Saturday, June 28, 2014 7:09 PM, Daniel F. Doeppers <dfdoeppe@wisc.edu> wrote:
Bruce
This is an extensive excerpt from chapter 4 of the present book manuscript.
"Collecting Rice for Manila [ June 26, 2014]
An on-the-scene report allows a different angle of view on the process by which rice was moved commercially from small-scale growers to the wholesale commodity merchants. Export rice merchant and British vice consul Jose de Bosch left a vivid account written in Pangasinan at the start of the rainy season in 1856. Wet rice was grown in substantial quantities in all jurisdictions of the province, he said. Following the harvest, some palay was kept aside for household consumption, “and the rest is either sold to brokers, or taken little by little to the tiangues, or markets, in the towns, or to Dagupan and Lingayen in canoes [bancas], for trading purposes.”[1] The principal markets in Pangasinan then were still periodic rather than everyday and all were located in the town-parish centers of communities at the lowest margin of the river delta close to the gulf. This was also the zone of highest population density. These periodic markets formed an integrated system with synchronized schedules allowing mobile merchants to attend most of them on a regular basis (map 1.3). The Thursday market in Calasiao was said to draw the largest number. Dagupan was not initially one of the two or three most populous nuclear centers.[2] As it became more important in the rice trade, however, a second market day was added. Other periodic markets served people living further inland, but these were not so well attended. The great advantages of the periodic market system were that at least once a week it concentrated demand and material products in a designated locale that was easily accessible to local residents in an era when the amount of trade was not yet sufficient to support many permanent stores. By the later nineteenth century, everyday shops and a permanent commercial district had crystallized in Dagupan, and some merchants based there were sending out strings of carts to service the interior markets.
At first, most of these merchants were mestizos, but small numbers of Chinese began to arrive. Within two years the newcomers were ensconced in stone shop houses in Binmaley and Dagupan and in the ground floors of the more substantial homes of Lingayen. The Chinese initially encountered hostility, but by 1856 they were “joining the mestizos in all kinds of commercial businesses,” said de Bosch.[3] They were just getting started.
On the process of drawing out surplus rice, historian Rose Cortes emphasizes the complementarity between the coastal zone, where all of the more important early markets were located, and other rice production locales in the interior. For this exchange, people in the coastal settlements produced and traded salt, nipa “wine” (tuba), and nipa roof shingles. De Bosch singles out Camiling, now incorporated in northern Tarlac, for special mention as one of the great rice producing municipalities of the Pangasinan river transport zone.[4]
De Bosch also reports that a large part of the rice that entered commerce did so through the activities of broker-agents known as personeros. Usually mestizos plus a few Spaniards, personeros worked on behalf of a principal wholesale rice merchant or speculator in a complex system involving cash advances. According to de Bosch, a personero might receive a thousand silver dollars to advance in small amounts, usually indirectly through one or more layers of intermediary brokers operating on a smaller scale. Although brokers and merchants would gladly purchase rice directly when the opportunity was presented, in fact this was then primarily a commodity trade organized on the general lines of the Asiatic advance system—a system that established patron-client relations and deflected upward some of the risk of production. In various forms, it was a system that was widely used in the smallholder export rice industries of mainland Southeast Asia.[5] Depending on the season of the advances, they could provide a system of agricultural credit. De Bosch continues:
With the money [now] advanced to the brokers, [the personero] receives orders to purchase grain at a certain fixed rate—and as he bargains and collects it, it is his duty to report operations to the merchant who employs him. If the latter hears of a rise or fall in the price of the article, at Manila, or in China, he immediately writes to his brokers, giving them a new collection price.... As the acquisitions of rice are affected, the brokers forward it to Dagupan, or Sual, or ship it direct for Manila from the towns where the purchases are made, if accessible to coasters….[6]
Bruce
The market schedule details are displayed on the map. Except for Lingayen and Dagupan with two market days each, the rest of the important markets were mostly on different single days.
[1] Jose de Bosch, “Philippine Islands (Sual),” Hs. of Com., 1857 session 1, v. 16, C 2201, quote 530.
[2] “Croquis Militar de la Parte de Pangasinan, 1830,” Angara, Cariño, and Ner, Mapping the Philippines, 122-23.
[3] De Bosch, “Philippine Islands (Sual),” Hs. of Com., 1857 session 1, v. 16, C 2201, 529-535; Rafael Magno, “Mangaldan,” Philippiniana Sacra 8.23 (1973), 340.
[4] Cortes, Pangasinan, 1801-1900, 54; Lopez, “History of Sta. Barbara,” Ilocos Review 16 (1984), 112-14; de Bosch, “Philippine Islands (Sual),” Hs. of Com., 1857 session 1, v. 16, C 2201, 530.
[5] On the advance system, see Owen, “Peele, Hubbell,” in Stanley, ed., Reappraising an Empire, 220-25. My understanding of this system also owes much to conversations with Willem Wolters.
[6] “Philippine Islands (Sual),” Hs. of Com., 1857 session 1, v. 16, C 2201, 529-535, quote 530.
On Tuesday, June 24, 2014 12:23 PM, Daniel F Doeppers <dfdoeppe@wisc.edu> wrote:
….
Aside from odd provincial reports I did not find a source that routinely gave market days, but from my periodic market file here is what I have accumulated:
Isagani Medina, Cavite before the revolution, p 127-128. 1830s
Kawit mon, Bacoor tues, Imus wed, indang fri (?and also Silang Naic?), Tanza fri, Maragondon Sunday.
My note. McLennan/ Zuniga, Estad ..Miami, Bulacan market cycle.
Bulacan mon, Calumpit tues, Polo wed, malolos thurs, Bocaue fri, Baliuag sat.
Also cited by "ODCorpus, 451"
Buzeta and Bravo, Pasig jueves and Domingo . As we know Pasig was an important commercial town whose business required two market days per week
Jocano and Veloro. San Antonio, a case study of adaptation and folk life in a fishing community (UP NASB Integrated Research Program, 1976) , 126-127. On tiangge. San Pablo Saturday. He calls San Pablo an important or "central " market around which are other subsidiary markets on different days. -- a basic central place/ periodic market finding of the 1960s
Alberto-Boncocan, Rhina and Dwight David Diestro. Nineteenth Century Conditions and the revolution in the province of Laguna. UP 2002, 34-35.
1830 tiangui in the largest settlements.
Sta Cruz miercoles jueves, Majayjay lunes, Siniloan lunes (in far northeast), Nagcarlan Domingo, Binan Domingo, Calanan Domingo , Paete viernes.
Huerta 1865, p 170. Santa Cruz, Laguna important market miercoles y jueves