El Costo del Imperio Asiático: La Formación Colonial de las Islas Filipinas bajo Dominio Español, 1565–1800 (review)

El Costo del Imperio Asiático is the result of arduous and careful research made by the author in several Spanish, Mexican, and Philippine archives. Luis Alonso has discussed and outlined some topics found in this book in earlier conference papers, journal articles, and book chapters. Nevertheless, this book pulls together these various issues to offer a reinterpretation of the interaction between the public treasury, the economy, and the strategy of the Spanish administration in the Philippines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The book is divided into five sections, which contain nine very carefully selected essays that all deal with the Philippines, from the arrival of Legazpi in 1564 to the Bourbon reforms implemented after the British captured Manila in 1762. These essays deal with the interrelationship between the public and private spheres on matters such as political decision making in the Spanish administration in the Philippines, the organization of the Spanish treasury, and the galleon trade.

The first section, entitled “El proyecto asiático de Legazpi-Urdaneta” (The Asian Project of Legazpi and Urdaneta), makes us reflect on why the Spaniards decided to conquer and hold the Philippine islands. The Spaniards’ interest in the archipelago emerged when the Portuguese settled in Asia. Portuguese seafarers started to frequent the southwest coast of India in 1499, consolidating positions in the western Indian Ocean during the first decade of 1500, spreading later through other regions as the Persian Gulf, Ceylon, the Bay of Bengal, the Indonesian archipelago (Malacca, Timor, and the Moluccas), China, and Japan. For the Portuguese authorities the Far East was thus one of the regions embedded in a much broader space, coordinated from Goa, that included the long coast from the Cape of Good Hope to the Japanese beaches and Korean coast. Castile fell behind Portugal. Charles V decided to send different expeditions, which all failed until Legazpi’s expedition took place in 1564. The Spanish administration did not want to miss the action in the spice trade. Once the conquest was completed, the Spaniards observed that the Philippines did not have precious metals as their Latin American colonies had, or lots of spices as those found in the Portuguese colonies. However, despite the fact that Philip II could not create in Asia an eastern empire similar to that in the western hemisphere, he decided to keep the archipelago as a defensive stronghold or bastion to support his western empire. In this section, Alonso expounds on how the Spanish administration tried to promote agriculture and the instauration of the Manila galleon as intermediary trade between Southeast Asia and New Spain.

In “Los orígenes de la Hacienda filipina y la organización del sistema tributario” (The Origins of the Philippine Treasury and the Organization of the Tribute System), Alonso discusses the tribute system as a complex tax imposed by the Spaniards, which became the key factor in the hispanization of the islands. In the exaction of tribute, forced labor called polos and forced purchases or cash distributions called bandalas must be included. Polos and bandalas, along with the encomienda system, were the backbone of the Spanish system. No doubt, both the tribute and the encomienda were coercive for the natives, but this does not imply, as some works in American and Filipino historiography do, that the prehispanic tenure system was idyllic and dissimilar to colonial innovations. Some American and Filipino historical works have assumed that the coercive systems imposed by Spain decimated the population, as happened in the Americas, with the population decline lasting until the eighteenth century. There was no such destruction of old native communities, at least during the first years of the Spanish conquest. On the contrary, the Spanish system coexisted with old native practices until the Spaniards imposed a similar system like that of Latin America.

The third...