Reply to Cruikshank

First of all, I want to thank Philippine Studies for allowing me to make this response and clarify my points of view. I also thank Bruce Cruikshank for the praise he gives me at the end of his commentary. His remarkable academic personality, his knowledge of Philippine economic and social history, makes it even more valuable, although I consider it excessive. But, above all, I want to thank both for giving me the opportunity to reflect more deeply on the tax system imposed by the Spanish in the sixteenth century and thus improve our knowledge of Philippine history, which is what we all want.

I think Cruikshank's critical observations can be grouped into four sections: (a) on the role of the parish priest in the determination of exceptions (reservas) to the payment of tribute; (b) on the formal development of the open population count (padrones); (c) on the statistical contradictions in the growth of the tribute during the eighteenth century; and finally (d) on certain aspects of the tribute in relation to Philippine domestic trade, outside of the galleon trade.

The Parish Priest and Exemptions from Tribute

The arrival of the Bourbons in Spain in the early eighteenth century caused changes in the whole Spanish empire. They initiated political reform to make the colonies in America and Asia more profitable through modification of the commercial and administrative system. I will not go into details, except to say that greater tax revenues in Spain, America, and Asia were needed to meet higher spending on defense against European competitors, who had been severely affected by the reforms (cf. Delgado 2007). In America and in Asia, the reforms involved, among others, the tribute, forced labor (polos), and compulsory purchases (called bandalas in Tagalog areas). To this end, laws were issued for more efficient revenue collection without increasing the tax rate. Among them was the change of system from "closed count" (lower revenue) to "open count" (higher revenue) in the collection of tribute. While in the former the parish priests were those who conducted the census or the tribute list, in the latter it was made by members of the civil administration: the governors (alcaldes mayores and corregidores) supported by native officials of towns (gobernadorcillos) and villages (cabezas de barangay). In my articles that Bruce Cruikshank has critiqued, I advanced the hypothesis that it was in the interest of the parish priest—although benefiting from a significant part of the tribute—to reduce the number of tributes by increasing the exemptions or reservas, a tax figure introduced in the early sixteenth century by Gov. Don Santiago de Vera. These native reservados, i.e., nontaxpayers, became part of the large staff of servants who worked in the churches and the residences of priests. Cruikshank says I do not provide evidence, while he describes the experience of the Franciscans. Admittedly I do not, because it is something that anyone researching on early Philippine history will find diffused in the Spanish administrative sources. Of course there is little direct evidence, but indirect ones exist. I will cite a few.

Firstly, the government ordinances addressed by the governors general to the alcaldes mayores and corregidores were meant to correct the flawed responses to orders that emanated from Manila, such that its reiteration indicated the systematic noncompliance by provincial and local authorities. These began to appear in the seventeenth century and continued during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Among the best-known ordinances were those issued by Don Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera (1643), Don Fausto Cruzat y Góngora (1696), and Don José Raón (1768), with subsequent governors making vital additions to improve the management of tribute collection. The ordinances of Hurtado de Corcuera (1643) specified that the reservados should only be "the elderly who were sixty years old who, for that reason, had exemption, and those who had been cabeza de barangay and their firstborn, heir and successor to that post, and singers, sacristans, doormen, and cooks." This signified, first of all, the identification of fraud (that local authorities and parish priests abused exemptions) and it was also a reminder to comply. This was...