The Philippines in Imperial History

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to draw the attention of historians of empire to one of the most neglected components of Western imperial systems. Although the Philippines was ruled successively by Spain, the United States, and Japan for more than four centuries, it occupies only minor place in standard histories of Western imperialism and often is not mentioned at all. Yet, historians of the Philippines have produced work of high standard on themes that prompt comparison with studies of other colonies. The illustrations selected here refer, respectively, to the rise of anti-colonial movements within the colony and the links between embryonic nationalism and similar trends elsewhere in Southeast and East Asia. The originality and vitality of the literature on the Philippines deserves to be much better known outside the country. Equally, historians of the Philippines can gain from connecting their work to the wider historiography of Western imperialism.

KEYWORDS:

• Imperial historiography
• empire
• anti-colonial nationalism
• insular territories
• global history
• cultural history
• Spain
• the United States
• ilustrados
• Rizal
• Bonifacio
• Aguinaldo

The Forgotten Colony

This essay is as an advertisement for a subject that has been either neglected or treated in an episodic, fragmented manner by historians of imperialism and empire. Readers will have great difficulty finding references to the Philippines in standard texts on British and French imperialism. Historians of Spain and the United States have of course produced some fine work, but it is confined to a small group of specialists who occupy only a minor place in their larger national stories. In Spain, interest wanes after ‘El Desastre’ of 1898. In the United States, considerable research has been invested in the weightiest event, the Spanish-American War, but few historians there have pursued either its distant antecedents or its colonial consequences. Taken as a whole, it seems fair to say that only a small number of the large cohort of scholars who consider themselves to be imperial historians could write more than a very short essay on the subject.

The omission is scarcely a minor one. No country has a longer and more varied imperial history than the Philippines. Spain laid claim to the archipelago in 1521; independence came in 1946. In the intervening centuries, the country was ruled successively by Spain, the United States, and, briefly, Japan. The British, too, were never far from the scene. In 1883, the French Consul in Manila observed that ‘to all intents and purposes the Philippines are a British possession.’¹ Far from being a passing interest, Britain’s informal involvement can be dated from at least the early nineteenth century and continued during the period of U.S. rule.

This is not to suggest that the long and complex story of cosmopolitan imperial connections remains unexplored. On the contrary, historians in the Philippines and a small number of specialists outside it have produced a rich historiography that includes spirited debates on the causes and consequences of colonial rule and notable studies of the character of the nationalist movement.

The literature, however, is characterised by an exceptional degree of what might be called academic involution, despite the long-standing cosmopolitan and imperial connections that have made the Philippines part of global history. While it is the case that all imperial histories tend to be confined to the imperial power itself or to one, or occasionally more, of its specific possessions, the insularity surrounding the study of the Philippines is distinctive. Moreover, the borders containing scholarship have been in place for so long that they are now taken for granted, as if they were a phenomenon of nature. One consequence has been to restrict the circulation of outstanding work that deserves to be known far more widely; another has been to limit a return trade in ideas and examples from other parts of the imperial world.

A full account of continuing localisation in an increasingly global world requires more reflection than space allows here. Two considerations, however, are likely to be part of the explanation. In the first place, the Philippines has been saturated in diverse strains of foreign domination for so long that historians have felt both able and compelled to engage with the imperial record in a way that has been largely self-contained. The all-embracing imperial past has entered the country’s soul, as well as its history. Debates that appear to be time-bound are invariably informed by a need to understand the present, and by a desire to justify or reject the world made by the imperial past. To say that the history of the Philippines is the history of successive foreign empires is an exaggeration; to say that it is hard to separate the ‘island story’ from the absorbing influence of these empires is to state a truism. In these circumstances, the need to extract the ingredients of a national history from the imperial record has given successive generations of historians focus and inspiration and justified their concentration on imperialism ‘in one country’.

Secondly, the pervasiveness of the imperial past in the Philippines is not offset by a founding myth or Great Tradition of the kind that served as a rallying point for nationalists in, for example, India, Persia, and Ottoman Turkey, or China, Korea, and Japan. As a result, nationalists (and historians) in The Philippines have faced exceptional difficulties in appealing to a common counter-culture, which is an essential ingredient in the process of decolonisation.² The omission does not stem from the absence of an indigenous history or of one that lacks longevity and interest. The story of the Philippines is not, as Professor Trevor Roper once claimed of Africa, one of the ‘unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the world.’³ The history is rich and extensive, but it is also diverse and localised. The Philippines had numerous states of different sizes and structures but no single, unifying polity that covered a large part of the archipelago.

Two exceptional studies will illustrate the main features of the literature noted here. One is an acknowledged classic in the field that demonstrates the way historians have engaged with the imperial record for the purpose of escaping it. The other is a recent publication that connects with the same themes but does so in a way that opens a wider perspective on the past.

Pasyon and Revolution

Reynaldo Ileto’s book is one of the most celebrated and influential contributions to the history of the Philippines. Yet, it is rarely cited by historians of other empires, including those who are specialists on comparable insular colonies.⁴ It was first published in 1979 but has remained in print since then and has been widely discussed by successive generations of historians. Its achievement is the more remarkable because it is a revised doctoral dissertation and not a work marinated in the additional reading and reflection that time allows.

The events that shook the Philippines in the late 1890s are the most dramatic and among the most important in the country’s long colonial history. The Revolution that broke out in 1896 led first to the establishment of a Revolutionary Government and then, inevitably, to war with Spain. The upheaval in the Philippines became caught up in the Spanish-American War, which began in April 1898 and ended with Treaty of Paris in December of that year, when Spain was obliged to transfer the Philippines to the United States. This was not the end of the matter. Emilio Aguinaldo, who had become the leader of the Revolution in 1897, refused to recognise the Treaty and in January 1899 proclaimed the First Philippine Republic. There followed an unequal war between the two republics that ended in 1901, though militant resistance to the U. S. occupation continued until 1913 and reappeared in new forms after World War I. U. S. rule lasted from 1901 to 1946, apart from 1942-45, when Japan occupied the country. Independence in 1946 opened a new era but also raised old questions about how much effective sovereignty had been attained, who had inherited the spoils of victory, and whether the end of colonial rule had completed the Revolution of 1896 or merely opened another chapter in a story that had still to reach its conclusion.

Unsurprisingly, the events of the 1890s have had a profound effect on the direction of historical studies of the Philippines. Specialists on the nineteenth century have analysed the personalities and programmes of Revolution’s controversial leaders in forensic detail, traced its antecedents, and dug into its subterranean causes. Specialists on the twentieth century have identified the winners and losers in the colonial settlement that followed, examined manifestations of what is often referred to as the ‘Unfinished Revolution’, and explored how the legacy of the colonial past continues to shape the present. The large question joining the two centuries is how to explain the character of nineteenth-century nationalism, its relationship to the Revolution, and the course it took under U.S. rule. The result has been an animated and sometimes assertive debate that has dominated much of the historiography of the Philippines for more than a century.⁵

It was within this context that Reynaldo Ileto set himself the task of finding a new way of understanding the rise of Filipino nationalism in the nineteenth century. In the early 1970s, when he was preparing his doctoral dissertation, the existing historiography was strongly influenced by official records and by American commentators and their Filipino associates who assumed that the key figures in the nationalist movement were members of the educated (ilustrado) middle class. The bias was especially apparent in representations of the leaders who came to prominence in the 1890s. Their role was revised or polished to ensure that it was congenial to the colonial rulers and their justificatory programmes of political and economic development. José Rizal, the first of the nationalist heroes and a presumed moderate, who was executed by the Spanish authorities, was promoted; Andrés Bonifacio, the known revolutionary, was relegated by their successor, the United States. This approach was not merely an antique artefact of the colonial era; Ileto argued that it was also advocated and extended by U.S. scholars during the Cold War. Ileto determined to escape from this orthodoxy by prospecting for a new ‘history from below’ that would recover the voices of the unheard by drawing on sources that lay beyond official records.

Ileto’s imaginative idea was to re-examine the pasyon as a source of the voice of the people. The pasyon is a Tagalog poetic epic, or saga, about the passion of Christ. Although the elements of the pasyon were brought together formally in 1814, it was present in various forms before that date and continued to absorb local infusions after it. It also became generalised to cover Christ’s birth, life, death, and resurrection, and extended to incorporate the Creation, the Fall of Man, and the Last Judgment. The Tagalog, who inhabit the northern island of Luzon, had been subjected to vigorous efforts to convert them to Catholicism since the sixteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, the mission had made considerable headway not only there but also in the islands of Visayas, Cebu, Panay, and Negros. The message had also been localised. A combination of selective adoption and infusions of folk beliefs indigenised Christianity; rendering the story of Christ into vernacular languages, principally Tagalog but other languages as well, not only made the pasyon widely available but also enabled it to resonate with the lives of local people. The administrative controls the communities of friars exercised over local villages produced a theocracy that played an unwitting part in the process by encouraging the circulation of the pasyon while censoring many other written sources. Consequently, the pasyon was widely chanted, performed, and read, and came to exercise a profound influence over the peasant mentality.

Ileto’s next step was to argue that the pasyon could be read as an allegory that represented the lives and prospects of the peasantry, who constituted the great majority of the population. The argument was based on an analysis of key terms, which could be interpreted to have secular as well as spiritual meaning. Christ’s humble early life, subsequent persecution by higher authority, and subversive activity in seeking to initiate a new order, could be interpreted as statements of the predicament of ordinary Filipinos and their hopes of deliverance through independence. Ileto followed his exegesis of the pasyon by tracing its subsequent influence on the nationalist movement, particularly the Katipunan, the secret association founded by Andrés Bonifacio and others in 1892. The Katipunan facilitated the spread of liberal ideas into Tagalog, where they passed into familiar religious texts, including the pasyon, and reappeared in political forms, including notions of revolution. The process helped to make a popular revolt possible by giving the unheard rural majority a voice and carrying the nationalist cause beyond the confines of the educated urban middle class. The version of the pasyon expressed through political action was neither that of a world made in the image of the United States nor a regression into millenarianism, but one of a social order of equality, community, and prosperity that had been partly lost and partly unrealised.

On this analysis, the pasyon was a potent outlet for Filipinos who felt oppressed by the colonial state, and a validation of actions taken to resist its agents. Ileto was careful to state that the pasyon was a medium that could be used to express resentment and dissent but was not itself a direct cause of revolutionary action. Its function was to prepare the peasantry to respond to material causes, notably ‘economic pressure and the appearance of charismatic leaders.’⁶

Ileto’s thesis parted the waters. It showed that Catholicism did not just promote passive obedience, as had previously been claimed, but could be a subversive force. In joining the neglected majority to the Katipunan, the founding institution of the Revolution, Ileto laid out a route that bypassed the dominant interpretation, which claimed that the movement was promoted and steered by an elite of urban ilustrados based mainly in Manila. Ileto argued that the term ‘ilustrado’ had wider meaning than the one adopted by the colonial government, the Filipino elite associated with it, and many subsequent scholars, especially those trained in the American world view.⁷ He suggested that the term could be applied to elements of provincial urban and rural elites who favoured reform and even revolution but were neither complicit with the colonial administration nor ultra-conservative landowners. Seen from this standpoint, the Revolution was a progressive movement of the dispossessed and the unheard majority. When the revolutionary leaders fell out and Bonifacio was executed by his successor, Emilio Aguinaldo, in 1897, the cause was parked in a layby until fuelled by new radical movements in the 1920s and 1930s. The revolution was not only unfinished; it had scarcely begun. In its place came the American-inspired interpretations that Ileto reacted against as a young Ph.D. student.

Notable writers had already found a place for the ‘masses’ in the story of the Revolution. Teodoro Agoncillo had interpreted Katipunan from this perspective and linked the Revolution to both the previous history of resistance to Spanish rule and the radical forms that culminated in the Huk rebellion of the late 1940s.⁸ In 1975, Renato Constantino produced a people’s history of the Philippines that also emphasised the role of non-elite Filipinos.⁹ For all their merits, however, these contributions shared important weaknesses. In bringing material forces in, they put religion out; they claimed to speak for the unheard majority but neither study was based on the voices of those they considered to be the moving force of history. Both accounts incubated methodological problems. Agoncillo was over-influenced by a teleology in which past events were judged according to their ability to explain the present; Constantino applied a formulaic analysis that treated the history of the Philippines as an exercise in accumulating class consciousness. From Ileto’s perspective, both writers underestimated the initiative that gave the ‘poor and ignorant’ agency in creating the movement that led to the Revolution of 1896.

Ileto, too, was unable to escape the call of the present. Indeed, in an exceptionally candid personal memoir he has detailed the influences that surrounded him during his student days.¹⁰ These included the rise of opposition to President Marcos, manifested in widespread rural and urban discontent, and a formative time in the United States as a graduate student at Cornell. He was also adjusting to generational change within his family. His father was a child of the American Empire, a West Point graduate who saw action during World War II and rose to become commanding general of the Philippine Army. The son was a budding scholar whose outlook was greatly influenced by two other wars: the devastation inflicted on Vietnam and the disparity that emerged during the Cold War between proclaimed principles and political realities. Both Iletos regarded themselves as Filipino nationalists. One spent much of his career in the service of the United States. The other reacted through his scholarship to the informal, as well as the formal, influence of the U.S.A. For the father, the war with the United States had been absorbed by history; for the son, it was America’s first Vietnam. In the Philippines, the imperial presence lives on long after the demise of colonial rule.

Given Ileto’s criticism of the exercise of U. S. power, his scholarship could have taken the road already travelled by many authors of anti-colonial, nationalist histories who praise famous men. Yet, while rejecting the notion of ‘benevolent assimilation’ used to justify colonial rule, Ileto wrote an account of the Revolution that was critical of ilustrado as well as American attitudes towards the uneducated majority. It was distinctive in its approach and use of source material, refreshing in its treatment of religion, and astute in avoiding the normative imperatives that often accompany studies of anti-colonial nationalism. These qualities were recognised by contemporaries and have helped to generate further work on a range of studies, from peasant movements to the reception of Christianity.¹¹ Moreover, the debate has gained rather than lost momentum with the passage of time. Even today, forty years on, his book is still stimulating commentary and criticism.

Unsurprisingly, Ileto’s study has aroused dissent as well as approval. Ileto was writing primarily as a cultural historian. His interpretation depended on his understanding of the perceptions of those who read and performed the pasyon. The method he adopted was formed before Orientalism and postmodernism became familiar terms that influenced a whole generation of scholars.¹² Nevertheless, his approach raised important questions about how texts are understood and translated, and the grounds on which one reading can be said to have more validity than another. It is unnecessary to enter the tangled depths of this debate, which has now lost the fervour it once had, to see that the inferences required to move from religious text to political action are open to alternative readings. One critic, for example, has claimed that Ileto mistranslated key Tagalog concepts, such as loób (‘inner self’ or ‘conscience’).¹³ If a different translation is preferred, the inferences Ileto draws are open to question.

An extension of this criticism holds that Ileto emphasised the read or spoken text rather than its public performance. The distinction matters because performances were grand events typically sponsored by members of the elite and were not the preserve of the masses. In spanning conventional social divisions, the pasyon served to reinforce social hierarchy rather than undermine it. A further complication arises over the degree of influence the pasyon enjoyed. Ileto’s research focussed on specific Tagalog provinces, though he generalised the argument in revising it for his book. It has been suggested, however, that the pasyon was just one among several public religious statements, which included the novenas, and was not as widely known as Ileto claimed.¹⁴

Uncertainty over the character of the constituency inspired by the pasyon raises the universally difficult issue of defining social classes. ‘Masses’, as Raymond Williams famously put it, are never ourselves but ‘other people’ who exist only in our view of them.¹⁵ Such subjective perceptions need anchoring in a conception of the social order, or they become amorphous and lose their utility. Ileto’s critique of standard categories and commitment to write a history ‘from below’ certainly charted a route forward, but also left alternative categories open to further definition.

In adapting the ilustrado term, ‘poor and ignorant’ (‘pobres y ignorantes’), to refer to the masses, Ileto rescued the urban and rural majority from what E. P. Thompson called the ‘condescension of posterity’ but also amalgamated considerable diversity.¹⁶ He followed Agoncillo in assigning a similar origin to Bonifacio, though he also qualified the thesis that saw him as the plebian leader of the ‘masses’. Other historians, however, have placed Bonifacio in that least favoured of social categories, the lower middle class. From this standpoint, he may have spoken for the urban and rural workers, but he did not do so as a member of the ‘poor and ignorant’ himself. It has further been contended that the nationalist movement Bonifacio led was largely middle class and also had links with the provincial landed elite. This line of argument suggests that the Revolution was less a matter of ‘haves’ versus ‘have nots’ than a movement that expressed wider forces of embryonic nationalism. Ileto’s great contribution was to shift the focus from urban elites; the challenge his analysis posed was how to devise categories that would be faithful representations of the wider society.

Pasyon and Revolution carried the story from the 1840s to 1910 and raised more questions about twentieth-century developments than could be answered within the confines of a single book. Subsequently, Ileto added to his assessment of the Revolution of 1896 and extended aspects of his interpretation into the twentieth century in a series of invigorating and often provocative essays, the most recent being Knowledge and Revolution.¹⁷ The emphasis on socio-cultural themes remains, and the analysis of pasyon is carried into the 1930s and linked to the political protest movements of the time.¹⁸ The analysis, however, has been refined to include new empirical evidence and to take account of Orientalist and poststructuralist approaches that became influential after Pasyon and Revolution was published.

Two themes stand out, though others deserve discussion if space allowed. First, Ileto has taken his understanding of social categories beyond the preliminary division between urban elites and rural masses that served the purpose of his Ph.D. dissertation. His thinking was assisted by the challenging work of U.S. historians who identified leading political figures as ‘caciques’ and ‘bosses’ and regarded them as authoritarians who hampered the U.S. civilising mission.¹⁹ Ileto’s research showed that this characterisation stereotyped reality: elites came in different shapes and sizes and represented a variety of interests. This assessment led to a reappraisal of both Bonifacio and Aguinaldo. Bonifacio failed as a leader principally because he was unable to connect effectively with the rural majority. Aguinaldo succeeded because his position as a provincial leader enabled him to mobilise support for what became a national movement. Ileto’s findings revised the definitions of elites and ilustrados. Aguinaldo qualified as an ilustrado by being an influential rural landowner but was not ‘enlightened’ because he could neither read nor write Spanish, showed no interest in education, and was conventionally religious. The term ‘ilustrado’ still poses problems of definition and the ‘masses’ have yet to shed some of their nebulous quality.²⁰ Nevertheless, Ileto’s analysis has carried the subject far ahead of its initial starting point.

The second and related theme continued the historiographical revision Ileto had begun in his Ph.D. dissertation. He had already reacted to the favourable treatment U.S. commentators had given Rizal, who was classified as a moderate. Subsequently, Ileto applied a similar criticism to the work of notable contemporary American scholars, such as Glenn May and Alfred McCoy, whose clinical view of the nationalist movement underlined the role of political factions and minimised the influence of idealism.²¹ Their interpretations emphasised the continuities U.S. rulers in the Philippines inherited. Enduring institutional rigidities and anti-modern attitudes frustrated the efforts made by colonial officials to promote progressive development policies. It followed that colonial subjects rather than American rulers were responsible for the limited progress made in advancing the civilising mission. Ileto contests this view, which he links to the defensive ideology circulating during the Cold War. The context could be greatly enlarged to include assumptions about ‘traditional’ societies that were applied to colonial societies throughout the world when modernisation theory was the primary influence of the day.

Ileto’s reinterpretation of relations during the Japanese occupation provides a striking illustration of his position. The de-Americanisation programme promoted by the Japanese, he argues, had the unrecognised consequence of encouraging Filipinos (including veterans of the war against the United States) to speak about their experiences and express their opinions of U.S. rule. The result was the emergence of an alternative view of the past that looked beneath the disguise imposed by U.S. rulers and commentators. ²² Unsurprisingly, Ileto’s interpretation has touched sensitivities that often rise to the surface when the past jostles the present.²³ Irrespective of the merits of the argument, it is clear that Ileto remains as innovative in retirement as he was as a student.

Towards a Wider World

Each generation of historians responds to, and speaks for, its own circumstances. Over 40 years ago, Ileto opened a fresh line of enquiry, a history ‘from below’, that reflected the need to bring the ‘masses’ into history and give them a voice.²⁴ CuUnjieng Aboitiz’s study, which is also a revised Ph.D., is the product of a world that has become integrated through the process of globalisation, and the voices she records are those of an increasingly cosmopolitan community. In opening a window on a wider horizon than historians of the Philippines usually encompass, she offers an approach that helps to fit the nation into the global.²⁵

Although CuUnjieng Aboitiz is familiar with the extensive literature covering relations between the Philippines, Spain, and the United States, and recognises its continuing research potential, she has chosen to step outside existing guidelines. She examines instead the set of connections joining the Philippines to Southeast and East Asia. This terrain appears to recommend itself because the longevity of ties among these regions is well attested in studies of migration, trade, religion, and political exchanges. Large segments of the story, however, are available only as fragmented components. CuUnjieng Aboitiz has taken one of these, the period of high imperialism between 1887 and 1912, and given it shape and substance. Like Ileto, her focus is on cultural and intellectual history; unlike him, however, her concern is with the educated, cosmopolitan ilustrado rather than with the ‘under-people’.

Paradoxically, the Philippines has been both connected to Asia and separated from it. Established ties have been overlaid by a historical cartography that has joined the archipelago to the West and its intermediaries in Latin America. The long history of colonial rule helped this image not only to set the compass for Western scholars but also to become a self-image accepted in the Philippines. CuUnjieng Aboitiz has a different purpose: her book sets out to recover long-neglected links with Asia and to demonstrate that they, too, played a vital part in stimulating anti-colonial thought and action in the Philippines during the era of high imperialism.

Asian Place opens with a critique of the way regions have been defined. Designations such as the ‘Near East’, ‘Middle East’, and ‘Asia’ and its various sub-divisions (‘South’, ‘Southeast’, ‘Far’, and ‘East’) were approximations imposed to suit Western purposes. Subsequently, colonial officials and Western scholars filled in the borders with details that purported to identify common regional characteristics. The resulting geographical categories brought artificial order to fluid realities and rested on an invented authenticity. If accepted notions of place and region need re-evaluating, so, too, do ideas of nations and nationality. As noted earlier, the need to resolve the uncertainties attending these concepts is especially acute in the case of the Philippines because it lacked an indigenous polity that could serve as the prime reference point.

These considerations provide the analytical basis for the key argument of the book, which explores how Filipino nationalists grounded their claims for self-government in a fusion of local ideas of community (of which the pasyon was one) and different Asian understandings of unity. Their aim was not to circumvent Western influences, which drew on the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and nineteenth-century liberal principles and were ingredients in the mix, but to compose an alternative based on the concept of ‘Filipino Asianism’. Both the Katipunan and the First Philippine Republic mobilised these sources to formulate an ideology of unity that was independent of models introduced by the West. The wider Asian region became more visible and increasingly accessible in the second half of the nineteenth century. Exchanges of people and ideas across South and East Asia gained momentum following the opening of the Suez Canal, the expansion of steamship services, and the growth of international trade. The dialectic of imperialism was already at work: innovations that propelled Western imperialism also provided the means of resisting their consequences.

The search for non-Western sources that would inspire a viable sense of common consciousness prompted leading figures in the anti-colonial movement in the Philippines to seek inspiration from China, Malaya, Vietnam, and Japan. Relations with China reinforced the idea of racial unity and of association with a great and influential culture, but were qualified by the hostility shown to the numerous Chinese immigrants in the Philippines. Rizal and Katipunan drew from Malaya the idea that the Philippines had once been joined to Asia through its roots with Malay-Islamic culture, which could be traced as far back as the eighth century. The anti-colonial struggle in Vietnam served as a channel for the exchange of ideas, including the fundamental distinction, derived from Ho Chi Minh, between reform and revolution.

The most important connection, however, was with Japan, which was the first country in Asia to launch a ‘big push’ for development and formulate an ideology of Pan-Asianism that linked the notion of a common ethnicity to opposition to Western imperialism. Japan’s successful war with China in 1894–95 demonstrated its power and encouraged the predisposition of leaders in the Philippines to see the other ‘island nation’ as a partner. Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905 was a cataclysmic event that raised its prestige and confirmed its leadership of what one newspaper called the ‘partners in misery’ in East Asia. Although Japan had escaped formal subjugation, it had been humiliated by the unequal treaty that was imposed shortly after Commodore Perry’s assertive appearance in 1853. Development had made major military victories possible; revision of the unequal treaty followed. Katipunan needed no further persuasion: Japan became the exemplar, ally, and place of refuge for Filipino nationalists escaping Spanish justice. However, the belief that Japan would also supply material support showed how hope could surpass experience. Good intentions were no match for political realities: at this early stage of its development, Japan had to be careful not to antagonise the great powers, which were already taking slices of East Asia for themselves.²⁶

The inflow of ideas and influences was an eclectic mix that became a rolling programme of instructions on how to construct a nation. Racial unity appealed for purposes of defence against an intrusive Western world and as a means of finding place and potential for Asian civilisation in the hierarchical order constructed by Social Darwinists. As Katipunan began to build on the past, even a semi-invented past, it also looked forward to creating a future that accorded with modernist principles of economic and political development. The main tension in its analysis and prescriptions lay between pan-Asian aspirations and local realities. The discussion was strongly infused with Social Darwinism, which became a powerful influence on thinking in East Asia as well as in Europe. It was one matter, however, to claim that racial hierarchies were not fixed for eternity and that human agency could shift the ranking towards equality, but another to identify the appropriate means of attaining unity and progress. As CuUnjieng Aboitiz shows, race proved to be an inadequate basis for mobilising opposition to imperialism and still more to providing the basis of national unity.

Ultimately, spacious ideas had to be slimmed to fit a more tangible location, though this, too, needed to be defined and made operational. The shift from the grand to the pragmatic became apparent under Aguinaldo’s leadership.²⁷ In 1898, the first Republic was obliged to minimise the element of pan-Asian racial unity to achieve international recognition and national viability. It was then that Aguinaldo began to speak of the ‘Filipino nation’. The idea of racial solidarity was domesticated, though it retained a place as a supplementary affiliation. When Japan, the leader of Asian modernity, annexed Korea in 1910, the combination of Spencer’s Social Darwinism and Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ impressed its neighbours but also raised qualms about the future.

Connections with East Asia were pioneered and sustained by ilustrados because they were literate, familiar with the possibilities, and had the financial means of travelling to other countries. Even so, there was a problem of communication because English was still in the early stages of becoming the lingua franca of the region.²⁸ The absence of a common language presented an even greater problem of communication within the Philippines itself. José Rizal, one of the heroes of the Revolution, was keenly aware of the importance of using a language other than Spanish in constructing a sense of national consciousness. Tagalog, the principal candidate, commended itself because it was the language of much of Luzon, the home of the anti-colonial movement, and its orthography had been undertaken by missionaries. Katipunan, following Rizal, hoped to locate the Revolution in a distant Tagalog culture. This step, though necessary on practical grounds, posed problems. Tagalog could not be used as a proxy for the Philippines without the acquiescence of the whole country, which some regions saw as accepting the dominance of Christian Luzon. In ascribing place to one country and reducing the emphasis on creating a wider pan-Asian community, nationalists found that their solution to one problem created another.

The defeat of the First Republic and the transfer of power to the United States halted the experiment in nation-building. The ideas, however, lived on in what CuUnjieng Aboitiz calls ‘The Afterlife of The Philippine Revolution’. Frustrated nationalists found new focus and fresh stimulus in opposing U.S. rule, which helped to solidify a sense of local unity. The ideals of the Revolution entered the Sakdalista revolt, a mass movement that looked back to the Katipunan and forward to the ‘green uprisings’ that were to become common throughout the colonial world during and after the 1930s. Ideas and experiences continued to be exchanged across East Asia among a wide range of ‘partners in misery’ who were subjected to colonial rule during the first half of the twentieth century. This was a two-way trade: as the Philippines borrowed from other parts of Asia, so the example and fate of the Philippine Revolution reverberated across Asia, especially in Malaya and Indonesia, providing both inspiration and guidance for other anti-colonial movements. Japan’s notion of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere sustained the idea of Pan-Asian unity; the country’s record as an occupying power and its defeat in 1945 destroyed it. The trend towards nationalism in one country was confirmed in 1946, when the Philippines gained independence.

The concluding pages of Asian Place reflect on the ‘global moment’ at the turn of the twentieth century, which has been analysed too often through a ‘Western-oriented bilateral framework.’ CuUnjieng Aboitiz has found a piece of the jigsaw puzzle that can be fitted into a map that extends far beyond East Asia. Other pieces, such as the complex linking the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea to Southeast and East Asia, bear out the proposition that globalisation had multiple centres of origin and diffusion. The chronological dimension can also be further generalised. The ‘global moment’ was the peak of a phase of globalisation propelled by empires and their instruments, port cities, that had the paradoxical consequence of culminating in the creation of nation states across the world. As new polities were being established or consolidated after World War II, the character of globalisation began to alter, and the volume and velocity of cross-border exchanges reached unprecedented levels. The result was a visible and weighty challenge to state sovereignty, whether newly-minted or prized for its antiquity. The increasing penetration of global influences in turn provoked a reaction that reached high levels of resistance during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, as President Donald Trump’s assertive ‘America First’ programme testified. The dilemma the ilustrados wrestled with, how to define a place for a people, remains a work in progress, and the formula for implementing Kant’s vision of a pacific, cosmopolitan world order continues to recede as we approach it.

Asian Place opens a fresh perspective on the history of nationalism in the Philippines. The research is necessarily detailed, but the text is enlivened by telling quotations from original sources. Portraits of Mariano Ponce’s stay in Japan and Emilio Aguinaldo’s refuge in Hong Kong, to cite two examples, provide illuminating cameos of the relationship of two different nationalist leaders with other parts of East Asia. The wider intellectual context, which encompasses Burke’s idea of place and Spencer’s formulation of what is known now as Social Darwinism, is neatly and accurately sketched. The text retains some of the density of a Ph.D. dissertation and has not fully resolved the familiar difficulty of matching themes and chronology. These minor imperfections, however, are more than offset by the bold and wide-ranging central thesis, which shows convincingly how Pan-Asian ideas of race became anchored in a specific location. Asian Place will be read by specialists on the Philippines and East Asia and ought also to be read by historians of anti-colonial nationalist movements elsewhere. The discussion that will ensue will also generate dissent, which is exactly what books that are both illuminating and plausible should do.

Missing Links

Both studies considered here view the rise and trajectory of the nationalist movement primarily from the standpoint of intellectual-cultural history, with some political extensions. The line of enquiry that began with Ileto has since been elaborated to incorporate Levi-Strauss’s structuralism, Orientalism, and postmodernism. Cultural approaches are prominent in the debate on colonialism more generally. Christianity has appeared as a supportive orthodoxy, in syncretic adaptations to colonialism, and in secessionist movements that sought spiritual independence within the colonial system. Converts could serve either as conservative collaborators or as proxy voices for the ‘masses’. Racism was a tool of suppression that also became a powerful motive for ending it.

Cultural history has undoubtedly made an important contribution but, like all specialisms, it has its limits. Ideas and their expression occur in a material context, which helps to explain why and how they are translated into action and the degree of influence they exercise. Without a wider setting, ideas and beliefs can easily become free-floating and timeless. Unless they are anchored in society, terms such as ‘class’ readily flow over and through borders that are too porous to contain them.

The performance of the economy and changes in its structure are considerations that, though not exclusive, form an essential part of the material context. The second half of the nineteenth century was a time of profound and wrenching economic change throughout the colonial world.²⁹ Expanding demand in Europe boosted the development of export crops; technological innovations discounted space; cheap manufactures became more widely available. These developments altered land use and tenure, shifted the distribution of wealth, and affected political fortunes in the recipient countries. In the late nineteenth century, structural changes intersected with fluctuations that affected prices and volumes in what was becoming an increasingly integrated global economy.

Even a brief check-list of the consequences of these developments provides evidence of their relevance for understanding the key events that led to the Revolution in the Philippines. ³⁰ The telegraph, steamship, submarine cable, telephone, and railway arrived during the last quarter of the century. Exports, notably abaca and sugar, expanded in volume but also suffered from falling prices during the same period.³¹ Competition for suitable land, especially from Chinese and Malay immigrants, led to conflicts with existing land-holders. The collapse in the price of silver weakened the exchange rate with gold-based currencies, raised the price of imports from those countries, and deterred Spanish investors. The potential benefits of a weaker currency in increasing the competitiveness of exports were nullified by falling demand in the industrial centres and competition from other colonial producers. The Spanish government’s acute need for revenue led to increased taxation and improved tax-gathering. To add to these difficulties, the 1880s introduced what has been called the ‘decade of death’, which saw the four horsemen of the apocalypse make their home in the Philippines. Floods, typhoons, and locusts joined malaria, smallpox, cholera, and rinderpest, among other diseases.³² Declining self-sufficiency led to a shortage of rice, the staple food, and a rise in the volume and price of imports. Malnutrition and disease formed a deadly partnership. Poverty and misery extended their already long stay. The average height of adult males did not regain even the low levels achieved in the 1870s until the 1940s.³³

Although association is not cause, the probability of a causal connection is suggested by the swelling demand for radical land reform, an increase in rural banditry and urban crime, and the gathering power of what has been termed the ‘judicial state’, which used its strength to preserve existing inequalities, extract taxes, and uphold injustices, such as forced labour.³⁴ The Spanish government was several steps behind the action: the nationalists who expressed these discontents were branded subversives (filibusteros). The U.S. administration that took over from Spain called them ‘insurgents’, a term that was to see service in many subsequent wars, including the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Historians of the Philippines are familiar with these features of the economic landscape in the late nineteenth century. Research into economic history, however, has been out of favour for several decades. Pioneering studies of export crops, incomes, and welfare need updating. Many gaps need to be filled. Detailed work is rarely set in the matrix of the international economy. Comparable examples in other colonies lie to hand but are often bypassed. Fortunately, there is now an opportunity to revitalise these and other subjects because economic history has returned from exile. A new generation of scholars has entered the field; novel approaches have revived and extended its methods and content. Although this development has yet to catch the attention of historians of the Philippines, the omission suggests that there are promising prospects for researchers who are at the outset of their careers and are prepared to take their cue from developments that are under way elsewhere.³⁵

This suggestion applies beyond the study of economic history. The treatment of nationalist leaders in the Philippines resembles a sequence that has occurred in other colonies. Typically, the first generation of national historians rehabilitated leaders who had been categorised as ‘subversives’ and ‘insurgents’ by colonial rulers; the second, writing with the experience of life after independence, often took a more critical view of them; the third, writing with the perspective time provides, was able to see merits in both interpretations. Elsewhere, too, competing interpretations of independence movements have tended to merge descriptive accounts of their composition and purpose with normative judgments of what they ought to have done, and have validated or condemned the outcome accordingly.

Ilustrado equivalents and ‘masses’ are equally well-known through long-standing and once fiery debates about the presence or absence of social classes under colonial rule. Successive generations of scholars have searched for the ‘making of the working class’ in Africa and Asia; a whole theory of imperialism has been compressed into stages of ‘collaboration’ that relied on the support of the educated ‘middling people’ and ‘traditional’ rulers.³⁶ If the outcome of the Revolution in the Philippines was a partnership between conservative ilustrados and foreign rulers, it was an alliance that was common throughout the colonial world. Similarly, if the Revolution remained ‘unfinished’ after the end of empire, it is hard to find a former colony that has completed it, not least because of disagreement about what the result should look like. It is enough to mention the name ‘Frantz Fanon’ to be reminded of an extensive literature on this subject.³⁷

It is not unusual to find that Katipunan had a strong middle class element, as well as a popular following. The American Revolution was secessionist movement led by the equivalent of ‘ilustrados’, who were also prominent in the revolts against Spanish rule in Latin America early in the nineteenth century. The same was true of the nationalist organisations in India and Africa, of reformists such as the Young Turks in the Ottoman Empire, and the leaders of the Self-Strengthening Movement in China. Popular and populist protests were everywhere in evidence, but it was not until the inter-war period that they reappeared in mass movements on a scale that was to form the basis of permanent political parties. Even so, the leadership came mainly from an ‘ilustrado’ elite. Gandhi set the trend in the 1920s. The ‘Youth Movements’ that arose during the 1930s were led by a new generation of educated nationalists who joined and sometimes co-ordinated the widespread rural and urban challenges to colonial rule in Africa and South Asia that had been given impetus by the consequences of the world slump.³⁸ This was the moment when the ‘green uprising’ in politics obliged elite leaders to enlarge the arena of opposition to incorporate the uneducated in the countryside and the unwashed in the towns.³⁹ Although the Sakdalistas were specific to the Philippines and are invariably treated within that context, they were also part of a global phenomenon.

Specialists on the Philippines might object that they cannot be expected to be familiar with the literature on Africa and Asia. Even if this defence is allowed, it is reasonable to suppose that comparisons with other parts of the Spanish and American empire would be made routinely. Yet, detailed references to Puerto Rico and Cuba, the two other important insular territories in the orbit of Spain and the United States, are uncommon. To cite the most obvious example, an outsider might assume that historians of the Philippines would have paid close attention to events in Cuba, which was also deeply involved in the Spanish-American War, created a nationalist movement in close association with the imperial experience, glimpsed independence before having it compromised, and engaged in much soul-searching thereafter to identify a ‘true’ national tradition. Few such studies have been made. The converse is equally true. Historians of Cuba and Puerto Rice could gain insight and ideas from research undertaken on the Philippines. Since, as Marc Bloch pointed out long ago, comparisons help to identify singularities as well as similarities, the need for more lateral thinking needs no further recommendation.

Conclusion

The aim of the foregoing survey has been to advertise the main lines of enquiry pursued by Ileto and CuUnjieng Aboitiz in the hope of alerting mainstream historians of empire to examples of established and new research that merit their attention. The fact that the discussion of Ileto’s book is still in progress indicates the range and vivacity of historical debates in the Philippines. The account given of CuUnjieng Aboitiz’s new study ought to point readers to an approach that connects domestic history to a wider and increasingly globalised world. It would be unwise for an outsider to venture further than this by attempting to judge the work of specialists who have, as R. H. Tawney put it, got their boots muddy. Outsiders, however, have an opportunity of drawing attention to perspectives that might further enlarge the context that has contained much of the discussion of nationalism in the Philippines. Some additional lines of enquiry have been suggested in the previous section. Beyond this point, reviewers, including the present writer, would do well to keep in mind Alexander Pope’s salutary guidance:

In every work regard the writer’s end,

Since none can compass more than they intend;

And if the means be just, the conduct true,

Applause, in spite of trivial faults, is due.⁴⁰

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Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Quoted in Owen, Prosperity Without Progress, 69.

2 Theories of Nationalism; idem, Nationalism.

3 Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe, 9.

4 Specialists on South Asia are an exception to this generalisation.

5 Ileto takes up these issues in his most recent book, Knowledge and Pacification.

6 Ileto, Pasyon, 24.

7 In taking this position, Ileto set himself against some formidable figures, including Benedict Anderson, Glenn May, and John Sidel. May’s revisionist study, Inventing a Hero, which challenged Ileto’s portrait, was a particular source of controversy, as was Ileto’s charge that viewpoints formed in the USA were infused with Orientalism. Ileto, “Orientalism,” 1–32; Lande, “Political Clientelism,” 119–28; Sidel, “Response to Ileto,” 29–38; Reynaldo Ileto, “On Sidel's Response,” 151–74. Quibuyen, A Nation Aborted, challenged the view of Rizal favoured by many U.S. commentators who have approved of him as a moderate reformer who distanced himself from radical options.

8 Agoncillo, The Revolt of the Masses. See Renaldo Ileto’s fascinating account of censorship and eventual publication in “Reflections,” 496–520; Nicolas Zafra, then Head of the Department of History in the University of the Philippines, combined a dismissive commentary on Agoncillo’s book with a defence of the colonial record in “The Revolt of the Masses,” 493–514.

9 Constantino, The Philippines. See the characteristically insightful assessment by Schumacher, “Re-reading Philippine History,” 465–80.

10 Ileto, Knowledge and Pacification, Ch. 6. See also Rafael, “Becoming Rey Ileto,” 115–32.

11 Three of many possible examples are: McCoy, “Baylan,” 141–94; Rafael, Contracting Colonialism; Guerrero, Luzon at War.

12 Rafael, Contracting Colonialism.

13 Scalice, “Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon,” 29–58

14 Schumacher, “Recent Perspectives,” 445–92.

15 Williams, Culture and Society, 289

16 Ariate, ‘Knowledge and Pacification”. This paragraph also draws on Fast and Richardson, Roots of Dependency.

17 Knowledge and Pacification. See also Filipinos and Their Revolution; and ‘Religion and Anti-Colonial Movements’.

18 Ileto, “Religion and Anti-Colonial Movements”.

19 See also Anderson, “Cacique Democracy in the Philippines”; and Ileto, “The Centennial of Cacique Democracy”.

20 Hau, “Patria é Interesses,” 3–54.

21 Ileto, Knowledge and Pacification, ch 11.

22 Ileto, Knowledge and Pacification, ch. 3.

23 Ariate, “Knowledge and Pacification”.

24 Ileto was more original than he thought. Although the move to recover the history of the urban and rural under-classes was well under way in the 1960s and 1970s, Ileto wrote and revised his Ph.D. dissertation without being aware of the work of Edward Thompson (or, later, Ranajit Guha, whose subalterns occupied a space as large as that ‘the masses’). See Ileto’s comments in “Historiography in The Philippines”.

25 Credit should also be given to Mattiessen, Japanese Pan-Asianism, who examines a bilateral relationship over a slightly different period.

26 Treaties with Britain in 1902 and with France in 1907 confirmed Japan’s independence and marked its emergence as a major power.

27 CuUnjieng Aboitiz is in accord with Ileto in underlining the importance Ileto now gives to Aguinaldo’s role in creating a national movement.

28 On this subject see Harper, “Empire, Diaspora”, in Hopkins, ed. Globalisation in World History, 141–66.

29 For a sketch of these developments as they affected the imperial world, see Hopkins, American Empire, ch.6.

30 A fuller but still schematic account is in Hopkins, American Empire, 404–12.

31 An enterprising historian is needed to produce an adequate time series covering the terms of trade for this period.

32 See the pioneering essay by Smith, “Crisis Mortality,” 51–76; and de Bevoise, Agents of the Apocalypse.

33 Bassino, Dovis, and Komlos, “Biological Well-Being,” 33–60.

34 Bankoff, Crime, Society and the State. See too Guerrero, Luzon at War.

35 See for example, Hopkins, “The New Economic History of Africa,” 155–177; Austin and Broadberry, “Introduction,” 893–906; Fourie, “The Data Revolution,” 193–212.

36 Robinson, “Non-European Foundations,” ch. 5.

37 Les Damnés de la Terre.

38 This was also the case with Benigno Ramos, the founder of the Sakdalistas.

39 Hopkins, American Empire, 479, 537, 554, 582, 628, 642.

40 Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism” (1711).