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SPANISH ERA

FEUDAL TIMES

The lives of the natives took a turn for the worse with the coming of the
Spaniards. As rulers and conquerors, the Spaniards expected to be served
and fed well by the natives. Much of the natives’ food now went to the
Spaniards; their labor used for the needs and the luxuries of the colonizers.
The natives, once sovereign in their own land, because the Spaniards’ slaves.

The native soon learned what to expect from the very first order the
conqueror of Manila, the Adelantado Miguel Lopez de Legaspi, gave to the
defeated chiefs.

In what was euphemistically called a “peace agreement”, but was

actually a document of surrender, the people of Tondo and Manila bound
themselves to construct buildings and provide food for the three hundred
Spaniards then living in the city.

“… the said Governor informed the said Filipinos that they

were now ordered to make and complete the fort which they had
begun on the promontory in this river where His Majesty’s
artillery would be placed and set up, and that within the
said fort they should make a house for His Majesty, and a large
storehousefor the necessary things and that likewise outside
the fort they had to make a house and church for the religious
in the place and locationwhich they would select, and a house
for the said Governor, and that houses and church had to be
larger; in the same way they had to makeanother one
hundred and fifty medium sized houses in which the people of
the camp would be sheltered … and that when the work of the
said houses was finished they would regularly give food to
three hundred Spaniards in this town of the sort of provisions
and food which they use and have in this land”.

Tribute and Encomienda

Encomienda
 Was the first economic system introduced to exploit the wealth of the
natives.
 The word originally came from the Spanish encomendar, meaning to
commend, to commit to one’s care.

A Spaniard was entrusted with the care of a number of native of one

given area, who in turn took the obligation of providing for the needs of the
Spanish encomendero through the payment of the tribute. Part of the tribute
was to go to the central government.
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The encomienda was a way of extracting money from the natives, and
the encomendero saw it as such – a means of enriching himself. And since
the natives were the vanquished they simply had no way of righting the
abuses of their powerful Spanish masters.

The words of Guido de Lavezares, Legaspi’s successor to the

Goverrnorship of the Islands, should prove illuminating in this regard.
Lavezares and his companions were accused before the King of abuses in
the collection of tributes. In answer, Lavezares could point to no better
reason than that these goods were needed for the Spaniards’ upkeep. For
the Spaniards, it did not matter if the natives suffered provided that they the
Spaniards lived in comfort.

Said Lavezares:

“We have collected large amount of gold as tribute in Ilocos and

Camarines without benefit to the natives, but you must understand
that in order to eat we need to be supported by the natives”.

Ealy natives considered the Spaniards robbers, taking as they did

what was not theirs. As the natives of NeuvaVizcaya, in the 1950’s, took the
Spaniards to their very faces:

“When asked if they had enemies, they answered, ‘Yes, we

would have them if we would leave our land to commit depradations.
But we are not like you, Castilians, who rob everything”.

In the same vein, in 1577 a native of Cainta, near Manila shouted at

the Spaniards under cover of darkness:

“What have we done to you, what did our ancestors owe yours,
that you should come to plunder us”?

Force Labor

The Spaniards also imposed the obligation of forced labor in 1580.

Every male indio between the ages of 16 to 60, with the exception of the
chieftains and their eldest sons, were obliged to serve for 40 days each year
in forced labor or polo. In actual practice, however, forced labor could last for
months and months.

Officials of the Spanish government, from the gobernadorcillo (town

mayor), to the Alcalde Mayor (Governor) and the Governor General, as well
as the priest, made use of forced labor, often quarelling among themselves in
their efforts to appropriate the natives’ work. What critics of the Church could
not particularly stand was the missionaries’ penchant for building palatial
converts, where only one or two priests reside. As one Spanish official, Pedro
Vertez, wrote against priests in 1788.
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Force labor for shipbuilding purposes constitute a grave burden to the

antives. As a group of Islands, the Philippines needed ships for travel, trade,
and war. Shipyards were thus built in Cavite, as well as in Panay, Albay,
Masbate, and Marinduque.

The work was so hard that everybody endeavored to evade it. The
richer inhabitants freed themselves from the obligation by simply paying a
certain sum of money called the falla. And if a poor indio resorted to this
method, he ended up in dept, usually at usurious interest, from which he could
scarcely extricate himself. For all practical purposes, the indio became a
slave.

Tobacco Monopoly

The tobacco monopoly was established in the Philippines in 1781 to

earn revenues for the deficit-ridden government. Burdened by the yearly
subsidy it had to give from the coffers of Mexico, the Royal Crown was happy
the Philippine government found a way of easing its financial difficulties.

Monopoly obliged farmers in certain designated areas or provinces to

grow tobacco, while prohibiting all the rest from planting it. The government
then brought all the tobacco, manufactured them into cigars and cigarettes,
and resold them to the general public.

Because tobacco was bought cheaply, and sold expensively as cigars

and cigarettes to a big captive market, with no one else allowed to enter the
business, the government realized big profit. Never before in the history of the
Islands did the government get such a profit.

Papeletas
 Certificate of credits instead of cash
 Government faced a big budgetary squeeze, began to pay the farmers
papeletas in buying tobacco.

Capitalism and Hacienda

At the beginning of the 19th century capitalism was gaining ground in

the economic world. England especially, which had become an industrial
capitalist power by the middle of the 19 th century, was eager to find markets
for its manufactured products as well as buy raw materials for its factories.

Forces within the Philippines s well as in Spain were agitating for

policies that would put the Philippines into the mainstream of this world
capitalism.

The Hacenderos

1. Spanish Church
2. Chinese mestizos
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3. Principalia
 Spaniards were few in numbers and therefore unable to rule the
natives by themselves, the Spaniards co-opted the principalia as
their collaborators in ruling the country.
 Before the rise of the Chinese mestizos, the principalia were the
biggest landowners among the non-Spaniards.
4. The descendants of the datus and chiefs of the pre-Spanish era.

The Chinese Traders

It must be noted that in the hacienda system the hacenderos were not
the only ones who got wealthy. The traders of the products of the haciendas
became even more so.

These traders were first of all the Chinese, who brought the export
products from the provinces to the big centers like Manila, reselling them in
Manila at handsome profit. The Chinese so controlled the internal trade in the
Islands that the Philippines was sometimes said to be “rather a colony of the
Chinese empire than a part of the Spanish monarchy.”

Of course, the Spaniards wanted to have this trade for themselves, and
exerted efforts to break the Chinese grip. In 1804 they passed a law wherein
only Chinese artisans and Chinese employed in agricultural production could
remain in the provinces; they were prohibited from engaging in trade.
Massacres even occurred, like those of 1603, 1630, 1662, 1668, 1755, and
1766, which drastically lowered the Chinese population.

British and American Merchant Houses

Over and above the Chinese, British and American firms benefited
from the hacienda system prevailing in the Islands. Buying the cash crop from
the Chinese traders, they exported these to other countries; they also
imported processed products from abroad for re-sale to the Islands. They
controlled, in short, the export-import business.

The Spaniards wanted to control the international trade. But just as

Spain could not impede the Chinese from dominating internal trade, it could
neither prevent the English and American firms from controlling the
international trade activities.

The reason was simple economics. Spain was poor, then a mere
economic satellite of industrial England. Without capital Spain could not have
the trade.

By the 1830’s, seven powerful merchant houses were already doing

business in the country.
1. J. and T. Apthorp,
2. Kierulf and Co.
3. Geo W. Hubell
4. Wise and Co.
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5. Peterson and Co.

6. Ker McMicking
7. Russel, Sturgis and Co.

Big Business in England and the United States

Beside the British and American firms in the Philippines, big capitalist
firms in England and the United States profited even more. For it was to these
firms the British and Americans corporations in the Philippines send the
country’s raw materials, and it was also from them that the British and
American firms got the imported manufactured goods sold in the Islands.

Spain may have owned the Philippines, but it was England and to a
lesser extent the United States, that got fat out of the bounty of the Islands. It
had been well said, “Spain kept the cow, while Britain and the United States
drank the milk”.

The Losers

The hacienda system produced wealth for the British and American
merchants, the Chinese traders, as well as the Chinese mestizos and antive
principalia, but it caused the common people greater poverty.
1. The common people began to lose the lands they had been tilling for
ages.
2. The people’s poverty was further heightened by the entry of England’s
capitalist goods which ruined native industries. The most important of
these industries was weaving.