Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - An Introduction to the Philippines

Starting point is 00:00:00 Located off the coast of Southeast Asia lies an archipelago of 7,641 islands that constitute the nation of the Philippines. The Philippines is one of the largest countries in the world by population and has a history and a culture unlike any other in Asia. The process through which the modern nation of the Philippines came to be is a direct result of its unique history. Learn more about the Philippines, its geography and history on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now.

Starting point is 00:00:58 Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Usually when I do an episode about a country, I tend to do episodes about small countries. It's pretty easy to cover the story. of Lichtenstein or Andorra in a single episode. In the case of the Philippines, that is pretty much impossible to do. The country is simply too big and its history too rich to cover everything given the time constraints of this podcast. What I'm going to do instead is to just attempt to give an introduction to the Philippines.

Starting point is 00:01:32 Many of the topics that I'll be covering are worthy of their own future episodes. And that being said, I've probably been asked by more people to do an episode about the Philippines than any other topic. Moreover, even before I started this podcast, I knew that the Philippines would probably be requested because of all the Filipinos I've interacted with online and in person all around the world. So before I get into the history of the Philippines, let's start with some basic geography of the country. The Philippines constitute the northern part of the Malay archipelago. The term Malay archipelago is sometimes confusing because of its similarity to the name of the country of Malaysia. The Malaya archipelago refers to all of the islands between Southeast Asia and Australia,

Starting point is 00:02:16 including the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysian Borneo, Singapore, East Timor, and Papua New Guinea. And fun fact, in the early 1960s, there was a movement in the Philippines to change the name of the country to Malaysia, but they were beaten to the punch by the former British colonies of Malaya, North Borneo, Sarawak, and Singapore. As I noted in the introduction, the Philippines consists of seven, 1,641 islands. However, the majority of them are very small and uninhabited. Only about 2,000 islands have any human population. By land area, the country is slightly smaller than Italy and larger than Ecuador. The country can roughly be divided into three groups of islands. In the north is the Luzon Group, which is centered around the island of Luzon, the largest and most populated

Starting point is 00:03:02 island in the country, with the capital city of Manila. In the center are the Vesias Islands, whose largest city is Cebu, and then finally in the south is Mindanao, which is centered around the second largest island in the country Mindanao and its capital Davao. The current population of the Philippines is estimated to be around 110 to 118 million people, making it the 13th largest country in the world, just behind Japan and above Egypt. The history of the Philippines is fascinating, and it's unlike that of any other Asian country. The first hominid presence in the Philippines dates back to about 700,000 years. During previous ice ages, when sea levels were lower, most of the major islands of the Philippines were actually connected to mainland Asia by land.

Starting point is 00:03:47 About 4,000 years ago, Austronesians migrated to northern Luzon from what is today the island of Taiwan, and this is part of the same migration, which eventually settled most of the islands of the Pacific. The particular group of islands that make up the Philippines is a result of being colonized. Prior to that, there was no hard and fast grouping of islands. Individual islands and villages often had their own cultures and traditions. Around the 10th century, trading ports developed on many islands, and during the Tang Dynasty, trade with China began. Many of the trading centers in the Philippines became tributaries of China during this period.

Starting point is 00:04:21 Influences from India also migrated to the Philippines in the 14th century in the form of both Hinduism and Buddhism. The primary social system prior to colonization was that of the Barangays. The Barangays were independent villages run by a local chief known as a Diodes, Arangays were often form alliances with each other, and there was a loose similarity to Greek city states. While many barangays were just villages, some grew in size to populations of thousands of people. The term barangay still exists today as the name for local villages or districts. The event that transformed the Philippines and led to the development of the modern Philippines was contact with Europeans. The first European to set foot in the Philippines was Ferdin and Magellan,

Starting point is 00:05:03 who arrived in 1521. Magellan arrived in, in the Philippines and claimed it for Spain. However, his claiming the land for Spain didn't do him much good because he was killed soon after at the Battle of Moktan, just off the coast of modern-day Cebu Island. His crew, led by Juan Sebastian Alonco, which I covered in a previous episode, managed to complete the voyage without Magellan, but somehow he's still given credit for being the first person to sail around the world, even though he died halfway in the voyage. In 1542, Spanish explorer Rui Lopez de Villa Lobos named the islands after King Philip II of Spain.

Starting point is 00:05:39 Magelland's claim to the Philippines on behalf of Spain wasn't forgotten despite his death. In 1565, the Spanish returned in the form of Miguel Lopez de Lagaspie, who established the first permanent Spanish presence in the Philippines. He also moved the capital of Spanish Philippines to Manila with its superb natural harbor. The consolidation of the Philippines by the Spanish was a process of divide and conquer, which was very similar to the process that they had previously used in Mexico. In some cases, they would use outright military conquest, and in others they used pre-existing rivalries between barangays to have them do the work for them. They put in place what became known as the Encomienda system. The encomienda system dates back to the Reconquista in Spain, and it was a form of feudalistic land management and a labor system.

Starting point is 00:06:28 Under this system, Spanish colonizers were granted a piece of land or a village, along with its indigenous non-Christian inhabitants. The grantee known as the Encomendro was responsible for the Christianization, protection, and education of the indigenous people on his land. In return, the encomendro was entitled to receive tribute from the people, often in the form of labor, agricultural products, or other goods. This system was one of the reasons why Spanish colonization was so different from French, British, and Dutch colonization. For the most part, people in the rest of Southeast Asia didn't adopt the religion or customs of the countries that colonized them. And this is why I say that the history of the Philippines was so unique amongst the other countries in Southeast Asia. In the Philippines,

Starting point is 00:07:15 the encomendria system and other Spanish policies fundamentally changed the country in a way that didn't change neighboring countries. Indonesia and Malaysia remained Muslim. Christianity never really caught on in Vietnam or Cambodia. But the Philippines became a profoundly Catholic country. In fact, today, it has the third largest Catholic population in the world behind only Brazil and Mexico, yet another Spanish colony. Moreover, most people in the Philippines have names that are of Spanish origin. This was due to the Spanish naming decree of 1849, which mandated that everyone in the country select a surname from a preset list, most of which were Spanish and origin. If you remember back to my episode on the Manila galleons, the Philippines eventually became an

Starting point is 00:08:02 endpoint in the world's first truly global trading system. For the most part, however, the Philippines was closed to the outside world for much of Spain's rule. However, in the 19th century, the country began to open up to the rest of the world, and the word Filipino began to take on a very different meaning. Previously, it only referred to people of Spanish origin who were born in the Philippines. But now it was being used to refer to anybody who was from the Philippines. With this opening up, the idea of independence began to take hold in the late 19th century, something which had already happened in most other Spanish colonies in the Americas.

Starting point is 00:08:39 One of the first events that spurred independence was the execution of three Filipino Catholic priests in 1872. Mariano Gomes, Jose Burgos, and Yakinto Zamora were executed after being charged with subversion. Other independence leaders arose, most notably Jose Rezal. Rezal wrote passionably about the cause of Filipino independence, and his works played a part in the Philippine Revolution, which took place from 1896 to 1898. The Spanish authorities executed Rezal on December 30, 1896.

Starting point is 00:09:11 Resol is considered to be a national hero of the Philippines, and December 30th is celebrated as Rezal Day. Today, you can visit the place of his execution in Fort Santiago in the Intramuros area of Manila. What was left of the Spanish Empire was very weak by 1898, and the Philippine Revolution probably would have been successful if it hadn't been for Spain going to war with the United States. The Philippines declared independence on July 12, 1898.

Starting point is 00:09:38 However, on December 10, 1898, Spain signed the Treaty of Paris, ceding control of the Philippines to the United States. The Filipino revolutionaries now had to shift their efforts from the Spanish to the Americans, which resulted in 1899 in the Philippine-American War. The Philippine-American War lasted over three years, and most Americans have never even heard of it. It resulted in the deaths of between 10 to 20,000 Filipinos and over 4,200 Americans,

Starting point is 00:10:08 and this will definitely be the subject of a future episode. The war ended in 1902 with the passage of the Philippine Organic Act by the U.S. Congress. The act allowed for the establishment of a Philippine's elected legislature, a Philippines bill of rights, and two non-voting representatives in the United States Congress. In 1934, the Tidings McDuffie Act was passed, giving the Philippines Commonwealth status. As a Commonwealth, the Philippines would be given significantly more autonomy, and it would be the beginning of a 10-year transition to full independence.

Starting point is 00:10:42 Whereas Spain controlled the Philippines for over 300 years, the United States was going to have the Philippines for just a few decades. However, once again, Philippine independence was delayed with the onset of the Second World War and the invasion by the Japanese. The Japanese attacked the Philippines simultaneously with the attack on Pearl Harbor. The war in the Philippines saw some of the most significant actions in the entire Pacific Theater, including the Battle of Corrigador, the Baton Death March, the Manila Massacre, and a large-scale guerrilla insurrection. When the war ended, the plans for independence were back on track, and after centuries of occupation, the Philippines,

Starting point is 00:11:21 finally became fully independent on July 4, 1946. Perhaps the most notable period post-independence was the reign of Ferdinand Marcos. Elected as president in 1965 and 1969, he declared martial law in 1972 and ruled by one-man decree up until 1986, when he fled the country after a popular uprising known as the People Power Revolution. One of the biggest economic developments of the last several decades has been the emergence of an enormous Filipino diaspora. There are estimated to be over 12 million Filipino workers overseas. And I have literally met Filipinos on every continent, including Antarctica. One of the industries

Starting point is 00:12:04 where they make up a huge part of the workforce is the maritime industry. As many as a fifth to a quarter of all seamen working on merchant vessels worldwide are from the Philippines. If you visit the Philippines, there are several exceptional things to see. Probably the best, are the rice terraces of Benawi, a UNESCO World Heritage site that's often called the eighth wonder of the world. It's a series of rice terraces built on very steep mountain sides, and the cover art for this episode is an image of the rice terraces. The island of Palawan is home to the world's longest underground river, which is 24 kilometers or 15 miles long. In 2011, it was declared one of the new seven wonders of nature. And with over 7,600 islands, as you might guess, there are fantastic

Starting point is 00:12:50 coral reefs and opportunities for scuba diving. And I just want to give a shout out to one of my friends and popular YouTuber Justin Carmack who just opened up a dive shop called Critter Republic on the island of Dowen. This has been a really cursory overview of a country that has a lot of history and for which there is a lot to be said. But you should at least now be able to see why the Philippines is unique amongst the countries of Asia and also why it's one of my favorite countries in the world. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiefer. I wanted to give a big thanks to everyone who supports the show on Patreon. Your support

Starting point is 00:13:32 helps me put out a new show every day. And if you're interested in everything everywhere daily merchandise, Patreon is currently the only place where it's available. And if you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and get notified of future episodes and projects, please join my Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - An Introduction to the Philippines

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