon which as many as a hundred warriors could stand.

By the third millennium B.C.E., these migrations had resulted in settlements in both the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos. By the second millennium B.C.E., they had gone as far west as Madagascar, off the eastern coast of Africa. Human settlements known as barangays, after the outriggered boats, were thus firmly in place in the Philippines well before the Spanish arrived, with a number of larger barangays trading with foreign ships that plied Southeast Asian waters.

While archaeological evidence attests to human presence in the archipelago as far back as 250,000 years ago, the earliest known human settlements were in caves on the southern reaches of long, dagger-shaped Palawan Island. Evidence suggests that the caves were continuously inhabited from 50,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene Age, until 9,000 B.C.E.—one vanguard of the seafaring peoples who formed the main matrix of contemporary populations. Known as the Tabon Caves and set into ocean-facing cliffs, they would have afforded a clear view of waterborne visitors and provided easy access to the waters themselves. Possibly the oldest Homo sapiens fossil in Southeast Asia, nicknamed the Tabon Man, was unearthed here, carbon-dated to 47,000 years ago. But the Tabon Man was more than one individual, the finds including a skullcap, jawbones, teeth, and bone fragments, with one tibia being the oldest fossil. The Tabon Man appears to have had Negritoid characteristics—strengthening the argument that the islands were originally inhabited by the Australoids, ancestors of the modern-day Negritos, otherwise known as the Agta, Aeta, or Ati. Food gatherers and hunters, the Tabon men and women, devising necessary strategies of survival, progressed from basic flake tools to instruments such as adzes and axes.

Like the Tabon Cave dwellers, most of the islanders lived by or close to water, whether ocean, river, or lake—sources of abundant food. Water was obviously the only transportation route to other islands, and these dwellers by the water engaged in brisk trade not just with nearby isles, but with ports as disparate as those on the southern coast of China and the Straits of Malacca. Larger population centers sprung up due to trade and, in some areas, most notably in Mindanao, the insistent call of Islam. But there were no fiercely ambitious warlords, no Tokugawa or Genghis Khan, who set out to unify many fiefdoms. Until the Spanish appeared on the horizon, no nation-state existed, only a far-flung collection of islands untroubled by the notion of a center.

Trade

The archipelago formed the outer edges of an established trade circle, one that extended from the Persian Gulf in the Middle East to Southern China, thus encompassing Southeast Asia. It was at its most active from the seventh to the ninth century C.E., and antedated European invasion in the sixteenth century. Chinese records from 671 contain references to Persian ships. Later accounts, including Japanese ones, mention not just the Persians but Indians and Malays as well, all trading at Canton. By 851, this trade route was well-established, with ships making calls at India’s Malabar Coast, the Nicobar Islands, the Malay Peninsula, passing through the Straits of Malacca, with more calls at Cambodia and Vietnam, before heading to Canton. According to historian Janet Abu-Lughod, in her book Before European Hegemony, The easternmost circuit was Chinese ‘space,’ the sea that joined the east coast of Indochina and the northern shore of Java with the great ports of South China being under the hegemony of the Sung and Yuan navies. This … was the domain par excellence of what scholars have called the tribute trade.

Of the pre-colonial Philippine ports that formed part of this trading world, Butuan was one of the most active, probably the center of trade and commerce in the islands during the eleventh century. Situated on the northwestern coast of Mindanao by the Agusan River, Butuan was a putative city-state by October 1003, the first pre-Hispanic Philippine barangay known to formally deal with Imperial China when it sent two envoys by the names of Lihiyan and Jiaminan (the names suggest Sinicization) to Beijing, to recognize the Divine Son of Heaven as undisputed sovereign, and, not coincidentally, to petition for the right to trade. The Butuan traders likely would have brought tropical hardwoods, beeswax, cinnamon, civet cats, cowry shells, abaca, and gold. Some of these would have been gifts for the royal court. Butuan also traded with the kingdom of Champa. Between 900 and 1200 C.E., in addition to Butuan, the Champa established trading outposts in Sulu. By the fifteenth century, 400 to 500 junks from Cambodia, Champa, and southern China were visiting the islands annually.

Yet, while situated strategically between the Persian Gulf and China, thus ensuing their value as transit points, Southeast Asian pre-colonial entrepots were not the region’s dominant players. They acted mostly as sources for raw materials, or as transshipment centers, of which the most valuable was the port of Malacca. (Malacca was also a major slave market, where slave raiders brought their human cargo, abducted from various coastal towns in Southeast Asia, to be sold to customers as varied as merchants looking for laborers and ship captains wanting to supplement their crews.) It had four harbormasters for ships originating from as near as Sumatra and Java, as far west as Persia, and as far north as the Ryu Kyu Islands and China. Commercial traffic along the Straits of Malacca thus helped shape the burgeoning global trade, especially during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

According to William Henry Scott, in Barangay: Sixteenth Century Philippine Culture and Society, It was in Malacca that Europeans—specifically, the Portuguese—first met Filipinos, a decade before the Spanish expedition led by the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan came across the archipelago in 1521. These pre-Hispanic Filipinos were called Luzones, from the island whence they had come. The Luzones were known not only as merchants and traders but also as fierce mercenaries active in various military campaigns in the region, employed, for instance, by the Achenese and the Burmese kings, or crewing on pirate ships. West of Malacca, on the coast, was a community of 500 Tagalogs, while in Malacca itself, according to Scott, they had their own shops and included a number of prominent businessmen.

The Portuguese took over Malacca in 1511, with Magellan as part of the conquering force. It was in Malacca that he purchased a young Malay slave he had christened Enrique, who would prove to be an invaluable asset when, ten years later, the Spanish exploratory fleet Magellan headed came across the islands later to be called the Philippines. It is therefore not unreasonable to assume that even before 1521, Magellan and the Portuguese knew of the Philippine archipelago, east and northeast of the Malay Peninsula.

The region was rich in natural resources, from minerals to spices to forest and maritime products, and this, coupled with rising demand from countries outside the region, ensured an almost perfect fit among supplier, manufacturer, and consumer. In short, as Abu-Lughod points out, Malacca was ideally located as a comprador site, just as Hong Kong and Singapore are now. In this trade world, the Chinese were active, if not dominant, players. At one time the Middle Kingdom commanded an enormous fleet—the so-called Treasure Fleet, under the command of a seven-foot-tall eunuch, Cheng Ho. On its initial voyage in 1405, the fleet was made up of 27,800 men and 1,500