A Philippine ‘coolie trade’: Trade and exploitation of Chinese labour in Spanish colonial Philippines, 1850–98

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-483
Author(s):  
Mònica Ginés-Blasi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Commercial Activities ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Coolie Trade

Chinese immigration to the Philippines has traditionally been studied in relation to commercial activities. But between 1850 and 1898, there was an unparalleled influx of Chinese labourers, which raised the number of Chinese residents to 100,000. This influx was fuelled by the abundant profits obtained by Chinese brokers and foremen, Spanish institutions and authorities in Manila, consuls in China, and Spanish and British ship captains, all of whom extracted excessive fees and taxes from the labourers. The trade in and the exploitation of Chinese labourers in the Philippines have yet to be thoroughly researched. This article shows that the import and abuse of Chinese labourers in and to the Philippines continued throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and that, despite some anti-Chinese Spanish colonial rhetoric, a wide range of actors and institutions, both in China and in the Philippines, took advantage of this unprecedented inflow of immigrants.

Deportation of “Undesirable” Chinese in the Philippines, 1837–1882

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-246
Author(s):  
Jely Agamao Galang
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Labor Supply ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
The State ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
Primary Materials

Abstract Between 1837 and 1882, the Spanish colonial government in the Philippines deported “undesirable” Chinese—vagrants, drunkards, unemployed, idlers, pickpockets, undocumented, and the “suspicious”—to various parts of the archipelago. Deportation, in this context, refers to the transportation or banishment of individuals deemed “dangerous” by the state to different far-flung areas of the islands or outside the colony but still within the Spanish empire. Deportation primarily served as a form of punishment and a means to rehabilitate and improve the wayward lives of “criminals.” This paper examines the deportation of “undesirable” Chinese in the nineteenth-century Philippines. Using underutilized primary materials from various archives in Manila and Madrid, it interrogates the actors, institutions and processes involved in banishing such individuals. It argues that while deportation served its punitive and reformative functions, Spanish authorities also used it to advance their colonial project in the islands. Chinese deportees formed part of the labor supply the state used to populate the colony’s frontier areas and strengthen its control over its newly-acquired territories.

‘The salvational currents of emigration’: Racial theories and social disputes in the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 426-444
Author(s):  
Florentino Rodao
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Biological Determinism ◽  
White Race ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article analyses the changing significance of racial theories in the writings of Spanish emigrants in the late nineteenth century Philippines. Works by Antonio Cañamaque, Pablo Feced (Quioquiap), and Antonio Barrantes show how racialised understandings of colonial society in the Philippines evolved, from an initial dismissal of hybridism and rejection of mestizos to assertions of the innate superiority of the ‘white race’ and advocation of a rigid separation between local communities. These developments are considered in the context of the rising popularity of biological determinism alongside an influx of Spanish emigrants into the Philippines. The Spanish settlers used biological determinism to proclaim their role as the sole purveyors of both ‘progress’ and of a kind of egalitarianism. This article describes these debates and arguments, analyses their inconsistencies, and addresses the Filipino elite's responses to the settlers’ racial theories. These responses are read not simply as part of the development of Filipino nationalism, but as reflective of rivalries within the Spanish colonial community in the Philippines, where the locally born found additional reasons to support anticolonialism.

From Bohemia to Balintawak

2021 ◽  
pp. 19-44
Author(s):  
John T. Sidel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Asian History ◽  
Jose Rizal ◽  
The One

This chapter provides a seemingly unusual, but potentially illuminating, vantage point from which to approach the cosmopolitan dimensions of the Philippine Revolution of the late nineteenth century — the Bohemian town of Litoměřice. It recounts the visit of Dr. José Rizal, the great Filipino novelist and celebrated progenitor of Philippine nationalism, to Leitmeritz and his relationship with Ferdinand Blumentritt, a local gymnasium teacher and avid student and scholar of Philippine history and society. The chapter provides a coherent narrative account, one whose emplotment follows the nationalist logic so prevalent in the study of Southeast Asian history. On the one hand, the revolution is said to have been led from above by urban — and highly urbane — educated young men familiar from Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, Filipino nationalists who emerged from Spanish colonial schools in the Philippines. On the other hand, the Philippine Revolution is also said to have been driven from below by a broader pool of the Filipino masses, by peasants and fishermen across the provinces of the archipelago, and by artisanal laborers in Manila and other port cities. The chapter argues that the struggles leading up to the Philippine Revolution can be understood in terms of what scholars have termed the “Culture Wars” of the late nineteenth century, a transcontinental if not global conflict pitting “anticlerical” scientists, Freemasons, liberals, and republicans against the Catholic Church in its ultramontane incarnation.

The Chinese in Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, and Panama: Lessons in History, Identity, and Culture, and Interconnections with the Chinese in the Philippines

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-302
Author(s):  
Richard T. Chu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Trinidad And Tobago ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Silver Mining ◽  
Diasporic Community ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Gold And Silver Mining ◽  
External Forces

Abstract The Chinese in Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, and Panama have had long histories of migration dating back to the nineteenth century, when British and Spanish colonial powers started to bring them to the Caribbean and Latin America from Guangdong province. The primary goal was to provide labor for the sugar cane, guano, bird nest, gold and silver mining, and other industries. In the 1870s, Havana could boast of having the largest Chinatown in the Caribbean, with more than 10,000 Chinese. Today, it has fewer than 100 Chinese Cubans. Trinidad and Tobago’s population of Chinese waned after the nineteenth century, but many Trinidadians have some Chinese ancestry, while Panama currently has the highest percentage (7 percent) of Chinese among Latin American countries. What stories, approaches, and lessons can be learned by comparing their histories to that of the Chinese in the Philippines? More specifically, how are the experiences of the Chinese in these three countries, whether citizen or recent immigrant, similar to those in the Philippines? What can we learn from the scholarship on the Chinese in the Caribbean that can help shape our own research agenda in studying the Chinese in the Philippines? Through a combination of historical and ethnographic research, this essay discusses the ways in which the identities of each Chinese diasporic community are being shaped by local and external forces, including China’s increasing presence in the region. This essay hopes to serve as a guidepost to Chinese diaspora scholars interested in examining further the transhemispheric connections between the Caribbean and Southeast Asia.

Masonería, Cofradía, Katipunan

2021 ◽  
pp. 45-71
Author(s):  
John T. Sidel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South America ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
International Context ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter argues that the Philippine Revolution of the late nineteenth century can be most fully understood in light of the international context in which it unfolded and the cosmopolitan mobilizing structures that enabled and impelled the trajectory it followed. The chapter suggests that the timing of the Philippine Revolution — late relative to South America, early in Southeast Asia — owed less to the nationalizing impact of Spanish colonial state formation than to the cosmopolitanizing consequences of the deepening integration of the Philippine archipelago within the world capitalist economy over the course of the nineteenth century. The chapter reviews the church's fundamental role in the formation of a modern public sphere in the Philippines and in linking the Philippines to the very same cultural, intellectual, and linguistic world of Christianity, which liberal and republican cosmopolitan challenges to the universalist claims of Rome had emerged. Ultimately, the chapter discusses how plebeian and egalitarian forms of brotherhood provided the basis for a revolution within the Revolution, with the associational form of the cofradía providing a popular vehicle for subaltern mobilization in many provinces across the archipelago.

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Goldhill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Victorian Art ◽  
Victorian Science ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? This book is an exploration of how ancient Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, the book examines how sexuality and desire, the politics of culture, and the role of religion in society were considered and debated through the Victorian obsession with antiquity. Looking at Victorian art, it demonstrates how desire and sexuality, particularly anxieties about male desire, were represented and communicated through classical imagery. Probing into operas of the period, the book addresses ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and cultural politics. And through fiction—specifically nineteenth-century novels about the Roman Empire—it discusses religion and the fierce battles over the church as Christianity began to lose dominance over the progressive stance of Victorian science and investigation. Rediscovering some great forgotten works and reframing some more familiar ones, the book offers extraordinary insights into how the Victorian sense of antiquity and our sense of the Victorians came into being. With a wide range of examples and stories, it demonstrates how interest in the classical past shaped nineteenth-century self-expression, giving antiquity a unique place in Victorian culture.

Women and Slavery in the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daina Ramey Berry ◽  
Nakia D. Parker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Kinship Bonds

This chapter analyzes the lives of enslaved women in the nineteenth-century United States and the Caribbean, an era characterized by the massive expansion of the institution of chattel slavery. Framing the discussion through the themes of labor, commodification, sexuality, and resistance, this chapter highlights the wide range of lived experiences of enslaved women in the Atlantic World. Enslaved women’s productive and reproductive labor fueled the global machinery of capitalism and the market economy. Although enslaved women endured the constant exploitation and commodification of their bodies, many actively resisted their enslavement and carved out supportive and sustaining familial, marital, and kinship bonds. In addition, this essay explains how white, native, and black women could be complicit in the perpetuation of chattel slavery as enslavers and slave traders. Considering women in their roles as the oppressed and the oppressors contributes and expands historical understandings of gender and sexuality in relation to slavery.

The Anatomy of Justice: Forensic Medicine and Criminal Law In Nineteenth-century Egypt

1999 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khaled Fahmy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Forensic Medicine ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Reform Process ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Common ◽  
Arabic Speaking

AbstractThe reform of the Egyptian criminal justice system in the nineteenth century traditionally has been viewed as forming an important step in the establishment of a liberal and just rule of law. By studying how forensic medicine was introduced into nineteenth-century Egypt, I argue that the need to exercise better control over the population and to monitor crime lay behind the reform process as much as liberal ideas borrowed from Europe did. Drawing on a wide range of archival material, both legal and medical, I analyze the role played by autopsy in the criminal system and argue that the practice of autopsy was viewed differentially by 'ulamā', by Arabic-speaking, French-educated doctors and by the mostly illiterate masses. And contrary to the common wisdom, I conclude that the "modernization" of the Egyptian legal system was intended not to displace the sharīa but to support it.

The Philippines in 2006: Democracy and Its Discontents

Asian Survey ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila S. Coronel
Keyword(s):  
High Growth ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Political Uncertainty ◽  
Foreign Investments ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
Wide Range

A wide range of groups attempted to force President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo out of power in 2006 but failed. The attempt prompted the declaration of a state of emergency and plunged the country deeper into crisis. The year was marked by internecine rivalries among the country's elites, restiveness in the armed forces, and a renewed campaign against communists. But the economy seemed insulated from political uncertainty, posting high growth because of rising export receipts, more foreign investments, and record remittances from overseas workers.

Breast-feeding and Diarrheal Morbidity

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 86 (6) ◽  
pp. 874-882 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry M. Popkin ◽  
Linda Adair ◽  
John S. Akin ◽  
Robert Black ◽  
John Briscoe ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Breast Milk ◽  
Breast Feeding ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Longitudinal Survey ◽  
Milk Diet ◽  
Specific Effects ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Environmental Causes ◽  
Diarrheal Morbidity

This study used a unique longitudinal survey of more than 3000 mother-infant pairs observed from pregnancy through infancy. The sample is representative of infants from the Cebu region of the Philippines. The sequencing of breast-feeding and diarrheal morbidity events was carefully examined in a longitudinal analysis which allowed for the examination of age-specific effects of feeding patterns. Because the work controlled for a wide range of environmental causes of diarrhea, the results can be generalized to other populations with some confidence. The addition to the breast-milk diet of even water, teas, and other nonnutritive liquids doubled or tripled the likelihood of diarrhea. Supplementation of breast-feeding with additional nutritive foods on liquids further increased significantly the risk of diarrhea; most benefits of breast-feeding alone on in combination with nutritive foods/liquids became small during the second half of infancy. Benefits of breast-feeding were slightly greater in urban environments.

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