Gaming the System

The Tribute System in the Spanish Philippines, 1565-1884©

Bruce Cruikshank                           23 November 2014

         There is an elephant in the room.  We all know it is there, but we do not talk of it directly or comprehensively.  We speak of its trunk, the weight of its feet and crushing power as it steps or shuffles about; the stench of its feces, or its general bulk when encountered as we edge around it.  This elephant, the imperial Spanish tribute system, was imposed on families in the Philippine colony after conquest in the 1560s and maintained until the Spanish rulers moved in 1884 to a tax system based directly on adult individuals.  The imposing creature called the tribute system had a childhood, adolescence, maturity, decline and death. 

All students of the Philippine past agree there is an elephant in the room, that the tribute system in the Spanish period in Philippine history was a significant presence in a variety of arenas from Manila to the townships in the provinces.  We all agree that the creature called the tribute system was a behemoth which intersected issues of Spanish imperial sovereignty, economics, demography, administration, and so forth. 

Let us take a look at the system, focusing on ways participants “played” the system to maximum personal gain, advantage, or freedom.  The rules were complex and over the years from the initial conquest of 1565 there were modifications, tweaks, and some major revisions, particularly in 1884, when the Spanish changed from a tribute system to a system based on an identification card (cédula).  We need not focus on the myriad of rules behind the system, which would be rather tedious (for those interested, I have laid out the major aspects and changes in Appendix One, below).  We will discover some of them, as needed, as we make our way.  In any case, rules and prescribed rubrics did not necessarily reflect what happened “on the ground,” in the municipalities under Spanish rule in the Islands. 

         The tribute system provided a significant percentage of material and revenue to the Spanish imperial treasury in the Philippines.  The heart of the beast is the annual demand for set quantities of goods or of coin from most families in the colonial Philippines.  The range of goods in kind that were taken centered on rice and other food items but extended as well to many other types of items:[1]

                     The commodities that went into the tribute were generally food and

provisions: rice or palay, salt, chickens, eggs, venison, other game meat,

swine, and native liquor or wine.  Other items included mats, jars and pottery,

various cloths from plain homespun cotton for sheets and blankets to table

cloths and elaborate embroidered altar cloth; coconut oil for lighting, wax

from the forest for church candles; abaca fiber and rope for rigging and tackle

for ships, brea (pitch) and coconut husk or coir for caulking; and the famed

Ilocos mantas, heavy cotton sailcloth for the trading boats, the craft in the

wars against the Muslims, and for the galleons in the Manila-Acapulco trade.

The amounts collected, some of which ended up in the imperial treasury in Manila, permitted Spanish and Filipino[2] functionaries to manipulate the impositions in ways to fraudulently profit, raising a stench until the mid-nineteenth century at least of malfeasance, corruption, and extortion.  Perhaps not all of the officials in the provinces—the Spanish governors and the Filipino municipal officials--played the system for personal advantage.  However, manuscripts from the period suggest that those who did “game” the system were not a small percentage of those officials.  The stratagems and extortions against non-official Filipinos are a consistent theme during Spanish rule in the colonial Philippines. 

Alcaldes mayores and Corregidores

The governors of the provinces were the key Spanish officials supervising and directing the tribute collection.  In order to maximize profits from their rule, some of them stole, cheated, and acted despotically.  An observer in 1827 said that the general pattern for governors (known as alcaldes mayores or corregidores) was that they would buy boats, set up shops, confiscate merchant boats, and swindle Filipinos with unjust taxes.[3]  This pattern is echoed in a report from 1842, which states that “From the moment that are named alcaldes mayores or corregidores, they buy a boat for … commerce … that they quickly fill with goods for the provinces where they are being sent.  They are then occupied in facilitating sales and the collection of products from the pueblos they govern” in order to refill the boat to send back to Manila.  This practice is their first concern and preoccupation.[4]  In 1779, a Franciscan wrote that “from the day they are given the position,” they focus exclusively on “which goods and commodities will have the best success” in their provinces.[5]  As Luis Alonso Álvarez points out, the governors “created a commercial network,” working with Filipino municipal officials and covering all the provinces.[6] 

We are told by an astute commentator in the 1770s that the causes were debt and avarice:

                     The poverty of the alcaldes-mayor, their being loaded with debts

         when they go from Manila, and the ambition to become rich in a short time,

draw them into trading with the product of the tributes in each province;

they buy vessels, lade them with goods, and convey these to Manila, or

send them to other provinces.  ….[7]

Part of the debt appears to have been the expense of receiving the position as governor—Viana alludes to the purchase of this office,[8] and a longer statement includes this as one of the reasons for the indebtedness:[9]

         An alcalde-mayor has twenty-five pesos of salary a month, which makes

         three hundred pesos a year;[10] but before he leaves Manila for the province

         to which he is assigned he spends a larger sum [than that] in the fees for

         his documents and in the notary’s office, and for the securities [that he

         must give].  In three years his term as alcalde comes to an end,[11] and the

         expenses of his residencia[12] cost him four hundred to five hundred pesos;

and it needs but little less for the settlement, presentation, and despatch

of the accounts of the royal revenue.  Thus all the salary which he receives

on account of being alcalde, which amounts to nine hundred pesos in the

three years, is not sufficient for the aforesaid expenses; for the rest of their

maintenance have been invented the thefts from the royal revenue which

they handle, and from the Indians within their jurisdiction.  For this reason,

and likewise because these offices have usually been sold, as a rule they

are filled by men who are not very trustworthy.

A contemporary observer has acknowledged both that while not all governors were corrupt, the number who were “was sufficient to disrupt the system.”  Moreover, even otherwise honest governors might use illegal means to cover their expenses; and “those less honest would use these and even more fraudulent means not just to cover the necessities of their office but also to enrich themselves.”[13]  One of the more common tricks was to collect the tribute in either kind or in coin, depending on which the Alcalde mayor could subsequently manipulate on the market to his best advantage.[14] 

As Tomas de Comyn notes, writing about 1820, there is no administrative arena “more susceptible to all types of frauds” and that collection in kind results in frauds against the fruits of Filipino industry and the de facto demand of a tribute twice or three times what is legal.[15]  Such collections in goods rather than coin began “in the first phases of the conquest and continued into the nineteenth century, when there was an attempt to monetize the system completely, though in fact the initiative was never completed.”[16] 

         The foremost, contemporary student of the system, Luis Alonso Álvarez, has repeatedly pointed out that the tribute system (the “tribute complex”) in fact consisted of three parts, each of which provided opportunities for graft and corrupt practice:[17] 

                     First, the tribute: paid partly in kind, it provided the Spanish food and

supplies at very low prices.  Secondly, forced labor (polos): it provided

them with labor services at low cost.  And, finally, forced purchases or

cash repartimientos (Bandalas): it completed the goods delivered in the

tribute, which the Spanish acquired with little money.

The polo, “forced but remunerated work for the colonizers … was called coatequil in Mexico and mita in Peru.”[18]  Pay for the work was mandated by ordinance but most observers agree that food and pay received were not what was ordered by the King.  This has also been described as the “obligatory personal loan” of labor” and paid or “unpaid work for the government for a set period of time.”[19]  One writer described the practice around 1800 or so, saying that “the injustice begins” with the gobernadorcillo who, needing 100 men requests 120; “the 20 pay in money for the work they should do,” and the gobernadorcillo pays off the alcalde mayor or his agents.  “Each cabeza de barangay does the same with those who in his charge, some 45 to 50 persons, and in this way public works that each indio ought to work on once during the assigned time requires that he work on it seven or eight times.”[20]

         Bandalas, the third part of Alonso Álvarez’s “tribute complex,” was the “obligatory sale of products to the government “ with amounts due assigned to the provinces.[21]  Hidalgo Nuchera describes this practice as a “double imposition, since it both compelled purchase of products from the Spanish as well as assigned a price for goods sold to the Spanish at lower than the market value.[22]  An account from 1701 describes the process and the fiddle:[23]

                     The works and preparations for the equipment [of ships] which are

made on his Majesty’s account often make necessary various repartimientos

and bandalas for the supplies of oil and rice, and other products, which the

provinces furnish; and it is the continual and well-founded complaint from

all of them that the amount paid for the said products is not according to

their just price and value, but much less, from which follow the most

serious wrongs to the poor.  Of this precedent many of the alcaldes-mayor

avail themselves for [their own] advancement, to judge by their unrighteous

profits, with lamentable injury to the poor, which is general and well known

in the provinces.

Almost sixty years later, thanks to a manuscript written by the Bishop of Nueva Cáceres, we see an additional twist to the gouge: “… obliging them to sell what they need for their children and families, sometimes in the name of the bandala, other times in the name of a sale mandated by the king.  And then in a short time, re-selling the items to the same Indios when there is a scarcity, but now at an exorbitant price.”[24]

Coercion is key: coerced sales or purchases through the bandalas or associated ploys; and with the polos, coerced sale of labor at rates lower that would exist in “a true labor market.”[25]   Payment in kind facilitated the capability for extortion by the governors since they could “impose the tribute demands in what type of items they wished, set the price of the item as they wish” while also “using with full freedom the labor of provincial families through the polos and personal services linked to the tribute payments.”[26]  Retana observes that “some governors learned how to use hundreds of free arms” for their own purposes.  “Naturally, once innoculated by the evil it spread to cabezas, gobernadorcillos, etc., resulting” in much wealth to quite a few individuals.[27]

While Filipinos in all provinces under Spanish rule were subject to unpaid labor and forced sale of goods, the severest impact tended to be greater in provinces closer to Manila and Cavite than in those farther away since forced labor to cut timber for use in constructing galleons in the shipyards at Cavite and the Spanish demand for goods was usually inflicted on Filipinos in the Manila region.[28]  Regulations from the King, the Council of the Indies, as well as Governors General in Manila repeatedly addressed the problem and outlined penalties for misbehavior.  The fact that the descriptions and concerns appear repeatedly in codes of conduct and royal pronouncements from the seventeenth well into the nineteenth centuries suggests that the problems and practices were endemic and pervasive.[29]  Indeed they started shortly after the Conquest, back in the sixteenth century.  For instance, a complaint to Bishop Salazar in June 1582 by the principales, or leading male citizens, of three municipalities around Manila denounced the governors for having taken goods for tribute assessed at a low prices, “severe and injust punishments ordered by these authorities, and the demand for tribute without taking into account those [on the tribute lists] who were dead or absent.”[30]  Once set, the pattterns continued.

         A new luster was given to the elephant’s tusks in 1751 when those running the Philippine colony developed a means to legally avoid and evade the explicit rule against trade by alcaldes mayores and corregidores.  On July 17, 1751, a royal cédula essentially permitted alcaldes mayores and corregidores to trade.  This new regulation was expressly in violation of the Laws of the Indies, “which, not being repealed, prohibited in general and in particular all bureaucrats with jurisdiction from engaging in any form of commercial or business activity.  But the violation was as openly recognized … [and in] consideration of this permission to break the law, therefore, the provincial bureaucrats were obliged to pay ‘fines’ to the royal exchequer, in amounts regulated according to the value of the commerce of the respective provinces.”[31]  Apparently there even was a Treasury category for these fines, with figures showing receipts in 1785-1787 totally 3,494 pesos, 5,193 pesos, and 3,415 pesos respectively.[32] 

         Eighteen years later the Audiencia stated the following, presumably with a straight face: “that the permission for the alcaldes mayores to engage in commerce does not in any way limit whatsoever the liberty that all the naturales of these Islands have enjoyed, inluding the commerce of somes provinces with others or the transport of their goods and other effects for the supply of this capital; and his Majesty has only suspended the probition for alcaldes mayors to engage in commerce that the royal ordinances have proclaimed as long as those alcaldes pay” the fine.[33] 

In short, the central government was selling what in fact turned out to be quasi-monopolistic access to trading rights.[34]   “Through this provision, corruption departed from being an exception to becoming the norm, a constituent component and fundamental to the institutions” of colonial rule and “without which economic activity would have difficulty developing.”[35]   To quote Fradera Barceló (156), “the ‘indulto de comercio’ clearly signaled the possibilities … and was a not so obscure indicator of the possibilites for personal enrichment” through the marketing of goods.  Since the fines were relatively low—ranging from 450 pesos for Zamboanga to 250 (Pangasinan and the Ilocos) to 200 Iiloilo) all the way down to 40 (Zambales) and 25 (Mariveles)[36]—once the precedent and practice was established, I would imagine that even more provincial governors would pay the fine for license to trade.  Once paid, the provincial governors presumably would have been even more active in trying to redress those fines along with their other expenses.  Perhaps as a consequence, along with the expanded world demand for Philippine products, “the second half of the eighteenth century was, with full certainty, the golden age for the activity of the provincial authorities.  …  The collection of tribute and access to new productive sectors were, definitely, inseparable realities of the universe created by the maneuvers of the Treasury.”[37]

         Even before the indulto de comercio, though, there were indications that alcaldes mayores had a hand in commercial matters.  In 1725 there was an exchange of letters between the Bishop of Nueva Cáceres and the Alcalde mayor of the Camarines, Don Pedro Simón de las Alas.[38]  The Bishop accused the governor of having bought all of the rice in Polangui, Oas, and Ligao at the government standard price[39] of 10 gantas[40] per real.  These three municipalities were “precisely those where rice was available in spite of drought and a plague of locusts” in that region.  The market price was 6 or 7 gantas per real.  The Bishop said the governor planned to sell the rice in Manila.  The governor said that he had only bought the rice so that the residents could pay their tribute obligation and that he had never forbidden anyone to sell on the open market.  While the governor denied the charges levied by Bishop Felipe de Molina, and we do not know if there were subsequent charges or a resolution of the matter, the Bishop’s accusations are relevant in general even if in doubt specifically. 

         A case from 1835 involved the corregidor or political/military governor of Capiz, Don Miguel Durán, who was charged among other things of having interfered with the free trade of rice; demanding canes and wood from various municipalities in the province without paying for them or only paying a fraction of what the market price would have been; and imposing taxes in rice and in coin without authorization.  He was found guilty, received a strong reprimand, which (we are told) was “not too common” [“no demasiado común”].[41]

         Another case involving a corregidor, this time one serving as the governor of Masbate and Ticao, took place in 1873.  The governor, Don Ignacio García Galián, was accused among other things of having bought cattle at less than the market price; negotiating either on his own account or through his wife to send cattle for sale to Manila; and of not having given the ration obligated to those doing their polo service.[42]  Sánchez Gómez does not tell us of the disposition of this particular case, but does indicate (p. 605) that the cases he presented show “the types of abuse committed generally by the governors … as they travelled along the road to personal enrichment.” 

The Residencia

         There was a mechanism for reining in and punishing provincial governors who abused their position.  The procedure employed was called the residencia, which “was the trial and audit of accounts of an official at the end of his term  ….”[43]  The purpose was clear, “to uphold the morale of colonial service by making officials answer for all their acts in a judicial examination held at the close of their terms”[44] and “to ascertain whether or not the official had faithfully executed his duties and it served to clear him if he were proved honest, giving him a clean certificate of recommendation” (124).  The author continues by saying that “If he were found guilty of official misconduct or dishonesty he was apprehended, degraded, and punished, according to his deserts.”

The author also observes “that the fear of the residencia was almost the sole incentive to righteous official conduct or efficient public service …” (122).  In practice, though, this “fear” seems in many cases not to have been sufficient for honesty.  Justice was often delayed or avoided.  Francisco Leandro de Viana wrote in 1766, “that the laws and royal decrees are not held in due reverence and respect; that they are transgressed with reckless readiness; that seldom is justice administered, on account of the intervention of influential persons; and that only where there is no advantage for self—as is the case in the affairs of poor people—are the laws observed.”  He continues by observing that the “spirit of greed is the sole ruler with absolute dominion.”[45]  From the work of Fradera Barceló we know that the alcaldes mayores and corregidores were “in general not alien from the colonial administration.  On the contrary, generally we are treating of persons linked to it, directly or through their relatives ….”[46]  While the residencias are a good source to see how alcaldes mayores acted, and can include “a mix of abuses of authority, economic extortion, and affronts and vexations of the indigenous principalía,”[47] my impression is that by and large the system of Spanish imperialism protected its own. 

Even when the residencia was used to identify and punish abuses of the governors, sentences could be appealed, modified, mollified, or reversed.  One case, for instance, focused on principal complaints against an alcalde mayor of Ilocos, who was accused of imposing shackles and inflicting lashes on some of them.[48]  This alcalde, Pedro Nevado, “had not insignificant connections and economic actvities,” including the use of three boats for “commerce between his province and Manila.”[49]  While found guilty by the Audiencia in Manila, he appealed to Madrid  in July 1776, and ultimately the case was archived without enforcing the punishment assigned by the Audiencia  in Manila.[50] 

         Toward the end of the eighteenth century occurred a case against the alcalde mayor of the province of Cebu, Don Martín de Flores.[51]  Among the accusations were demands that the cabezas de barangay deliver specified goods (cloth called siguey, cotton balls or yarn (madejas de algodón), and cacao) at mandated prices lower than what customarily the residents sold them for; and that a good friend of the alcalde tried to impress men for work in the mountain without paying them.  With dry wit, Alonso Álvarez comments that “the evidence given us from other residencias does not permit us to affirm that [these practices] constituted exactly an exception.”

A more extensive discussion and more examples can be found in the older study by Cunningham.  This case,[52]  from around 1780, involved the residencia of Francisco Fernández Zéndera, alcalde mayor and military captain of the province of Ilocos.  It lasted twelve years and involved both the Audiencia in Manila and the Council of the Indies in Madrid.  Fernández Zéndera had been alcalde for about three years when he was subject to a residencia.  The charges against him were

         First, Zéndera had compelled natives to work for him on his own estates,

building houses, granaries, fences, tilling the soil and planting crops, from

two hundred to three hundred men having worked for him continually,

without pay or food; second, the arbitrary methods of this alcalde mayor

left the natives without money with which to buy their food or to pay their

tribute; third, not only were the men forced to labor, but the women were

obliged to sew, spin and embroider without pay, and the product of their labor

was confiscated by the alcalde mayor.

Once plans for the residencia were announced (7 November 1782), eighty-eight charges were submitted, “most of which were variations of those mentioned above.”  For our purposes, the following are most relevant:

 Zéndera was charged with having suppressed all commerce except his own,

going so far as to arrest merchants of other provinces who came to Ilocos to

trade. This he had done to secure his own monopoly in commercial matters.

…  He was charged with having taken rice as tribute at a low price, turning

it over to the treasury officials at a higher rate, thereby making great profits

for himself.

“Zéndera was found guilty of almost every charge made against him.”   “The defendant was fined 8000 pesos and sentenced to deprivation of office for a period of eight years.”  After a second investigation, the Audiencia confirmed its findings “and the case was carried to the Council of the Indies on November 7, 1785.”  “The final judgment of the Council of the Indies was rendered March 23, 1794. The fine of 8000 pesos was reduced to 3000 pesos, and the portion of the sentence which had ordered a deprivation of office was remitted altogether.”  Over a decade of deliberation ended with the result of a small fine and reinstated eligibility for public office.

         In August 1799 the system of residencia and its application to alcaldes mayores was modified.  According to Cunningham (155-157), henceforth “investigations of corregidores, alcaldes mayores, and sub-delegate intendants” were to be made  only when charges were made against them.”  Cunningham observes, tongue firmly in his cheek: “otherwise it was assumed that their official conduct had been satisfactory, and accordingly no residencias were held.”  He concludes, “Although the reform of August 24, 1799, recognized the residencias of alcaldes mayores, tenientes, and corregidores, merely transferring jurisdiction over these to the audiencias, it would seem that this investigation retained less of its former severity from this time onwards. In fact, some authorities infer that the residencia was abolished after 1799. This was not the case, however, as the residencia was recognized by laws promulgated as lately as 1870.” 

Filipino Pueblo Officials

         Let us turn now from the realm of the Spanish and provincial governors to the Filipinos who held official titles in the municipalities in those provinces.  They were Janus-like individuals, looking to those they governed while keeping a face turned as well towards their superiors.  Not surprisingly, “the indigenous authorities benefitted from the carrying out of their duties,” “using their position for their personal enrichment.  But as well, on the other hand, they were obliged to fully satisfy the demands of the Spaniards, that we know centered on the tribute demands and the demands for manpower.”[53]

         Many or some of them also gamed the tribute system.  One source from the 1760s said that “It is generally the case that the heads of barangays keep back from the king, at a very low estimate, at least ten tributes each, on account of the dispersion of the houses of the Indians, which renders almost impossible any exactness in the tax-lists….”[54]  A contemporary scholar described the hiding of those who should pay tribute as an “endemic evil and greatly damaging” to the Treasury.[55]  A manuscript source from 1701 mentioned that cabezas habitually obliged their charges to pay tribute before the age mandated.  These minors then were also subject to  demands of labor and goods from the alcaldes mayores.  At this time at least, the Filipino officials leave office “with advantage and never with loss.”[56] 

Two priests described the common practices in the 1720s and 1730s, which included a general statement of “excesses and tampering in the collection of tribute and, more particularly, that “some principales make non-official Filipinos work in their homes or in their fields … year around, telling them it is to cover their tribute obligation, turning those so conscripted into slaves of their masters.”[57]  The priests continue by saying that the officials and principales use their extra wealth and position to buy cheap and sell dear as well to make loans at high interest rates—“e.g., loaning a cavan of rice at seeding time with the obligation to return two or three after harvest”—or making them “use their lands and even themselves as guarantees for loans.”  If they make loans in coin the interest charges are “very elevated, one real per month for each peso” (a peso had a value of eight reales). 

         There were also ways, the two priests tell us, for the gobernadorcillo and the cabezas de barangayes to profit from the forced labor (polo) and repartimiento aspects of the general tribute system, mainly by “reserving from personal service those who pay to escape it, then they would make the poorer work more, always unjustly.”   They also drafted individuals to cut timber as part of the polo obligation “but in some cases use the workers for private tasks.”  More generally, they worked to prevent non-official Filipinos from engaging in commerce, presumably to the benefit of themselves as well of course of the governors.[58]

         As Sánchez Gómez notes, “the picture painted by the two priests is scarcely favorable to the principales.”[59]  Indeed, a source from 31 December 1778 by a government official, Pedro Vértiz, confirms the bleakness of the situation for those at the mercy of corrupt municipal officials:[60] Sánchez Gómez reflects that “Vértiz called attention to the major abuses committed by the cabezas de barangay.  In the matter of tributes, given the dispersion of the population and the inaccuracy of the tribute lists, the cabezas would hide tribute payers and appropriate what was collected from them.  The major abuses took place in regard to the prestación personal, using those subject to polo for service to them, with fines and corporal punishments for those who were absent without permission.”  As Vértiz points out, the use of the polistas year around means that these Filipinos could not tend to their own fields, generating a “tyranical slavery, made more insufferable by cruel whippings with which they punish them, so that [finally], seeking to better their fortune, they flee with their families, desperate, going to the most hidden [parts] of the mountains where no one will meet them; or they go to the beaches with the risk of being kidnapped by Muslim pirates.”

Perhaps the worst form of polo was the requisition of labor to cut timber for construction of galleons and other ships, which constituted “an evil that is necessary and unavoidable, since on these depends the entire preservation of these islands; but this necessity is equaled by the destruction and the injuries which that work has caused in these provinces, in the diminution of their population and products.”[61]  This burden fell disproportionately on the provinces around Manila; and within that area fell heaviest on the poorest of the poor.  Those who could purchase exemptions from the alcaldes mayores did so, and some in trying to escape this hard and not infrequently fatal labor “pledge, or sell, or enslave themselves; and from this cause result very serious evils—thefts, withdrawing to the mountains to roam as vagrants, and other crimes.”[62]  Then the list of selectees is sent on to the gobernadorcillo and cabezas de barangay, who again receive payment for exclusion, ending up with few, whose number would again be trimmed by the “superintendent of the work.”  The consequence is that the few remaining have to make up for those culled out, so that they “are so overtaxed and harassed that they hardly have time to eat, and of sleep they will have some three hours, as a result of their labors on the account of his Majesty and outside his account.”[63]

And, yet, the Filipino officials were more vulnerable than the provincial governors, not so much in terms of judicial process against corruption but because they had to facilitate the governors’ graft while also producing the prescribed amount of tribute, laborers, and commandeered goods on a regular and scheduled basis.[64]  Governors had more leeway since their accounts were not due until the end of their terms and were often late, incomplete, or not submitted.[65]  If there were severe epidemics and the population numbers dropped, the cabezas were still responsible for those on the active lists, even if they had died.  If cabezas de barangay could not produce the requisite tribute payments required for the lists in use, they could be fined and jailed.  Here is a description from 1701 of how this might play out: [66]

“It arouses pity in the hardest hearts to see and know by experience that

nearly all the headmen [cabezas de barangay] enter office under

compulsion from the alcalde-mayor, and, finding themselves perplexed

to the utmost by the difficulties in rendering their accounts satisfactorily—

either by the duplicate names on the registration lists, or the absences

(which usually are many), or by the deaths  [of those registered]—on

account of the great poverty that is general in the villages these deficiencies

fall back on the headmen, who are compelled to pay them or be imprisoned. 

This measure of imprisonment is carried out with so great rigor that many

headmen are in prison, without any hope that they will be able to pay; and

there are even cases in which the headmen have been imprisoned for many

years for their indebtedness to the tributes in their charge, and, dying in

prison, their burial was delayed for several days in order that their relatives

might be able to find security for the dead man’s tribute and debt.”

Here is a case from five years later, from a single province: [67]

                 I learned that there were sixty-six cabezas [de barangay] in the

Camarines province in jail, [all because] … the Filipinos in this

province are very mobile.  Almost every year they change their

home from one municipality to another, both in this and surrounding

provinces as well as to pueblos as far away as Laguna de Bay,

Tondo or Bulacan... To collect the tribute from these is almost

impossible, and with others to collect it entails such expense that

it undoubtedly would cost more than the tribute itself.  And so it has

                     occurred that when the cabezas go to hand over the tribute … they go

                     without it and must provide it themselves, [from their own pocket].

There is some suggestion that due to the potential hardships and legal complications of the position some individuals in the nineteenth century began to refuse the position of cabeza de barangay.[68] 

         To conclude this overview, here is a fairly lengthy quotation from 1701 which puts all the pieces together, from the alcalde mayor through the Filipino pueblo officials to agents and high profile Filipinos, tribute payments and the polo and the repartimiento or bandala, showing the fiddles, disparity in power, and the ultimate vulnerability of the Filipinos as victims or even as fellow complicitors in the frauds.[69]  The quotation begins with observations on the alcaldes mayores, the goals of those who are corrupt, the actions of their pueblos’ official minions, and how they all manipulated the tribute system to their advantage:

                     It seems as if in most things the principal object of the alcaldes-mayor

in the provinces, and that in which they proceed with most assiduity—excepting

many who conduct themselves with entire integrity—reduces itself to a rigorous

and excessive collection of the tributes; and their other aim is the utmost attention

to their own personal advantage.  These two aims are most injurious and prejudicial

to the public welfare and to the poor people of the said provinces—because, when

there is no produce [with which to pay the tributes] the alcaldes-mayor either

compel the headmen to search for it, and even to bind themselves to do this,

or regularly make the headmen responsible for amounts which they not only

will not but cannot collect.  Another reason is, that the said headmen, with

cruel injustice, compel Indians to pay tribute before the age which his Majesty

commands and fixes, and this they do under the compulsion of the alcaldes-mayor; likewise, the said headmen exact more than the amount of their obligations for the

conveyance of the tributes. 

Next the quotation introduces the image of the hydra—perhaps better than mine of the elephant—and briefly refers to the polos:

In the other aim of the said alcaldes-mayor (that is, their own private advantage)

is seen a monstrous hydra with many heads of injustice and inqiuity.  One of these

is their compelling the Indians to labor in construction and other works which do

not belong to his Majesty’s service, although even for those [for the crown] the

royal law spares and exempts them [from service] during the times when they sow

and harvest their crops. 

Then this 1701 document discusses the bandala or forced delivery of crops and other goods:

         The alcaldes also appoint certain Indians who are intimate with them, and who

         have influence among the other natives, to whom the latter deliver the

         commodities which they carry to the provinces; and these Indian agents, fixing

         the prices of goods at their own pleasure, compel the said Indian chiefs to

         supply them, either by sale or in exchange for other wares.  From this results a

         most flagrant inequality in the prices and the exchanges of goods; and the loss

         in all these dealings always falls on the mass of the poor people, because the

         alcalde-mayor and the said petty chiefs or influential Indians always conclude

         their bargains with profit, and never with loss. 

And the quotation concludes with the recognition that the crooked alcaldes have more power than the crooked Filipino officials, and if there is a problem with profit for the former the latter must pay:

         Some alcaldes-mayor have gone to such an extreme of violence that, in case

the said petty chiefs are unable to dispose of the goods which are thus committed

to them, the alcalde compels them to assume the obligation, and to bind

themselves to take the goods.  Thus some of the Indians are constantly bringing

upon others irreparable consequences and losses that are worthy of redress—all

springing from the first injustice of compelling those to buy who neither possess

nor can take charge of such commodities. 

Filipino Resistance to Tribute

What about other Filipinos, those who were not officials, also residing in the provinces?  Here, for instance, is Tomas Comyn writing around 1820 describing these very individuals and families: [70]

… and above all, the extreme repugnance that the naturales show toward

satisfying the tribute, a circumstance that leads them to employ infinite

ruses to evade the vigilance of the collectors ….

These Filipinos might be depicted as victims, with payoffs in coin, goods, and personal labor to Filipino officials and Spanish authorities.  The picture I perceive, though, is rather different.  I see a variety of essayed methods to avoid conflict and compliance when their priorities are different than those attempting to dragoon them into obedience.  Payoffs or participation as aides to cabezas de barangay and to gobernadorcillos might be creative ways as well to avoid the worst aspects of tribute, polo, and bandalas.  We see the mixture of methods in a view from the Bishop of Nueva Cáceres, dated the 28th of April 1783:[71]

The multitude of officials, it is obvious, are without any utility whatsoever

…  They spend the year maintaining their position and work by distributing

among themselves those who must pay tribute.  These then must work the

lands of the pueblo officials so that those officials can spend the work with

more decency and display.  .. this is a hidden government that, while tyrannical,

all observe, some from fear and others hopeful that tomorrow they will do the

same to others.  … it is partly from this that [some run off], hoping to hide

themselves or even to found visitas so that they themselves can be officials.

Even the frequent accusation in the documents of Filipino “laziness” might be stood on its head: why show initiative or extra effort if a Spaniard or local potentate might scuttle or appropriate your efforts?  Gordon Thomasson suggests that “As the peoples of the Philippines came to understand the Spanish colonial system and their place in it, their productivity dropped.  …the conquered have no interest in enriching others.”[72]  As a writer in 1767 noted:[73]

         When the Indian sees that he is powerless to do business even with what is

his own, he weakens greatly, does not try to progress nor to increase his farm

products or commercial articles; because if he does have any, and in order to

profit and gain by them, he wants to take them to Manila, he immediately

loses the friendship of the alcalde  … And the Indian … will let everything

that he owns be lost rather than fall from the good graces of the alcaldes mayores.

And, a bit later: “From this stem the ruined condition of commerce in these islands; the fact that the Indians have no desire to improve the fruits of the soil; the fact that they do not travel more frequently to Manila and other points with the products peculiar to their own land; and the fact that they are not more active in seeking and getting gold, wax, oil and many other exquisite products of those isles.”

         Sometimes, of course, we get hints  that some, perhaps many, of the non-official Filipinos in the provinces were actively responding to the impositions and creatively learning to play the system to their advantage, not to the advantage of the Filipino and Spanish officials.  One example dates from the late eighteenth century and attempts to reform the tribute system.  At one point the plan was to have the cabezas de barangay issue a certificate to each ostensible tribute payer in his charge.  At Easter, when Filipinos were required to attend church and services as well as confess, they were to present the certificate, have their name recorded on the roster (the padrón), and thus be subject to the tribute, the polo, and the bandala.  Filipinos quickly figured out that if they did not show up for the Easter confession and services their names would not be entered on the padrón and they could then avoid being subject to tribute demands for that year.  As a Franciscan remarked in 1774,[74] the previous three years had seen a “very notable” decrease in those coming to Mass and making their confession,

         with detriment to their recognition of vasallage to our sovereign through the

annual tribute, that they ought to pay to the cavezas de barangay as

representatives of the king.  The priests must certify … the tributes who are

administered in the pueblos, which is done through the padrones that are

made up based on certificates that they carry from their cavezas at the time

of confession.  If they do not confess, their names are not registered in the

padrón.  …  We know the names who should have confessed because of

the previous year’s padrón. 

When the priest asked the cabezas de barangay about these individuals, he was given no concrete reason for the name’s absence from the current list, nor was there certification of their having died or having registered in some other municipal district.

Stratagems such as missing annual confession, payoffs to local officials, collaboration, and feigning incompetence and laziness are in a sense strategic responses to a corrupt and oppressive system that also allowed some Filipinos to game the system on their terms and in their turn.  Flight and mobility are indicators that are more noticeable and sometimes the linkage is expressly noted.  For instance, according to Huerta, a ranchería established by the Franciscans in the municipality of Limotan in 1670, took form and “prospered until the year of 1700” when the government tried to obligate its residents to pay tribute.  At that point, they all fled to the hills, and the mission was entirely lost.[75] 

Indeed, mobility of the Filipino was often remarked upon, leading to the difficulties cabezas de barangay had in collecting the tribute and bandala and finding enough workers for the polo.  Since mobility was legal,[76] the Spanish tried to lay out rules and procedures to adjust to the Filipino mode while still collecting taxes and keeping track of the population.  While some registered when they resided in a different pueblo from the one they paid tribute in, paying a sum as vagabundos (see Appendix Two, below, for more on this category), many ignored and evaded such regulations.  One Spaniard complained in 1843 about the “informality with which the Indios move from one pueblo to another, and even from one province to another, without notice to the gobernadorcillo nor to the alcalde mayor….”[77]  We also have the words of a Franciscan writing in 1726 that “we see Indios who within the space of a year usually have two or three pueblos of residence.”[78]  While we cannot know for sure what motivated this mobility, presumably it was based on perceptions of self-interest and advantage.  It is not a great stretch to liken it to motives of self-interest and advantage of the alcaldes mayores and Filipino pueblo officials.  From the outside it appears that in effect mobile lowlanders were gaming the system, playing the rules for personal motives as effectively as many provincial governors and municipal officials seem to have done.  (Parenthetically we might also say that it was a rather neat way to get the cabezas de barangay in trouble)

What about dispersion?  It is apparent that one of the more striking conflicts between Spaniard and Filipino centered on Spanish attempts to compel or attract Filipinos to live “under the bells,” in a nucleated settlement near the church.  The Spanish view was that a human was not only a rational animal but also “a social, political or civil one.”  Only barbarians could live “without an organized community, without towns and society.”[79]  Hence the Spanish efforts to congregate the Filipinos in and around the church, in the center of the municipality, the población.  Spiritual indoctrination and administrative controls by the Spanish and their Filipino agents would thus be facilitated.  The Spanish efforts over a third of a millennium in the Islands pretty much failed.  Consequently there were a significant number of settlements and populations outside of the poblaciones.  These sites were known as visitas, barrios, and sitios.  One of the consequences is the awkward English translations of the resultant pueblo--the municipality or municipal region or municipal district. 

Filipinos from 1565 to 1898 showed remarkable tenacity and success in refusing to move from their dispersed settlements to the Spanish-mandated, nucleated ones.  In 1768, two hundred years after Spanish conquest, Anda y Salazar observed that “… the [Indians] are today found … as scattered as they were in the time of their paganism.  … as they live far away and in the recesses of the mountains, it is impossible for the alcalde to enumerate them for the payment of their tribute, and he is compelled to guide himself by the list or register which the father gives him.  …”[80]  Seven years later, in 1775, a Franciscan, writing about Filipinos in Samar, commented

         The mode of living of these Bisayans … appears to oppose all that is

rational justice.  They make the greatest efforts to live like savages in

the mountains, as far as possible from the church, priests, governors,

and their own gobernadorcillos so as to live in freedom without God

and without obedience to the King….[81]

In Samar as late as the 1890s, over three hundred years after the Iberian conquest of the Islands, “only about one-half of the population [of Samar] lived in the poblaciones while about eight percent lived as many as twelve or miles away.” Indeed, a bit more than 22% lived six or more miles away from the población.[82]  Of the 38 pueblos on Samar about 1890, their poblaciones were ringed by 144 visitas, 285 barrios, and 213 rancherías (Samar, 226-227). 

         Certainly indicative of the Spanish problem are a pair of quotations.  Here is the Governor General writing to a Franciscan writing around 1805 about the pueblo of Pandi:[83]

                     Insofar as within the area of the pueblo there are residents of other

pueblos living for much of the year in houses and with fields and garden …

with no subjection to civil authority nor to spiritual; and insofar as many

[others] live far away from settled areas and encourage and commit

infamous acts while hidden [by] tribute-payers who act as go-betweens

with these evil folk, against [the interests of] both majesties, for these

reasons … it is hereby ordered that you subjugate and enter these people

on the padrón. 

And here is another Spanish official writing over one hundred years earlier, but now about Los Baños, with a viewpoint clearly informed by the view of rational living mentioned previously as well as a perspective focused exclusively on Spanish civil and ecclesiastical goals:[84]

         … this pueblo has no [or very few] … houses [in the población] because

         the people continue to live [near their] fields, [a practice] which is gravely

         prejudicial to the common spiritual and civil good.  Because of this they

         miss many days of fiesta, [fail] to attend Mass and [expound] the Doctrina

         Christiana … their children do not attend school, and they have tumbled

[into a life] without polity [and] without rational practice.  …  Those that

live [near] the fields die without the sacraments, having passed their lives

in continuous drunkenness, menaces, and other vices that they [can indulge

in] while far away from the parish priest …  Moreover many groups of

vagabonds live in the pueblos who are [in fact] registered in other pueblos

… [a practice] which causes harm to all in the province.  ….

To avoid residence in the población meant that one lost out on easy and regular attendance at religious observances, fiestas, schooling for your children, commerce, and religious rites of passage.  Residence away from the municipal center put one closer to fishing areas or fields and, according to many Spanish observers, made one susceptible to “continuous drunkenness,” gambling, and alternative religious practices.  One could also “escape admonitory pressure as well as reprimands and punishments for unorthodox behavior or failure to comply with the administrative demands of the State.”  “Some Filipinos (perhaps most) during the Spanish colonial period chose not to establish their homes in or near the población.”[85] 

If we can trust the figures, the pattern for ten municipalities around 1900, a handful of years after the close of the Spanish imperial period in the Islands and the beginning of United States’ Asian colonial rule, falls strikingly on the side of Filipino successful resistance to Spanish attempts to group them near the churches and government buildings of the población:[86]

Province[87]    Number of     Total         Population   Number       Population of

                     Municipalities Municipal   of           of Barrios    Municipality Resident

                                             Population   Población   etc.              in the Población

Albay            27        239,434  67,704    302                     28.28%

Ambos

Camarines               39    233,472      67,335    493                     28.84%

Antique                   20    131,245      32,514    338                     24.77%

Bataan                     12          45,166  29,798      44                     65.97%

Batangas                 22    257,715      45,113    569                     17.50%

Bohol                      35        269,223  28,039    449                     10.41%

Bulacan                   25    223,327      33,867    328                     15.16%

Capiz                       34        225,092  48,079    501                     21.36%

The percentages of those choosing not to live in the población are striking.  Agricultural and fishing needs as well as topography undoubtredly played a role as well.  Eight of the nine show a clear preponderance of Filipinos who chose to live outside of the población.  Even the exception of Bataan shows that a third of the pueblo populations lived outside of the municipal nucleii.  There were almost certainly a variety of reasons for this pattern.  To deny that would be absurd.  I would suggest, though, that to deny a role for Filipino resistance to Spanish efforts to move them to the municipal centers would also seem implausible.

While the motives of those who chose not to live in the población are closed to us, just as the reasons why some Filipinos did not sign in to the tribute system or paid their tribute obligations are unclear, it seems reasonable to suggest that in effect many lowlanders were gaming the system, playing the rules for personal motives as effectively as many provincial governors and municipal officials seem to have done. 

Conclusion

                                 Since it is a just and reasonable thing that the Indians who may

                     be pacified and reduced to our obedience and vassalage should serve

and render tribute in recognition of our sovereignty and should give

such service as our subjects and vassals owe.  And as, moreover, they

have established among themselves the custom of paying tribute to their

rulers and superiors, we command that they be persuaded to aid us with

tribute in such moderate amounts of the fruits of the earth as may from

time to time be required by law.[88]

         The quotation above might be rephrased into a more direct statement of power and submission:  since we’ve conquered you and since you already pay taxes to your former rulers, we demand that you be convinced to show your submission to imperial Spain by paying tribute “from time to time.”  Once the system was set up, the phrase “from time to time” in practice meant yearly.  What is not said here but which may reasonably be construed as implicit is: since we have conquered you, and since wealth and personnel from other Spanish colonies and Spain are now being expended in the Philippines, you must pony up to help pay the deficit.  One rather loses the nuances and the use of the royal We in the paraphrase. 

         There is certainly no nuance in describing the reality of Spanish imperial governance for many Filipinos.  Colonial rule in the Philippines seems for many, probably most, of those ruled to have meant forced labor, second class status under the Spanish, an imposed orthodoxy in religious belief and practice, unequal opportunities, and rule after rule to be enforced by Spanish and Filipino officials running the political and ecclesiastical bureaucracies.

         J. S. Furnivall wrote many years ago:  “although colonial relations arise out of the search for material advantage, men like to justify their activities on moral grounds and colour them with the warm glow of humanitarianism.”[89]  My comments are not meant to be reductionist or simplistic in looking at human behavior.  My argument in this essay is that all those involved in the Spanish tribute system may or may not have acknowledged the formal laws, procedures, and principles while living their lives and pursuing their aspirations.  My perception is that most of the players acted primarily for their own goals even if formally charged with enforcement of or submission to the system. 

It is a well-known maxim in historical work that to understand a situation one needs to look behind the regulations and bureaucratic procedures and see how in fact the system functioned.  It is not enough, I would argue, merely to play with translation and paraphrase, while exploring the usages and meanings of words employed in the documents.  To understand the tribute system in the Spanish Philippines, my view is that we need to look at what occurred on the ground rather than simply accept or parse what was prescribed and proscribed in the regulations.  Returning to Furnivall (p. 8), “it is from the results of colonial policy rather than from statements of its objects that its [colonial policy’s] true character may be ascertained.  In the study of colonial affairs statements of policy need scrutiny in the light of practice.”

The most important conclusion of this essay is not the official corruption but the ubiquity of Filipino agency.[90]  Gobernadorcillos and cabezas de barangay worked the system, presumably some with honesty and some without.  Some did well and prospered, some did not and ended up in jail.  Perhaps most got by without significant prosperity or notable punishment.  All were part of a colonial system and tried to figure out to make it work for themselves and for others.  Those  Filipinos who were not officials also demonstrated agency, as entrepreneurs, tribute-payers or tribute–evaders, working with or avoiding officials; and through flight and making their way while separated from their natal home and perhaps from friends and relatives.  This study of gaming the system ultimately attempts to underscore the canny adaptability and resilience of Filipinos under Spanish imperial rule.

Appendix One: A More Technical Sketch of Major Aspects of the Tribute System

The tributo was assessed for married couples.  Those who were not married had different rates--half tributos collected for unmarried males living with parents and over 20 (later over 18); and unmarried females living with parents and over 25 (later over 20).  If the young people were emancipated and over 16, they were subject individually to a half tributo payment as well.  “Legazpi in 1569 set the rate at 8 reales of silver per family.  The rate was increased to 10 reales in 1590, by Governor General Gómez Dasmariñas,” in kind or in coin.  After 1697 the rate was increased again, this time by 3 more reales, to cover the “expenses of the three major religious festivals, Corpus Christi, the patron of the pueblo, and Holy Week.”[91]  In 1852 the 14 reales charged for a tribute payment (husband and wife), with the 3 reales charged for the religious festivals (sanctorum), went to 16 reales, where it stayed until the system was changed to that of cédulas in 1884 (Sánchez Gomez, Las Principalías, 212).  Chinese mestizos and Chinese paid different rates. 

A circular of 20 September 1851 set forth the sums in effect beginning in 1852:[92]

   In all provinces except in Mindanao, the tribute for a married couple = 12 reales

   Everywhere continues the Zamboanga charge =                                        ½ real

   Vintas, “paid annually in grain by the inhabitants of Bulacan and

                           Pampanga,”                                                             cancelled

   Unmarried males of 18 and over and unmarried women 20 and over,  6 reales

   Emancipated males and females of 16 and over, begin tribute pay,          6 reales

   Sanctorum, Pangasinan also henceforth has to pay this standard rate   3 reales

   Cajas de Comunidad—Pangasinan and la Union henceforth has to pay

                           the standard rate of one real per tribute

Again, Chinese and Chinese mestizos paid different rates.  A percentage of collections went to the local official and the alcaldes mayores—after 1852, cabezas de barangay got 5% of collected tributos, gobernadorcillos received 1.5%, and alcaldes garnered 2%.[93] 

Almost from the start, from its infancy, there were attempts to get the beast to perform

better for the rulers of the colony.  By imposing tribute in kind, forced delivery of crops, and forced labor, the Spanish were able to compel Filipinos to increase their efforts to support the invasive, alien conquerors.  From the beginning quantities and values were manipulated to favor the new rulers.[94]  Until 1691, through the late childhood of the elephant, agents of the Treasury went to the provinces “to deliver the receipts” for the payments to be received; after 1691, the beginning of adolescence for the pachyderm, this task was “passed on to the alcaldes mayores.”  By the end of the seventeenth century, it was part of the job of the parish priests to make up the list of tribute payers. These rosters of tribute payers were made “every four or five years,” a process that was not flexible in the face of population changes due to epidemics, flight, and so forth.[95]  The fluctuations in population size “were significant.”[96]  By the late eighteenth century, full adulthood, the system was set, with the parish priests working with the local officials to make up the padrón or tribute list annually and make the collections.[97] 

         In 1837 Alcaldes mayores were required to have a certaion level of education to qualify for office.  Also in 1837, some provinces were reserved only for military appointees.  And on the 23rd of September of 1844, early old age for the elephant, commerce by alcaldes mayores, their families, and their servants was prohibited.[98]  Changes were instituted, reforms were proposed—particularly in the nineteenth century[99]--and on the 7th of December 1883, effective in 1884, the tribute system was effectively killed off in favor of an identity card (cédula) system.[100]  References to the bandala in the government ordinances died out from about 1815 onwards, perhaps because the galleon trade ended in 1815 and commercial trade became more significant in the provinces and was no longer dominated by the provincial governors.[101]   The polo was under discussion with various changes to length of service and reduction of fee to buy out of the obligation from 1827 to the 1860s or so.[102]  Earlier the length of service officially was 40 days; after 1884 it was reduced and set at 15 days of work.[103] 

Appendix Two: Vagabonds

Dispersion was so commonplace that it hardly elicited surprise when around 1800 Martínez de Zúñiga described a settlement in Batangas made up of “six, eight or more houses.  One of the residents, perhaps due to his age or his nobility or his beneficence towards his neighbors, is obeyed by all” and with the respect they give him “preserves harmony in the neighborhood.”  The alcalde mayor does not bother them since they pay the tribute.  They do personal service for the gobernadorcillo, each one for a week at a time, and if they have arguments they are arbitrated and punished by the gobernadorcillo, “in accordance with their customs and with the participation of two old men as consultants …”[104]

Dispersion and mobility were so common in the Islands under Spanish rule that the colonizers had a variety of terms for those Filipinos who practiced them, calling them vagabonds (vagabundos) or highlanders (monteses) for instance.  The problem addressed in this Appendix is that the term vagabundo would seem to simply mean “people who live without making their tribute to the king.”[105] As such it can be confused by those who have fled to the hills (remontados) or “wild” groups living away from settled communities (cimarrones).  For instance, a writer about 1803 or so described folks living in the mountains between the provinces of Cavite and Batangas as “descendents of vagamundos who had taken refuge in the mountains.”[106]  I also was confused about the term, mistakenly using it in the same context as those who had fled and lived outside of Spanish control in the hills.[107] 

Subsequently I learned that as used administratively, the vagabundos were not the same as remontados, cimarrones, infieles, or monteses, to use the common terms for highlanders and for those who had fled into the hills and set up their own communities.  Rather, it appears to be a Treasury category for collections made from Filipinos who are tribute-payers in one pueblo but who are resident in another.[108]  They are considered to be without “fixed residence”[109] but sufficiently susceptible to the collection of fees: “…the Division of Vagabonds (that is made up of the tributantes who do not have fixed residence).” 

         It is an unfortunate cognate, but there does not seem to be a concise equivalent.  Blair and Robertson used the term “strolling Indians”:  “It was also set forth that, after the budget for the provinces was drawn up, and the number of tributes in them realized, it was resolved in a conference of the royal treasury officials to abolish the register of strolling Indians [my emphasis], reducing them to a poll-list like the rest of the tribute-payers.”[110]  While the term catches ones attention when first seen in print, it does not speak to what I have posited as the resident but not enrolled-in-the-padrón nature of the vagabundo.  Vagabonds in the common sense would not pay a residence tax, but it appears the vagabundos did.[111]

Appendix Three: The Question of Economic Health of the Islands before 1800,

and an Anomaly—How much Coin was Collected in the Provinces from the Tribute?

         The amounts collected for tribute in the provinces could be significant.  For instance, in 1739, 138,609 pesos were collected in the provinces.[112]  Of these 93,822 pesos, about 68%, was spent in the provinces.  By 1794 the amount collected for tribute in the provinces amounted to 327,758 pesos in coin and in kind, with 138,858 pesos (about 55%) spent there and the rest (186,899 pesos) sent to the Treasury in Manila.[113]  Alonso Álvarez says convincingly that until the tobacco monopoly was instituted at the end of the eighteenth century, the tribute system was the most significant item in the colonial economy, a weight that “fell directly on the rural economy.  Without any vestige of doubt, from the perspective of the Treasury, it was the indigenous  peasants who contributed most to sustain Spanish rule in Asia.”[114]  He continues by observing that heretofore this fact has been obscured by the “mirage of the fiscal aid from New Spain (the situado) and obstinancy in maintaining this fiction.”[115]

“From the beginning of the seventeenth century, especially when the situados from Mexico began to increase to finance the wars with Holland in the Pacific, the management of tribute was transferred to the provincial accounts, administered by the alcaldes mayores and the corregidores.”  These sums were used to finance ecclesiastical expenses, administrative expenses (including transportation of tribute payments in kind), and so forth.[116]   These amounts and accounts do not appear in the eighteenth century Manila Treasury accounts—and, as Alonso Álvarez effectively argues, those in the past who relied only on the Manila accounts effectively shortchanged the size and health of the Philippine colonial economy (103-105).  “This signifies that the tribute constituted, during a large portion of the colonial period, the tax of greatest weight for the economy of the Islands, a reality that has passed unperceived by [previous] investigators since its figures were not registered” in the Manila Treasury but rather in the provinces.[117]  From the 1770s, tribute amounts from the provinces were entered in the Manila Treasury accounts.[118]

Josep M. Fradera Barceló has worked up the tribute sums registered in the treasury from 1789 to 1831, with some gaps.  The figures vary considerably, with the low figure in 1801 (122,093) and the high in 1829 (362,771 pesos).[119]  Even the low figure is not insignificant, and tribute would be second only to the tobacco monopoly’s revenues during this period.  For instance, in 1809, the tobacco monopoly brought in 506,754 pesos to the Manila Treasury, almost 28% of total returns; the “Tributo indígena” produced 364,474 pesos, a shade more than 20% of all income.[120]  If we just look at Albay’s finances in 1853, we are told out of a total income of 83,487 pesos, the tributo de naturales amounted to 70,904 pesos.  Total expenses for the province amounted to 83,347 pesos, almost half of which (49,118 pesos) were in fact sent to the Treasury in Manila.[121] 

In 1697, about 101,000 pesos were collected from tribute payments, almost 76% in coin and about 24% in kind.  “This permits us to deduce, in principle, the existence of an elevated level of monetization of the economy, while in this sense one should not be too optimistic.”[122]  Alonso Álvarez continues by arguing that most payments in kind were in rice, both palay (unhusked) and arroz (husked); although Tayabas had moved to coconut oil and pitch and the Calamianes focused more on wax (97).  Cavite, due to the salaries of the work force, paid its tribute obligations “always in metal.”  Ilocos was also known for its cotton blankets and other provinces also produced a wide range of woven items.  Also submitted were products such as gold dust, wax, coconut oil, vinager, and pitch (98). 

What seems anomalous, and what Alonso Álvarez seems to suspect is the dominant role of coin in the percentage of tribute payments registered in 1697.  By 1739, of the 138,609 pesos of tribute collected in the province, 97.3% was paid in coin.[123]  Is this possible?  We have multiple references to payments in kind and yet by the late 1730s, over 97% appears in the Manila Treasury as coin.  Again, how is this possible?  Chances are that it is not possible that that much coin was collected as tribute in the provinces and such a low percentage of tribute came from payments in kind.  Thanks to work by Dery, we have a remarkable survey of tribute payments in provinces in 1742:[124]

Tondo—seven pueblos paid in coin (reales) and 17 pueblos paid in palay

Bulacan—six pueblos paid in coin, seven municipalitiess paid in palay

Pampanga—eleven pueblos paid in coin, twenty-two in palay

Laguna—four pueblos paid in coin, twenty-three in palay

Balayan—one pueblo paid in coin, seven paid in palay

Cavite—four pueblos paid in coin, two pueblos paid in palay

Mariveles—three pueblos paid in coin, one pueblo paid in palay

Mindoro—three pueblos paid in palay and six pueblos paid in reales “ and

other products         not in palay” (48).

Ylocos—sixteen pueblos paid in palay while “Bangui and the rest of the Ilocos towns

paid their tribute entirely in reales” (48).

         Pangasinan—six pueblos pueblos paid in coin, fifteen pueblos paid in palay

         Cagayan—ten pueblos paid in coin, 23 pueblos paid in kind.  “The rest of Cagayan’s

                     towns paid twenty gantas of rice and one and one half gantas of coconut oil

                     valued at two reales” (48).

         Camarines—five pueblos paid in coin, nineteen pueblos paid in palay

         Tayabas—ten pueblos paid in palay or in coconut oil.  “The rest of the Tayabas

                     towns paid fifty-five gantas of palay at four reales but later, the inhabitants

                     were allowed to pay their tributes entirely in reales” (49).

         Albay—five pueblos paid in palay, four municipalites paid in abaca textiles, and two

                     pueblos paid in brea [pitch] and petates.

         Cebu--five pueblos paid in reales, two municipalities paid in paly, fourteen pueblos

                     paid in lompotes while “others paid in pieces of cotton cloth at one real a pair,

                     cacao at two reales a ganta” (49).

         Leyte/Samar—twenty-eight pueblos paid in palay or in medriñaqus or chinanta of

                     abaca or a chinanta of drived meat.  Two, Guiuan and Catbalogan) paid in

                     reales.

         Oton—one pueblo paid in reales and other items, sixteen municipalies paid in palay

         Panay—one pueblo paid in reales and other products while eight paid in palay

         Caraga—two pueblos paid in palay, one municipality paid in gold dust

         Calamianes—two pueblos paid in palay, two municipalities paid in dried meat

My hunch is that we have assumed mistakenly that silver deposited in the Manila Treasury was silver collected in the provinces. 

         This possibility brings us back to the alcalde mayor and their ability to play the system.  We have a statement of how alcaldes mayores might have been able to game the process regarding shipments of tributes made in kind—with a nice twist regarding costs for transport.  In a 1767 manuscript published by Carlos Quirino, we read the following revealing account:[125]

                 Another greater harm then this they do the King which is to advise

Manila that they are sending such and such articles for H.M. to the account

of tributes in a sampan under such and such a captain.  …  The object is that

if the boat is lost or is captured by the Moros, he may be given credit for said

products … but in case the boat reaches the port, the captain is prepared with

a letter  … in which he says that for fear of the Moros he is not sending the

goods which he had announced and that at another time he will send them ….

Adopting the mind set of a corrupt governor wanting to maximize illicit profits, one could sell the goods acquired (which of course were accumulated at low prices and often with fraudulent methods), and take part of the proceeds (most of it straight profit) to make the required tribute payment in silver as if the silver had been collected in the provinces.  This is speculative, of course, but given the unliklihood that such larger percentages of the tributes registered in Manila were in fact made in silver in the provinces at this time, it is at least a possible method to explain the anomaly.

Selected Bibliography

Alonso Alvarez, Luis

         “Los señores del Barangay.  La principalía indígena en las Islas Filipinas, 1565-1789: Viejas evidencias y nuevas hipótesis.”  In Margarita Menegus Bornemann and Rodolfo Aguirre Salvador, eds., El cacicazgo en Nueva España y Filipinas (Mexico: Centro de Estudios sobre la Universidad, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2005), 355-406.

Alonso Álvarez, Luis

         “El tributo indígena en la consolidación de la Hacienda filipina, 1698-1800.”  Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas/Anuario de Historia de America Latina, 41 (2004), 91-116. 

BRPI

Blair, Emma H.; and James Alexander Robertson, eds. and trans.

The Philippine Islands 1493-1898.  Cleveland, Ohio: The Arthur H. Clark Co.,

1903-1909. 55v.

Cabrero, Leoncio, ed.

         España y el Pacífico Legazpi.  Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, S. A., 2004.  2v.

Comyn, Tomas de

         Las Islas Filipinas. Progresos en 70 Años. Estado a principios de este siglo, según Don Tomás de Comyn, y en 1878, según el Editor de la Revista de Filipinas.  Manila: La Oceania Española, 1878.

Corpuz, Onofre D.

         The Bureaucracy in the Philippines.  Manila: Institute of Public Administration (Studies in Public Administration, no. 4), University of the Philippines, 1957. 

Corpuz, O. D.

         An Economic History of the Philippines.  Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1997. 

Cosano Moyano, José

         Filipinas y Su Real Hacienda (1750-1800).  Córdoba: Publicaciones del Monte de Piedad y Caja de Ahorros de Córdoba, 1986. 

Fradera Barceló, Josep M.

         Filipinas, La Colonia más Peculiar. La Hacienda pública en la definición de la política colonial, 1762-1868.  Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1999. 

Furlong, Matthew J.

         Peasants, Servants, and Sojourners: Itinerant Asians in Colonial New Spain, 1571-1720.  Ph.D. dissertation, History, University of Arizona, 2114.

Hidalgo Nuchera, Patricio

         Encomienda, Tributo y Trabajo en Filipinas (1570-1608).  Madrid: Universidad

Autónomo de Madrid,  Ediciones Polifemo, 1995.  

Hidalgo Nuchera, Patricio

         La Recta Administración.  Primeros Tiempos de la Colonización Hispana en Filipinas: La Situación de la Población Nativa.  Madrid: Ediciones Polifemo, 2001.  

Martínez de Zúñiga, Joaquín , O.S.A.

Estadismo de las Islas Filipinas ó Mis viajes por este país.  Ed. Wenceslao Emilio Retana y Gamboa, who estimates that it was written sometime between 1803 and 1805.  Madrid: Imp. De la Viuda de M. Minuesa de los Ríos, 1893.  2v.                   http://books.google.com/books

Plehn, Carl C.

         “Taxation in the Philippines,” Journal of History, 10: 2 (June 1962), 135-92; which was reprinted from its 1901 publication in the Political Science Quarterly, 16: 4 (1901), 680-711; and 17: 1 (1901), 125-148.  This article also appears in Phillipine Social Review, 13: 1 (February 1941), 79-117.

Sánchez Gómez, Luis Ángel

         Las Principalías Indígenas y la Administración Española en Filipinas.   Ph.D. dissertation, Facultad de Geografia e Historia, Departamento de Prehistoria y Etnologia.  Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1991. 

[1] Corpuz, An Economic History of the Philippines, 32.  There is a summary per province of goods used for tribute payments between 1750 and 1775 in Cosano Moyano, Filipinas y Su Real Hacienda (1750-1800), 501-504.  Cosano Moyano also provides an extended discussion of the tribute system itself on pp. 473-518, though he observes that there are difficulties in finding comprehensive and full statements of tribute information in the second half of the eighteenth century (see his comments on pp. 169-174, 479-480, and 509-513).  Also see Luis Alonso Álvarez, “Repartimientos y Economía en las Islas Filipinas bajo Dominio Español, 1565-1815.”  In Margarita Menegus Borneman, ed., El Repartimiento Forzoso de Mercancias en México, Perú y Filipinas, siglos XVI-XVIII (Mexico: Instituto Mora/UNAM, 1999), 170-215; here, 205-206.

[2] I use the term Filipino to mean any non-Spaniard born in the Islands and living in the provinces.  The usage is anachronistic but convenient.  It does not mean to imply a sense of nationality.

[3] “Ynforme estendido de orden de S.M. por el Sr. D. Manuel Bernaldez y Pizarro, Oidor de Manila, con fecha 26 de abril de 1827, proponiendo cuanto cree conducente al bien y prosperidad de dichas yslas,” 131ff.—here f. 56-56v and f. 42, Bniblioteca Nacional (Madrid), Ms. 20325.  Cited in Sánchez Gómez, Las Principalías Indígenas y la Administración Española en Filipinas, 583.  Bernaldez adds that they also antagonize priests, steal from the King, abuse young women, burn houses “and ultimately have put the provinces into a state of uproar and resentment against the government and the rule of such a governor.”

[4] Fradera Barceló, Filipinas. La Colonia más Peculiar, 155-156n60, quoting  Luis Prudencio Álvarez y Tejero, De las islas Filipinas.  Memoria …. (Valencia: Imp. de Cabrerizo, 1842), 14.

[5] Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, 8/6, Ms., 5ff., 22 March 1779; here, f. 4v.  Also see Eliodoro G. Robles, The Philippines in the Nineteenth Century (Quezon City: Malaya Books, Inc., 1969), 111-117.

[6] Luis Alonso Álvarez, “El tributo indígena en la consolidación de la Hacienda filipina, 1698-1800.”  Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas/Anuario de Historia de America Latina, 41 (2004), 91-116; here, 114.  For more on the “internal economy,” see Luis Alonso Álvarez, “Los señores del Barangay.  La principalía indígena en las Islas Filipinas, 1565-1789: Viejas evidencias y nuevas hipótesis.”  In Margarita Menegus Bornemann and Rodolfo Aguirre Salvador, eds., El cacicazgo en Nueva España y Filipinas (Mexico: Centro de Estudios sobre la Universidad, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2005), 355-406; especially 400-401.  Also see Luis Alonso Álvarez, “El impacto de las reformas Borbónicas en las redes comerciales.  Una visión desde el Pacífico hispano, 1762-1815.”  Paper presented to the Second Congress of the Mexican Association of Economic History, 3rd Symposium, “Redes sociales e instituciones comerciales en México, ss. XVII-XIX”  for references to the “galleon network” and to the “internal network.”

[7] Emma H. Blair and James Alexander Robertson, eds. and trans., The Philippine Islands 1493-1898 (Cleveland, Ohio: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1903-1909. 55v.), v. 48, pp. 197-338, “Viana’s Memorial of 1765;”  here, p. 257.  [Henceforth I use the citation BRPI for this collection.]  Quoted as well in Sánchez Gómez, Las Principalías Indígenas y la Administración Española en Filipinas, 228.  Also in Luis Ángel Sánchez Gómez, “Las élites nativas y la construcción colonial de Filipinas (1565-1789).”  In Leoncio Cabrero, ed., España y el Pacífico Legazpi (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, S. A., 2004), v. 2, 37-69; here, 57.  A Franciscan in a recruiting letter to Spain mentioned that they “do not love god more than silver.”  Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, 7/13: Exhortación informative, remitida a España con el fin de animar a los religiosos a que vengan a Filipinas.  Ms., 6ff., 1703; here, f. 2.

[8] BRPI, v. 50, 77-117, Francisco Leandro de Viana, “Financial Affairs of the Islands, 1766;” here, 102-103:  “consequently, by reestablishing the oldtime method—by which the candidates for the posts of alcalde must present themselves before the royal Audiencia with documentary evidence of their merits, in order that three qualified persons might be presented to the superior government, in the first, second and third places respectively, for each post of alcalde—the dangers arising from the sale of offices which has been practiced in some governments would be avoided; and the selection [of officials] would be more conformable to justice and less mercenary….”  The brackets and insert are from BRPI.  Even under this “oldtime method,” it seems to me, there well might be the expense of bribes for Audiencia members.

[9] BRPI, v. 48, pp. 197-338, “Viana’s Memorial of 1765;”  here, pp. 256-257.  Brackets and words within are as found in BRPI.  Also see Luis Alonso Álvarez, “Repartimientos y Economía en las Islas Filipinas bajo Dominio Español, 1565-1815.”  In Margarita Menegus Borneman, ed., El Repartimiento Forzoso de Mercancias en México, Perú y Filipinas, siglos XVI-XVIII (Mexico: Instituto Mora/UNAM, 1999), 170-215; here, 195-196. 

[10] Hidalgo Nuchera, La Recta Administración, 68n18, indicates that the salary in 1604 was 300 pesos (“100 less than for the corregidores,” quoting Carta del gobernador Pedro Bravo de Acuña al Rey, Manila, 11 July 1604, AGI, Filipinas 7, ramo 2˚).  He cites Sánchez Gómez, Las principalías indígenas, 228, that the 300 peso annual salary was not changed until the 1840s.

[11] Terms could be extended once or twice; Table 8 (Luis Alonso Álvarez, “El tributo indígena en la consolidación de la Hacienda filipina, 1698-1800.”  Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas/Anuario de Historia de America Latina, 41 (2004), 91-116; here, 105) shows that alcaldes mayores in Albay from 1760 to 1805 served from 1 to 6 years.  Indeed, “from the 1790s through the first two decades of the 19th century, the time in office for provincial governors reached its maximum length.  During these thirty years, some alcaldes occupied their posts for eight or nine terms,” either consecutively or with interruptions.  “We also encounter examples of evident family monopolization” of certain gubernatorial positions.  Corregidores holding strategic positions for the military security of the colony usually held their posts for longer than alcaldes mayores (Fradera Barceló, Filipinas. La Colonia más Peculiar, 157-158. 

[12] A residencia “was the trial and audit of accounts of an official at the end of his term ….”  David P. Barrows, “The Governor-General of the Philippines under Spain and the United States.”  IN H. Morse Stephens; and Herbert E. Bolton, eds., The Pacific Ocean in History. Papers and Addresses Presented at the Panama-Pacific Historical Congress held at San Francisco, Berkeley and Palo Alto, California July 19-23, 1915 (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1917), 238-265; here, 246.

[13] Sánchez Gómez, Las Principalías Indígenas y la Administración Española en Filipinas, 588 and 589.  Priests serving in the provinces were aware of the character of the provincial governors with a clear sense that the majority were dishonest.  In 1710 one noted that alcaldes mayores who have “a zeal for Justice and for the public good” “are rare and few” in number (Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, 7/18, Informe al Gobernador General sobre reducción de Infieles (por un franciscano), 1710, p. 12.  About one hundred years later a Franciscan was able to name one who was honest: “… alcades mayuores who put all their attention on plunder, with the single exception of Don José Garrelu, an honorable man, who is today governor in Camarines…” (Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, 71/27, Recurso a los oficiales Reales, protestando y defiendo la propiedad de sus fieles de Meycauayan.  Meycauayan, 2ff., undated [1814?], by P. Fr. Francisco Gascueña, O.F.M.; here, f. 1v.  Eliodoro G. Robles [The Philippines in the Nineteenth Century (Quezon City: Malaya Books, Inc., 1969) was able to name three provincial governors with merit: José María Peñaranda (Albay, 1834) (122), José Dominguez Zamudio (Tayabas) (123), and José Ramirez de Dampierre (Tondo in 1845, Laguna in 1849) (129); he also mentions Don Juan Castilla and Don Francisco Gutierrez de los Rios, “governor and alcalde mayor of Samar and Laguna, respectively, in 1842 as models of honor and integrity” (123), citing Sinibaldo de Mas y Sans as his authority.

[14] Governor General Simón de Anda y Salazar described this ploy in 1769, as quoted in Sánchez Gómez, Las Principalías Indígenas y la Administración Española en Filipinas, 228-229, taken from Archivo Histórico Nacional (Madrid), Códices 1269b, pp. 60-61.  Also in Luis Ángel Sánchez Gómez, “Las élites nativas y la construcción colonial de Filipinas (1565-1789).”  In Leoncio Cabrero, ed., España y el Pacífico Legazpi (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, S. A., 2004), v. 2, 37-69; here, 57-58.  Also see Martínez de Zúñiga, Estadismo de las Islas Filipinas, v. 1, 532, where tribute payments in kind “only serve to enrich the alcaldes mayores.”  Tomas de Comyn, writing around 1820, observes that even with the oppression and schemes of the alcaldes in mind, his efforts did provide “some stimulus in favor of internal commerce” so that “In effect, little or much, there is no island or province without dealings and relations with its neighbors” (Tomas de Comyn, Las islas Filipinas. Progresos en 70 Años. Estado a principios de este siglo, según Don Tomás de Comyn, y en 1878, según el Editor de la Revista de Filipinas (Manila: La Oceania Española, 1878), 49-50).  He goes on to reference the tiangues (weekly markets), the role of Manila as market, and the use of payments against future crops by richer Filipinos and Chinese mestizos. 

[15] Tomas de Comyn, Las islas Filipinas. Progresos en 70 Años. Estado a principios de este siglo, según Don Tomás de Comyn, y en 1878, según el Editor de la Revista de Filipinas (Manila: La Oceania Española, 1878), 110 for the quotation and 113 for the doubling or tripling of the tribute in effect when paid in kind.

[16] Fradera Barceló, Filipinas, La Colonia más Peculiar, 142.  He goes on to observe, p. 154, that collection in kind not only enabled abuses and frauds by the alcaldes mayores, but it also led to “enormous costs for transport that had to be borne by the Treasury….”  Also see p. 154n55 where the cited text he provides discusses the difficulties of transport from producer to Manila, including the risks and other costs.  On page 167 he discusses Comyn’s critique of payment in kind and in a mixed metaphor said that “Comyn put his finger in the wound and opened the trail that future critics of the system would travel.”  In 1803 the principales of Lagonoy referenced “the difficulty of conducting the royal goods” and the potential losses of “a large portion of the bandala,” with reference as well to two years worth of bandala stored due to inability to safely send it on for ultimate deposit in the Treasury in Manila (PNA, Ereccion de Pueblos, Camarines Sur, 1791-1891. Exp. 2, ff. 25-50b: Expediente creado a presentación del Provincial de San Francisco, paraque se erija en pueblo la Mision de Goa, situada en el Monte de Isarog, 1803-1807; here, f. 41.  Also see ff. 47v-48 where a Don José de Eguía in August 1806 makes reference to the difficulties of land transport in that region.  Also see the examples of alcalde mayor abuses of power in Luis Camara Dery, Pestilence in the Philippines: A Social History of the Filipino People, 1571-1800 (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 2006), passim as well as 98-100, 133, and 159-160.

[17] Luis Alonso Álvarez, “La política de Legazpi y su proyección: la formación del proyecto espanol en las islas Filipinas, 1565-1593.”  In Leoncio Cabrero, ed., España y el Pacífico Legazpi (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, S. A., 2004), v. 1, 437-62; here, 443.  Also see Luis Alonso Álvarez, “Reply to Cruikshank,” Philippine Studies, 59: 2 (2011, 239-250; here, 249.  And Luis Alonso Álvarez, “El tributo indígena en la consolidación de la Hacienda filipina, 1698-1800.”  Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas/Anuario de Historia de America Latina, 41 (2004), 91-116; here, 114.  And Luis Alonso Álvarez, “El impacto de las reformas Borbónicas en las redes comerciales.  Una visión desde el Pacífico hispano, 1762-1815.”  Paper presented to the Second Congress of the Mexican Association of Economic History, 3rd  Symposium, “Redes sociales e instituciones comerciales en México, ss. XVII-XIX”  for references to the “galleon network” and to the “internal network,” 11-12.  And Luis Alonso Álvarez, “Los señores del Barangay.  La principalía indígena en las Islas Filipinas, 1565-1789: Viejas evidencias y nuevas hipótesis.”  In Margarita Menegus Bornemann and Rodolfo Aguirre Salvador, eds., El cacicazgo en Nueva España y Filipinas (Mexico: Centro de Estudios sobre la Universidad, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2005), 355-406; here, 401.

[18] Patricio Hidalgo Nuchera, “La encomienda en Filipinas.”  In Leoncio Cabrero, ed., España y el Pacífico Legazpi (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, S. A., 2004), v. 1, 465-84; here, 478.  Also see Luis Camara Dery, Pestilence in the Philippines: A Social History of the Filipino People, 1571-1800 (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 2006), 38-43.

[19] Sánchez Gómez, Las Principalías Indígenas y la Administración Española en Filipinas, 213-214.

[20] Martínez de Zúñiga, Estadismo de las Islas Filipinas, v. 1, 525.  There actually were two forms of labor requisition imposed by the Spanish rulers, which I collapsed together to avoid too many technicalities in the main text.  The polo with an “obligation to work a certain number of days in community works.  All males from sixteen to sixty years old were required to render this obligation.  Originally, it consisted of sixty days work but was reduced to fifteen days in 1890.”  The repartimiento was the draft of Filipinos “from their villages for various colonial works” such as “shipbuilding, roadbuilding, building of colonial edifices, fighting Spain’s wars,” and cutting timber for and building the galleons.  [Quotes taken from Luis Camara Dery, Pestilence in the Philippines: A Social History of the Filipino People, 1571-1800 (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 2006), 298].  The more egregious abuses occurred with the forced levies, the repartimientos. 

[21] Sánchez Gómez, Las Principalías Indígenas y la Administración Española en Filipinas, 215-216.  Quantitites could be quite large.  See, for instance, the description of a bandala in Bulacan around 1800 made up of a “large mountain of rice” that contained “some two hundred “fanegas [1 fanega is about 55.5 liters, roughly 56 quarts] of rice,” artfully crafted into a cone covered with with straw and such able to keep the rice dry from the rains (Martínez de Zúñiga, Estadismo de las Islas Filipinas, v. 1, 325).  Carlos Quirino, “Abuses in the Philippine Government during the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century.”  The Journal of History, 9 (December 1961), 125-154; here, 139n9, gives the equivalent of fanega as “about one English bushel.”  Also see Luis Camara Dery, Pestilence in the Philippines: A Social History of the Filipino People, 1571-1800 (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 2006), 51-55, where he summarizes the products and amounts officially required from each province for 1752.  Among the descriptions we find 12 quintales of beeswax from Mindoro, 6,000 cavanes of palay from Bulacan, 12,000 cavanes of palay from Pampanga (reduced from the previous amount of 24,000 cavanes), while Oton/Cebu/and Panay were required to produce 20,000 cavanes of palay.

[22] Patricio Hidalgo Nuchera, “La encomienda en Filipinas.”  In Leoncio Cabrero, ed., España y el Pacífico Legazpi (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, S. A., 2004), v. 1, 465-84; here, 479.  Also see Hidalgo Nuchera, La Recta Administración, 47-49.

[23] BRPI, v. 44, pp. 120-141, “Conditions of the Islands,1701,” 7 October 1701 to the Governor General by the Provincials of the Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans, Recollects, and the Jesuits; here, pp. 133-134.  Brackets and added text are as found in BRPI.  A 17th century Governor General also refers in general terms to “many opportunities” for personal gain.  See Luis Alonso Álvarez, “Repartimientos y Economía en las Islas Filipinas bajo Dominio Español, 1565-1815.”  In Margarita Menegus Borneman, ed., El Repartimiento Forzoso de Mercancias en México, Perú y Filipinas, siglos XVI-XVIII (Mexico: Instituto Mora/UNAM, 1999), 170-215; here, 181; and on p. 182 there is another Governor General referring to an “infinite number of frauds” with the bandalas.  Also see page 183 and another Spanish official discussing Cagayan and the active mercantile proceedings of its alcalde. 

[24] Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, 92/22: Informe del Sr. Obispo sobre las vejaciones y atropellos causandos por los Alcaldes mayores.  Camarines, 6 May 1760, 2ff; here, f. 1-1v.

[25] Patricio Hidalgo Nuchera, “La encomienda en Filipinas.”  In Leoncio Cabrero, ed., España y el Pacífico Legazpi (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, S. A., 2004), v. 1, 465-84; here, 479, citing Lorenzo Alonso Álvarez, Él alimento de Manila: un acercamiento a los niveles de mercantilización de la economia filipina durante la época colonial temprana,” La industrialización y el desarrollo económico de España. Homenaje al Doctor Jordi Nadal (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 1999), v. 1, 95-106.

[26] Fradera Barceló, Filipinas, La Colonia más Peculiar, 154. 

[27] Retana in Martínez de Zúñiga, Estadismo de las Islas Filipinas, v. 2, 553.

[28] Sánchez Gómez, Las Principalías Indígenas y la Administración Española en Filipinas, Appendix 1, pp. 670-675, includes materials concerning a ca. 1743 petition for relief from these demands by Filipinos in what was then the province of Tondo.

[29] See Sánchez Gómez, Las Principalías Indígenas y la Administración Española en Filipinas, 63-68 for a discussion of the ordinances of good government by those of mid-eighteenth century by D. Pedro Manuel de Arandía as well as those published by Corcuera, Cruzat y Góngora, and Raón.  For the texts of these ordinances, a good source is Documentos para la Historia de la Administración de Filipinas. Las Ordenanzas de Buen Gobierno de Corcuera, Cruzat y Raon (Manila: Est. Tip. de La Oceania Española, 1891), especially the introduction, pp. 1-39.  BRPI, v. 50, 191-264, has a section on the “Ordinances of Good Government,” which has some useful material but it not as complete as the Documentos para la Historia de la Administración de Filipinas.  The selection in BRPI dates the ordinances by Corcuera as from 1642, those from Cruzat in 1696, and those by Raón as having been published in 1768.

[30] Luis Ángel Sánchez Gómez, “Las élites nativas y la construcción colonial de Filipinas (1565-1789).”  In Leoncio Cabrero, ed., España y el Pacífico Legazpi (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, S. A., 2004), v. 2, 37-69; here, 56. 

[31] Corpuz, The Bureaucracy in the Philippines, 83-84.  Also see Documentos para la Historia de la Administración de Filipinas. Las Ordenanzas de Buen Gobierno de Corcuera, Cruzat y Raon (Manila: Est. Tip. de La Oceania Española, 1891), 24.

[32] Luis Alonso Álvarez, “Repartimientos y Economía en las Islas Filipinas bajo Dominio Español, 1565-1815.”  In Margarita Menegus Borneman, ed., El Repartimiento Forzoso de Mercancias en México, Perú y Filipinas, siglos XVI-XVIII (Mexico: Instituto Mora/UNAM, 1999), 170-215; here, 184n29, citing AGI, Filipinas, 868 y 869.

[33] Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, 5/3: 9 May 1769 Auto from the Audiencia, Manila.  To be fair, the letter did specify punishments for those alcaldes who might abuse the strictures regarding free commerce and the collection of bandalas.  This same Decree from the Audiencia appears in Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, 22/87, where one can see that the reason for the proclamation was not so much what they call the “insupportable oppression that some suffer from their alcaldes mayores” due to commercial activities and gaming the bandala but rather that the over-reach of the alcaldes had affected the supply of goods to Manila: “… all the inhabitants of this city and its extramuros, where for some years we have seen a notable shortage of all food items and other goods that come from the provinces.”

[34] Fradera Barceló argues that the trade systems run by the provincial governors were recognized as crucial to the internal trade of the colony and that this was a method designed to permit the trade while not in fact eliminating the law against it.  Fradera Barceló, Filipinas. La Colonia más Peculiar, 155.

[35] Luis Alonso Álvarez, “Repartimientos y Economía en las Islas Filipinas bajo Dominio Español, 1565-1815.”  In Margarita Menegus Borneman, ed., El Repartimiento Forzoso de Mercancias en México, Perú y Filipinas, siglos XVI-XVIII (Mexico: Instituto Mora/UNAM, 1999), 170-215; here, 184.

[36] Fradera Barceló, Filipinas. La Colonia más Peculiar, 156n61, cting Cosano Moyano, Filipinas y su Real Hacienda (1750-1800), 198.

[37] Fradera Barceló, Filipinas. La Colonia más Peculiar, 156-157.  Hidalgo Nuchera, La Recta Administración, 68n19, citing Fradera Barceló, 168, indicates that by the ninettenth century alcaldes mayores were acting as agents of Manila merchants.

[38] Sánchez Gómez, Las Principalías Indígenas y la Administración Española en Filipinas, 229-231.  Also in Luis Ángel Sánchez Gómez, “Las élites nativas y la construcción colonial de Filipinas (1565-1789).”  In Leoncio Cabrero, ed., España y el Pacífico Legazpi (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, S. A., 2004), v. 2, 37-69; here, 58-59.  For a more general discussion, see Hidalgo Nuchera, La Recta Administración, 68-72, 82-84, 141-144, 148-156, and 157-159.  Sánchez Gómez, Las Principalías Indígenas y la Administración Española en Filipinas,  Chapter 4, pp. 250-306, has a detailed analysis of a case against an alcalde mayor in Ilocos around 1770.  Don Pedro Nevado was accused of a variety of misdeeds.  Most of the accusations deal with the whipping and other mistreatment of principales.  (We are told that perhaps until the nineteenth century (290), whipping was not expressly forbidden.)  He ultimately had his case shunted to Madrid in July 1776 (262 and 290) and then archived without enforcing the punishment assigned by the Audiencia in Manila.  Very little of the material discussed deal with trade or graft, focussing rather on the charges of mistreatment.  As Sánchez Gómez points out (289), “Whippings and physical punishment were in general the common currency in the Philippine provinces during the period of Spanish rule, though it was slowly decreasing as time passed.  Whipping was used by both the civil and the religious authorities as well as the indigenous officials with their subordinates.”  This case is also discussed in Fradera Barceló, Filipinas, La Colonia más Peculiar, 158-161. 

[39] The price set by the government, posted in an arancel, was always lower than the fair market price according to Luis Alonso Álvarez, “Repartimientos y Economía en las Islas Filipinas bajo Dominio Español, 1565-1815.”  In Margarita Menegus Borneman, ed., El Repartimiento Forzoso de Mercancias en México, Perú y Filipinas, siglos XVI-XVIII (Mexico: Instituto Mora/UNAM, 1999), 170-215; here, 179-180.

[40] Sánchez Gómez says a ganta is the equivalent of three liters. 

[41] Sánchez Gómez, Las Principalías Indígenas y la Administración Española en Filipinas, 603-604.

[42] Sánchez Gómez, Las Principalías Indígenas y la Administración Española en Filipinas, 605.

[43] David P. Barrows, “The Governor-General of the Philippines under Spain and the United States.”  IN H. Morse Stephens; and Herbert E. Bolton, eds., The Pacific Ocean in History. Papers and Addresses Presented at the Panama-Pacific Historical Congress held at San Francisco, Berkeley and Palo Alto, California July 19-23, 1915 (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1917), 238-265; here, 246.

[44] Charles Henry Cunningham, The Audiencia in the Spanish Colonies: As Illustrated by the Audiencia of Manila (1583-1800) (Berkeley: University of California Press (University of California Publications in History, no. IX), 1919), 122.

[45] BRPI, 50, 118-136, “Letter from Viana to Carlos III;” here, 124-125.  Later he observes “that the main root of all these evils is in the inefficiency, indolence, and, most of all, the covetousness of the governors” (135).

[46] Fradera Barceló, Filipinas.  La Colonia más Peculiar, 155.

[47] Fradera Barceló, Filipinas, La Colonia más Peculiar, 158 and 159.

[48] This case is also discussed in Sánchez Gómez in his dissertation, Las Principalías Indígenas y la Administración Española en Filipinas, Chapter 4, pp. 250-306, who points out that until perhaps the 19th century (290) whipping was not expressly forbidden. 

[49] Fradera Barceló, Filipinas, La Colonia más Peculiar, 161.

[50] Sánchez Gómez, Las Principalías Indígenas y la Administración Española en Filipinas, 262 and 290.

[51] Luis Alonso Álvarez, “Los señores del Barangay.  La principalía indígena en las Islas Filipinas, 1565-1789: Viejas evidencias y nuevas hipótesis.”  In Margarita Menegus Bornemann and Rodolfo Aguirre Salvador, eds., El cacicazgo en Nueva España y Filipinas (Mexico: Centro de Estudios sobre la Universidad, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2005), 355-406; here, 404-405.  The source cited (404n140) is the Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, leg. 21029.

[52] Charles Henry Cunningham, The Audiencia in the Spanish Colonies: As Illustrated by the Audiencia of Manila (1583-1800) (Berkeley: University of California Press (University of California Publications in History, no. IX), 1919), 152-155.

[53] Also see Hidalgo Nuchera, La Recta Administración, 83.

[54] BRPI, v. 50, 77-117, Don Francisco Leandro de Viana, “Financial Affairs of the Islands, 1766;” here, pp. 98-99.  This quotation also appears in Fradera Barceló, Filipinas.  La Colonia más Peculiar, 164-165n81.

[55] Fradera Barceló, Filipinas.  La Colonia más Peculiar, 164.

[56] Also, Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, 7/11: Informe al Rey, en cual los Provinciales le dan cuenta de las injusticias cometidas por las autoridades contra los Indios.  Ms., 7 Oct. 1701, 18 numbered paragraphs; here, paragraph 9.  And yet, in paragraph 11, this same report notes that cavezas de barangay were imprisoned because they could not produce the mandated tribute amounts due to death or flight of the listed tributantes.

[57] Sánchez Gómez, Las Principalías Indígenas y la Administración Española en Filipinas, 238-240.  Also in Luis Ángel Sánchez Gómez, “Las élites nativas y la construcción colonial de Filipinas (1565-1789).”  In Leoncio Cabrero, ed., España y el Pacífico Legazpi (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, S. A., 2004), v. 2, 37-69; here, 63-64.  The two priests, whose words were taken by Sánchez Gómez from Sinibaldo de Mas’ Informe sobre el estado de las Islas Filipinas en 1842 (Madrid, 1843), 3v., here, v. 2, 23-28 (Las principalías Indígenas, 248n9).  Sánchez Gómez goes on to give us the citations for the sources used by Mas, namely:

             Manuel del Río, O.P., Instrucciones morales y religiosas para el gobierno de nuestros ministros (Manila, 1739); and

             Tomás Ortiz, O.S.A., Práctica del ministerio que siguen los religiosos del Orden de NPS Agustín en Filipinas (Maniola: Convento de Na. Sa. de los Angeles, 1731).

[58] It is possible that the ability of the provincial governors to manipulate the naming and thus the control of cabezas de barangay increased in the late 18th century since, as Alonso Álvarez tells us (citing Mateo de Roxas, “Instrucción de don Mateo de Roxas alcalde de Bataan sobre recaudación y administración de los ramos de la Hacienda,” in the Philippine National Archives, Tributos, leg. 4, Bataan, 1815-1877, cap. 15, fol. 5v.), by a decree of 29 March 1789, based on an earlier decree of 23 March 1781 from Madrid, the alcaldes mayores were now allowed to name the cabezas de barangay directly, without submitting names to the government in Manila for their titles.  Alonso Álvarez indicates that this may have contributed to the weakening of the pre-Hispanic family lineage control of local power positions, but I am more impressed by how this could potentially have increased alcalde power on the local level.  Luis Alonso Álvarez, “Los señores del Barangay.  La principalía indígena en las Islas Filipinas, 1565-1789: Viejas evidencias y nuevas hipótesis.”  In Margarita Menegus Bornemann and Rodolfo Aguirre Salvador, eds., El cacicazgo en Nueva España y Filipinas (Mexico: Centro de Estudios sobre la Universidad, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2005), 355-406; here, 403n139. 

[59] Sánchez Gómez, Las Principalías Indígenas y la Administración Española en Filipinas, 240.  He follows on pp. 240-244 with more abuses as shown in municipal ordinances from 1743 with brief references as well to the 1768 code by Raón.

[60] Luis Ángel Sánchez Gómez, “Las élites nativas y la construcción colonial de Filipinas (1565-1789).”  In Leoncio Cabrero, ed., España y el Pacífico Legazpi (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, S. A., 2004), v. 2, 37-69; here, 67-68.  Archivo General de Indias, Ultramar, leg. 613.  Vértiz served in Cebu, probably for only a month or two.  The quotation from Vértiz is taken from p. 111 of Ma. F. García de los Arcos, La intendencia en Filipinas (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1983). 

Also see Luis Ángel Sánchez Gómez, ““Los debates sobre la regulación de la prestación personal en Filipinas.”  Anuario de Estudios Americanos, 57:2 (2000), 577-99.  And Hidalgo Nuchera, La Recta Administración, 83-84. 

[61] BRPI, v. 44, pp. 120-141, “Conditions of the Islands,1701,” 7 October 1701 to the Governor General by the Provincials of the Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans, Recollects, and the Jesuits; here, pp. 125-126.  Also see Hidalgo Nuchera, La Recta Administración, 85-88.  Also, Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, 7/11: Informe al Rey, en cual los Provinciales le dan cuenta de las injusticias cometidas por las autoridades contra los Indios.  Ms., 7 Oct. 1701, 18 numbered paragraphs; here, paragraph 4.

[62] BRPI, v. 44, pp. 120-141, “Conditions of the Islands,1701,” 7 October 1701 to the Governor General by the Provincials of the Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans, Recollects, and the Jesuits; here, p. 126.  For 17th century abuses, see Furlong, Peasants, Servants, and Sojourners: Itinerant Asians in Colonial New Spain, 1571-1720, 152-153 and 181-190.

[63] BRPI, v. 44, pp. 120-141, “Conditions of the Islands,1701,” 7 October 1701 to the Governor General by the Provincials of the Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans, Recollects, and the Jesuits; here, p. 127.   Also see Carlos Quirino, “Abuses in the Philippine Government during the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century.”  The Journal of History, 9 (December 1961), 125-154; here, 148-152.

[64] See pp. 139-148 for examples of alcalde mayor abuse and exploitation of cabezas de barangay and gobernadorcillos, in Carlos Quirino, “Abuses in the Philippine Government during the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century.”  The Journal of History, 9 (December 1961), 125-154.  Also see Eliodoro G. Robles, The Philippines in the Nineteenth Century (Quezon City: Malaya Books, Inc., 1969), 84-86.

[65] Luis Alonso Álvarez observes that the accounts when sent by the governors to Manila were often incomplete, replete with inconsistencies or faulty arithmetic, or missing—“not so much due to lost documentation but that they were never submitted (or the governor died before they could be sent), were not prepared, or were misplaced in the province.”  The figures he was able to find and use were sent and validated by Manila.  Luis Alonso Álvarez, “El tributo indígena en la consolidación de la Hacienda filipina, 1698-1800,” 104n23 (and notes 21 and 22 as well).

[66] BRPI, v. 44, pp. 120-141, “Conditions of the Islands,1701,” 7 October 1701 to the Governor General by the Provincials of the Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans, Recollects, and the Jesuits; here, p. 133.  I added the brackets [cabezas de barangay].  The brackets [of those registered] is found in the text presented in BRPI.

[67] Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, 7/14, Informe al Gobernador sobre la cobranza de tributos en la Provincia de Camarines, 1706, ff. 1-2.

[68] Javier de Tiscar and José de la Rosa, comps., Colección legislativa de todos los ramos y servicios de la administrativa económica de Filipinas y su contabilidad, solo en la parte vigente (Madrid: Amigos del País, 1866), 181.  [Google books] Here, in a 18 July 1862 decree from the superintentendent of the Treasury in Manila, one finds reference to absentees among listed tributantes and that due to the risk of financial ruin and imprisonment, it was becoming difficult to recruit individuals to fill the position.  It is also possible, though not mentioned, that individuals preferred to pursue economic opportunity in commerce rather than serve in the administration.  Also see Eliodoro G. Robles, The Philippines in the Nineteenth Century (Quezon City: Malaya Books, Inc., 1969), 84, who remarks that after 1844 “formerly lucrative offices gradually turned into ruinous positions….” 

[69] BRPI, v. 44, pp. 120-141, “Conditions of the Islands,1701,” 7 October 1701 to the Governor General by the Provincials of the Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans, Recollects, and the Jesuits; here, pp. 130-131.  The text inserted in the brackets is as found in BRPI.  Also see Eliodoro G. Robles, The Philippines in the Nineteenth Century (Quezon City: Malaya Books, Inc., 1969), 81-82.

[70] Tomas de Comyn, Las islas Filipinas. Progresos en 70 Años. Estado a principios de este siglo, según Don Tomás de Comyn, y en 1878, según el Editor de la Revista de Filipinas (Manila: La Oceania Española, 1878), 11.

[71] Philippine National Archives, Ereccion de Pueblos, Camarines Sur, 1781-1783: 1781-83m dd, 30-31v.

[72] Gordon C. Thomasson, “Beyond the Barangay: Rethinking the Question of Social Organization in the Pre-Hispanic Philippines,” Cornell Journal of Social Relations, 15: 2 (Winter, 1980), 171-192; here, 177.

[73] Carlos Quirino, “Abuses in the Philippine Government during the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century.”  The Journal of History, 9 (December 1961), 125-154; here, 143.

[74] Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, 8/2, Informes de varios Religiosos a nuestro Provincial y de este al Gobernador General … sobre malhechores y trastornos ocurridos en el Archipiélago, ms., 1774, ff. 1v-2.  Another complication was that a separate tax had been levied by the government at this time to be collected at Easter confession, leading to the false perception that Filipinos had to pay for that mandated religious obligation— “It is certain that the Indian believes that he pays for confession, and it is also a fact that if he does not pay he is not confessed” (BRPI, v. 50, pp. 137-190, taken from “Anda’s Memorial, 1768;” here, p. 145).

[75] Félix de Huerta, O.F.M., Estado geográfico, topográfico, estadístico, histórico-religioso de la santa y apostólica Provincia de San Gregorio Magno, de religiosos Menores Descalzos de la Regular y más estrecha Observancia de n. s. p. s. Francisco en las islas Filipinas; comprende el número de religiosos, conventos, pueblos, situación de estos, años de su fundación, tributos, almas, producciones, industrias, casos especiales de su administración spiritual, en el archipiélago Filipino, desde su fundación en el año de 1577 hasta el de 1865 (2nd ed.,  Binondo: M. Sánchez, 1865), 564-565.  This might merely be a coincidence, a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, but the Franciscan’s impression was that it was a clear case of cause and effect and not a simple coincidence of two phenomena one after another.

[76] Recognized and protected in the Recopilación, Title 1, Libro 6.

[77] Javier de Tiscar and José de la Rosa, comps., Colección legislativa de todos los ramos y servicios de la administrativa económica de Filipinas y su contabilidad, solo en la parte vigente (Madrid: Amigos del País, 1866), 172-174.  [Google books]

[78] AFIO 7/20, Informe al Gobernador sobre si convenia cobrar el tributo por cuenta abierta o cerrada, 11 January 1726, 4ff.; here, f. 3.

[79] Juan de Solorzano y Pereyra, Política Indiana (Madrid and Buenos Aires: Compañía Ibero-Americana, 1930), 5 volumes (first published in 1647 from translations of Latin texts of 1629 and 1639), v. 1, p. 372, no. 2; p. 373, no. 10; and passim.  Also see Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Response, 1565-1700 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), 44.

[80] BRPI, v. 50, pp. 137-190, “Anda’s Memorial, 1768;” here, p. 176.

[81] Quoted in Bruce Cruikshank, Samar: 1768-1898 (Manila: Historical Conservation Society, 1985), 42; and again on page 128.  The original source is Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, 95/6, Bangajon.  Dispersed fields certainly contributed to dispersed populations but I will stress the resistance aspect in this essay.

[82] Cruikshank, Samar, 128.  Also see Appendix 4, 222-225; and Appendix 5, 226-227.

[83] Quoted in Bruce Cruikshank, Spanish Franciscans in the Colonial Philippines, 1578-1898. Catalogs and Analysis for a History of Filipinos in Franciscan Parishes (Hastings, Nebraska: Cornhusker Press, 2003), v. 1, 82.  The original source is from the Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, 96/19.

[84] Ibid., v. 1, 83.  The original source is from the Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, 90/14, dated 25 November 1696.  I have omitted the section detailing the draconian penalties for non-compliance that follow the description quoted.

[85] Bruce Cruikshank, Spanish Franciscans in the Colonial Philippines, 1578-1898. Catalogs and Analysis for a History of Filipinos in Franciscan Parishes (Hastings, Nebraska: Cornhusker Press, 2003), v. 1, 158 and 83.

[86] Taken from United States, Bureau of the Census, Census of the Philippine Islands taken under the direction of the Philippine Commission in the year 1903 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1905, 4 volumes), v. 2, 133-209.  I did the calculation showing the percentage resident in the población.  I accessed the material used through the digital copy provided by Google.  I stopped after these nine initial sets of calculations.

[87] Camarines, no población listed for one municipality, entered largest barrio instead.  Camarines, one pueblo had no data other than total municipal population.  Camarines, one pueblo had 8 poblaciones listed; totaled their individual populations for the población column.  Antique, no población listed; used largest of the barrios.  Antique, one pueblo's barrios was in fact a sitio.  Antique, two poblaciones listed, totalled them.  Bataan, one pueblo only had total municipal population listed.  Bulacan, in four cases no población signified; chose largest barrio.  Bulacan, one pueblo had two poblaciones listed; summed them. 

[88] From the Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias, Book 6, Title 5, Law 1, dated 1523/1573.  A copy in Spanish is found in Fradera Barceló, La Colonia más Peculiar, p. 133; an English translation, somewhat different from mine, is in Plehn, “Taxation in the Philippines.”

[89] J. S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice. A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India (New York: New York University Press, 1956/1948), 6.  As Norman Owen has said in another context, “This essay represents, by default, a reductionist analysis of politics, implying a completely cynical political culture.  …it would be a mistake to insist that [Philippine politics] did not have other dimensions as well.”  (Norman G. Owen, “Challenging Colonial Authority: Principalía vs. Priest in 19th Century Kabikolan,” The Journal of History, 47 (January-December 2001, 102-127; here, p. 116.

[90] While I constructed the concept of “agency” for myself in the context of this essay, and before I read Matt Furlong’s dissertation, I freely acknowledge that he used the term before I did.  More importantly, he has as well a masterful mini-essay showing examples from Philippine historiography that either fail “to acknowledge Filipino agency” or have begun to use the available Spanish sources to elicit “the social history of the early colonial period” and to demonstrate Filipino agency under Spanish rule.  See Furlong, Peasants, Servants, and Sojourners: Itinerant Asians in Colonial New Spain, 1571-1720, 146-147n3.

[91] Sánchez Gómez, Las Principalías Indígenas y la Administración Española en Filipinas, 211.  There is a reference to the 1697 addendum of three reales for the religious celebrations in BRPI, v. 50, 77-117, “Financial Affairs of the Islands, 1766,’ Francisco Leandro de Viana; here, p. 95.  Plehn indicates another charge: “From 1635 to the middle of the nineteenth century there was a further addition to the tribute, at the rate of one-half real for each contributor, ostensibly for the conquest of Joló.  This was known as the donativo de Zamboanga.”  Plehn, “Taxation in the Philippines,” 144.  Also see Eliodoro G. Robles, The Philippines in the Nineteenth Century (Quezon City: Malaya Books, Inc., 1969), 72-78.

[92] Javier de Tiscar and José de la Rosa, comps., Colección legislativa de todos los ramos y servicios de la administrativa económica de Filipinas y su contabilidad, solo en la parte vigente (Madrid: Amigos del País, 1866), 162-167.  [Google books]  One also can view other presentations, such as BRPI, v. 52, 57-58n18; or Plehn, “Taxation in the Philippines,” especially pp. 140, 141, and 144.

[93] Fradera Barceló, Filipinas, La Colonia más Peculiar, 185 and 185n52.  Also in Javier de Tiscar and José de la Rosa, comps., Colección legislativa de todos los ramos y servicios de la administrativa económica de Filipinas y su contabilidad, solo en la parte vigente (Madrid: Amigos del País, 1866), 162-167; here paragraphs 19 and 20, but the percentages for cabezas de barangay and gobernadorcillos are, respectively, 1.5 and 0.5.  [Google books]

[94] Luis Alonso Álvarez, “La política de Legazpi y su proyección: la formación del proyecto espanol en las islas Filipinas, 1565-1593.”  In Leoncio Cabrero, ed., España y el Pacífico Legazpi (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, S. A., 2004), v. 1, 437-62; here, 443, where he talks of forced sales in the early period with values in effect up to four times greater than the legal rate.  Also see Luis Alonso Álvarez, “La fiscalidad de la monarquía: la formación de la Real Hacienda filipina, 1564-1604.”  In Leoncio Cabrero, ed., España y el Pacífico Legazpi (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, S. A., 2004), v. 2, 121-46; where on pp. 127-130 he talks of the coercion and violence in the early conquest period regarding tribute, on page 130 the bandalas are referenced; and on pp. 130-131 the topic of the polos is discussed.  He provides an overall summary of the three legs of the stool on pp. 133-137.  Also see Luis Camara Dery, Pestilence in the Philippines: A Social History of the Filipino People, 1571-1800 (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 2006), 36-38, 43-50, and passim.

[95] A 1706 manuscript source refers to a padron of Tayabas Province from 1681 whose totals stayed the same until 1696, when the alcalde mayor ordered a new one.  That one had been in force through 1705.  Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, 7/14: Informe al Gobernador sobre la cobranza de tributos en la Provincia de Camarines y sobre las misiones de la misma.  1706, 2ff.  Furlong refers to a padrón made in 1636 and still in use in 1647 (Furlong, Peasants, Servants, and Sojourners: Itinerant Asians in Colonial New Spain, 1571-1720, 173.  Also see time frames as long as twenty years in Luis Camara Dery, Pestilence in the Philippines: A Social History of the Filipino People, 1571-1800 (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 2006), 69, 105-108, 122, 162, and 187.

[96] Alonso Álvarez, “‘¿Qué nos queréis, castillas?’  El tributo indígena en las islas Filipinas entre los siglos XVI y XVIII.”  Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas/Anuario de Historia de America Latina, 41 (2003), 13-42; here, 38.  Even in 1706, according to a brief comment in a manuscript, an agent to collect tributes operated in the province of Bay, said there were 700 tributos to be collected although there were only 200, and consequently seized lands, cattle, horses, and caused all sorts of trouble.  See Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, 48/6: Escrito de sobre la Visita de las Doctrinas que se intentó el año de 1707.  Ms., copy, 6ff.

[97] Fradera Barceló, Filipinas, La Colonia más Peculiar, 179.  Alonso Álvarez, “‘¿Qué nos queréis, castillas?’  El tributo indígena en las islas Filipinas entre los siglos XVI y XVIII.”  Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas/Anuario de Historia de America Latina, 41 (2003), 13-42; here, 40.  However, a 13 October 1851 “Instruction” said that padrones were to serve for two years; a Circular of 22 November 1852 said that the padrón was to be revised annually.  See Javier de Tiscar and José de la Rosa, comps., Colección legislativa de todos los ramos y servicios de la administrativa económica de Filipinas y su contabilidad, solo en la parte vigente (Madrid: Amigos del País, 1866), 176 and 179, respectively.  [Google books]  Plehn says that “Every second year a padrón de tasas, or tax list, was made up for each cabecería and served as a basis of assessment for two years.  …  It had to be viséd by the parish priest….”  Plehn, “Taxation in the Philippines,” 143.

[98] Fradera Barceló, Filipinas, La Colonia más Peculiar, 172—alcaldes were required to be letrados but since the pool of eligible candidates was small, the requirement was initially applied only “in the districts immediate to the capital,” quoting Colección de Autos Acordados de la Real Audiencia y Chancillería de Filipinas (Manila: Imp. Ramírez y Giraudier, 1861), t. 1, 289-290.  The 1844 regulation against trade is on p. 173 with 173-179 devoted to more detail and how it worked out in practice.  Also see Eliodoro G. Robles, The Philippines in the Nineteenth Century (Quezon City: Malaya Books, Inc., 1969), 106.

[99] See Sánchez Gómez, Las Principalías Indígenas y la Administración Española en Filipinas, 582-589, for a useful summary of major reform efforts in the nineteenth century.  Also see Fradera Barceló, Filipinas, La Colonia más Peculiar, 168-172.  Also see Eliodoro G. Robles, The Philippines in the Nineteenth Century (Quezon City: Malaya Books, Inc., 1969), 123-125 as well as Chapters 8, 9, and 10.

[100] Sánchez Gómez, Las Principalías Indígenas y la Administración Española en Filipinas, 319.  Wenceslao Emilio Retana y Gamboa says that in 1886 with the  “creating [of] civil governors and judges of first instance” “The remedy has been worse than the sickness….”  Martínez de Zúñiga, Estadismo de las Islas Filipinas, v. 2, 530.  Also see Eliodoro G. Robles, The Philippines in the Nineteenth Century (Quezon City: Malaya Books, Inc., 1969), 244-249.

[101] Luis Alonso Álvarez, “Repartimientos y Economía en las Islas Filipinas bajo Dominio Español, 1565-1815.”  In Margarita Menegus Borneman, ed., El Repartimiento Forzoso de Mercancias en México, Perú y Filipinas, siglos XVI-XVIII (Mexico: Instituto Mora/UNAM, 1999), 170-215; here, 211-215 and 207-208. 

[102] Sánchez Gómez, Las Principalías Indígenas y la Administración Española en Filipinas, 324-328.

[103] Retana in Martínez de Zúñiga, Estadismo de las Islas Filipinas, v. 2, 552.

[104] Martínez de Zúñiga, Estadismo de las Islas Filipinas, v. 1, 173.

[105] Martínez de Zúñiga, Estadismo de las Islas Filipinas, v. 1, 290. 

[106] Martínez de Zúñiga, Estadismo de las Islas Filipinas, v. 1, 319.  Retana, who edited the 1893 edition of this book, concluded from internal evidence and a careful look at the life of the author that it was penned between 1803 and 1805 (see the Prologue, xix-xxi).

[107] My error can be found in “A Puzzle about Padrones.  Tribute in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Philippines,” Philippine Studies, 59: 2 (2011), 213-238; here, 216.

[108] Also see the useful and stimulating discussion for the seventeenth century and the linkage of the vagabundo to Filipino choice of preferable alternatives in Matthew Furlong, Peasants, Servants, and Sojourners: Itinerant Asians in Colonial New Spain, 1571-1720, 208-213.

[109] Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, 49/5: Demostración de los ingresos y gastos del Gobierno de Filipinas desde el 7 de Enero de 1723 hasta 7 de Enero de 1735.  Impreso.  Sampaloc: Nra. Señora de Loreto, 1737.  60 numbered pages; here, p. 26: “Pero constando tambien, que por el Ramo de Bagamundos, (que se compone de los Tributantes, que no tienen fija Residencia) se enteraronen la Real Caxa, en el referido primero seisennio 35,420 pesos 6 gr.  Siendo el correspondiente a los valores en que estuco arrendado 39,024 pesos 4 tom. 10 gr.  Se deducen 3,604 pesos 4 tom. 4 gr.  Que se dejaron de introducer a el cumplimiento del valor aque tuvo dicha Renta ….” 

[110] BRPI, v. 47, pp. 128-160, “The Ecclesiastical Estate,” 1742; here, p. 150 and another use of the term on page 155.  On pp. 128-129 we are told that this section is drawn from a report by Don Pablo Francisco Rodriguez de Berdozido, 1742.  Matt Furlong at one point suggests the term “indigenous migrants” (Peasants, Servants, and Sojourners: Itinerant Asians in Colonial New Spain, 1571-1720, 149).  Later, p. 158, he uses the term “migrants.”  Even administratively, the term and administrative category could be flexibly applied—in 1706 a Franciscan reported (without necessary detail) that in the Province of Camarines those Filipinos not on a padron “paid the tribute using the receipt of vagabonds [con bolete de bagamundos), just as is done in the provinces near Manila.”  Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, 7/14: Informe al Gobernador sobre la cobranza de tributos en la Provincia de Camarines y sobre las misiones de la misma.  1706, 2ff.

[111] Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental 50/14: Ingresos y gastos del Gobierno de Filipinas desde 7 de Enero de 1719 hasta 7 de Enero de 1729.  Impreso, 1739, 42 numbered pages; here, pp. 10 and 12.  Receipts, rounded up to the next peso:

                                             7 Jan. 1719 to 7 Jan. 1729                            7 Jan. 1729 to 7 Jan. 1739

Tributos Bagamundos                    54,954 pesos                                    58,176 pesos

See also Javier de Tiscar and José de la Rosa, comps., Colección legislativa de todos los ramos y servicios de la administrativa económica de Filipinas y su contabilidad, solo en la parte vigente (Madrid: Amigos del País, 1866), 176.  [Google books]  This Instruction from 13 October 1851 includes the following: “All those outsiders [“estraños ó forasteros”] that at the time of making up the padrones are in the pueblos, and the vagabundos who do not have a known residence, one is to make a note in the padrón of the barangay and demand the contribution of his class ….”  Also, Matt Furlong,observes that there was a Treasury category for vagamundos “at least from 1604 through 1700” (Peasants, Servants, and Sojourners: Itinerant Asians in Colonial New Spain, 1571-1720, 158); and he demonstrates the category in a 1691 padrón for Santa Ana de Sapa on page 217. 

[112] Alonso Álvarez, “El tributo indígena en la consolidación de la Hacienda filipina, 1698-1800,” 101.

[113] Alonso Álvarez, “El tributo indígena en la consolidación de la Hacienda filipina, 1698-1800,” 102.

[114] Alonso Álvarez, “El tributo indígena en la consolidación de la Hacienda filipina, 1698-1800,” 112-113.

[115] Alonso Álvarez, “El tributo indígena en la consolidación de la Hacienda filipina, 1698-1800,” 113.  He follows these strong words with a footnote citing Leslie E. Bauzon, Deficit Government.  Mexico and the Philippine Situado, 1606-1804 (Tokyo 1981).  He criticizes the work by Bauzon as well, but not as severely as here, in Luis Alonso Álvarez,  “Sobre la naturaleza de la fiscalidad imperial en las Islas Filipinas, 1565-1804: lugares communes y evidencias empiricas.”    IN Ernest Sánchez Santiró, Luis Jáuregui, and Antonio Ibarra, eds., Finanzas y Política en el Mundo Iberoamericano. Del Antiguo Régimen a las Naciones Independientes 1754-1850 (Mexico: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora, and Facultad de Economía-UNAM, 2001), 77-114; here, 76.   Also see the even milder critique in Luis Alonso Álvarez,  “Repartimientos y Economía en las Islas Filipinas bajo Dominio Español, 1565-1815.”  In Margarita Menegus Borneman, ed., El Repartimiento Forzoso de Mercancias en México, Perú y Filipinas, siglos XVI-XVIII (Mexico: Instituto Mora/UNAM, 1999), 170-215; here, 170-174.  However, his general conclusion is the same in all three of these essays—the tribute was the mainstay of the colonial economy until the late eighteenth century and that earlier scholars misrepresented the economic health of the colony by not looking at the provincial treasury books which, until the 1770s, had figures not entered in the Manila Treasury accounts.  Also see Luis Alonso Álvarez, “La ayuda mexicana en el Pacifico: socorros y situados en Filipinas, 1565-1816”  (Paper presented at a conference, El situado en el imperio colonial español, Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, August 2003), 15 and 28-29.  Cosano Moyano, Filipinas y Su Real Hacienda (1750-1800), 451-472, discusses the situado in the 17th and early 18th centuries.  Also see Matthew Furlong, Peasants, Servants, and Sojourners: Itinerant Asians in Colonial New Spain, 1571-1720, 180n45.

[116] Alonso Álvarez, “El tributo indígena en la consolidación de la Hacienda filipina, 1698-1800,” 103. 

[117] Alonso Álvarez, “El tributo indígena en la consolidación de la Hacienda filipina, 1698-1800,” 109.

[118] Luis Alonso Álvarez, “Sobre la naturaleza de la fiscalidad imperial en las Islas Filipinas, 1565-1804: lugares communes y evidencias empiricas.” IN Ernest Sánchez Santiró, Luis Jáuregui, and Antonio Ibarra, eds., Finanzas y Política en el Mundo Iberoamericano. Del Antiguo Régimen a las Naciones Independientes 1754-1850 (Mexico: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora, and Facultad de Economía-UNAM, 2001), 77-114; here, 101.

[119] Fradera Barceló, Filipinas, La Colonia más Peculiar, 129.  He also notes, p. 167, summarizing part of the work of Comyn, who wrote around 1820, reporting that Comyn “suggested that the waste …, both the legal losses due to poor administration and as well the fraudulent practices of the alcaldes mayores, amounted to more than 50 percent of the income.”  Fradera Barceló continues by saying that “a total collection of approxiomately half a million of pesos every year between the years 1762 and 1809, the Government had succeeded in depositing 215,000” pesos, “based on the accounts of the Contaduría Mayor.”

[120] Luis Alonso Álvarez, “Sobre la naturaleza de la fiscalidad imperial en las Islas Filipinas, 1565-1804: lugares communes y evidencias empiricas.” IN Ernest Sánchez Santiró, Luis Jáuregui, and Antonio Ibarra, eds., Finanzas y Política en el Mundo Iberoamericano. Del Antiguo Régimen a las Naciones Independientes 1754-1850 (Mexico: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora, and Facultad de Economía-UNAM, 2001), 77-114; here, 108.

[121] Fradera Barceló, Filipinas.  La Colonia más Peculiar, 163n78. 

[122] Alonso Álvarez, “El tributo indígena en la consolidación de la Hacienda filipina, 1698-1800,”  96. 

[123] Alonso Álvarez, “El tributo indígena en la consolidación de la Hacienda filipina, 1698-1800,” 102.

[124] Luis Camara Dery, Pestilence in the Philippines: A Social History of the Filipino People, 1571-1800 (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 2006), 46-50.  Unidentified pueblos apparently were not listed in the 18th-century report.  Generally speaking I have used the names as reported by Dery, though I did change the spellings for Guiuan and Catbalogan in Samar.  “Balayan” is the older term for Batangas/Mindoro/Marinduque/and part of what is now Laguna.

[125] Carlos Quirino, “Abuses in the Philippine Government during the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century.”  The Journal of History, 9 (December 1961), 125-154; here, 144-145.  I found the  reference to this work by Quirino in Patricio Hidalgo Nuchera, La Recta Administración, 72n31, for which I am grateful.