Rice: A reversal of fortune?

I appreciate The Making of a Periphery for its clarity in specifying the research question tackled in the book. On the very first page it declares: “Located off a corner of Eurasia, Island Southeast Asia was once a thriving region, an exporter of precious tropical products that found willing consumers around the world, from China to Europe. Today, the Philippines and Indonesia are forced to specialize in exporting their surplus of cheap labor. What explains this reversal of fortune?” (Bosma Reference Bosma2019, p. 1). It goes on to state that, to answer the question, “This book focuses on two prominent causes: high demographic growth and a long history of bonded labor embedded in patron–client relationships” (ibid.). Finally, it says that “today's massive labor exports are rooted in demography and have been structured by colonial and even precolonial patterns of labor recruitment” (ibid.).

The supposed prosperity suggested by Bosma – which parallels the putative golden age posited by nationalists – is said to be evidenced by rice: “The northern Philippines and Java were prosperous wet rice-growing regions”; these were “stable rice-producing regions” with “agricultural skills … in wet rice cultivation” before their “reversal of fortune” (ibid., p. 6). I take these descriptions as suggesting that there was once a solid period of time when peoples on these islands had an abundant supply of rice and even produced surpluses of this crop. How was that possible? Bosma's answer is found in the “successful modes of labor control,” which made “wet rice cultivation” a productive pursuit even in the harsh ecological conditions of “the Ifugao Mountains in the Philippines” (ibid., p. 7). Wet rice cultivation is said to be both stable and dating from antiquity. This assumed prosperity in rice production is the high point from which Island Southeast Asia is said to have fallen – except that, for the Philippines, there is little evidence of a rice-abundant or rice-surplus economy before or during most of the over-300 years of Spanish colonialism.

The Ifugao rice terraces are often taken as emblematic of an allegedly stable and ancient agricultural production system, with some believing them to have been built over 2,000 years ago. However, based on archaeobotanical, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic data, the studies by Stephen Acabado and colleagues have made a strong case that the Ifugao rice terraces were a response to Spanish colonialism and can be dated within 1620–1800, although the dates of occupation of the Banaue valley could be dated within 1043–1413, predating the Spanish conquest (Acabado Reference Acabado2009; Acabado et al. Reference Acabado, Koller, Liu, Lauer, Farahani, Barretto-Tesoro, Reyes, Martin and Peterson2019, p. 199). The evidence indicates that the rice terraces were not an ancient practice. Rather, they were built as an act of resistance against the advancing Spaniards, built beyond the reach of the conquistadors to enable the Ifugao to avoid colonial subjugation. Together with the shift to wet rice cultivation, “[t]he archaeological record suggests that economic and political intensification occurred in Ifugao coinciding with the appearance of the Spanish in the northern Philippines” (Acabado Reference Acabado2017, p. 1). Before resorting to wet rice cultivation, the Ifugao agricultural system relied on taro production (Acabado Reference Acabado2012).

In the preconquest age, taro and yams were “the most common food for part of the year, or all of the year for part of the people” in the Visayas as well as in Luzon and in Mindanao, wrote William Henry Scott (Reference Scott1994, p. 35). Laura Lee Junker (Reference Junker2000, p. 330) has noted that rice was a prestigious and highly valued food because of the “high labor intensity in growing rice” relative to root crops. Rice was perhaps the most esteemed cereal, but it was not a daily staple. Rice production, grown mostly as an upland dry crop and in a few locations as flood recession agriculture, was insufficient and did not allow year-round consumption: “even datus with many slaves ate root crops in certain seasons” (Scott Reference Scott1994, p. 291). Whatever labor control the datu exerted did not lead to self-sufficiency in rice. The alluvial plains of Bikol, which were subject to seasonal flooding, produced large quantities of irrigated rice and supported a large population; but even there “the staple Bikol food was root crops” (ibid., p. 182). Moreover, the Bikol region “did not have the elaborate network of canals and reservoirs we associate with ‘hydraulic societies,’” as Norman Owen (Reference Owen1984, p. 120) states of rice cultivation on the Bikol peninsula in the nineteenth century.

After the conquest, Spanish friars propagated plow technology, which harnessed the carabao, and made wet-rice cultivation prevalent in lowland but not waterlogged areas. The first irrigation system in the Tagalog area was built some thirty years after the Spanish arrived in Manila in 1571; and in northwest Luzon irrigated rice fields were first reported in Ilocos in 1630 and in Pangasinan in 1640 (Acabado Reference Acabado2012, p. 300). Through the course of the eighteenth century, migration, settlement, and rice farming extended to the northern portions of the Central Luzon plain (McLennan Reference McLennan, McCoy and de Jesus1982). As more areas were opened for cultivation, the aggregate output of rice increased and its commercialization also became pronounced. Later in the eighteenth century, Spanish authorities sought to develop export agriculture. With the de facto opening of Manila's port to world trade in 1789, rice production “received great impetus,” with Pampanga Province exporting 28,307 piculs of rice in 1793 (Diaz-Trechuelo Reference Diaz-Trechuelo1966, pp. 125–26). By the early nineteenth century, rice was abundant enough for it to be exported, particularly to China. Rice exportation lasted for about 80 years. During that period, parts of the archipelago were likely to have experienced persistent rice deficits, but other areas had more than enough supply for the rice exports to continue. However, from the early 1870s onward the Philippines became a net importer of rice, as Benito Legarda's (Reference Legarda1999, pp. 156–73) study of the nineteenth century demonstrates. From that time until today, the Philippines has been a major importer of rice.

Although an inconvenient truth for nationalists, Spanish colonialism was a significant and beneficial factor in the spread of wet rice agriculture. By the early nineteenth century, the export of rice was gaining momentum, at just the time when, according to Bosma (Reference Bosma2019, p. 8), the reversal of fortune became discernible. Prosperity from rice was brief. It was a transient phase of Philippine history that lasted for less than a century. To say that there was a reversal of fortune for a once prosperous wet-rice growing archipelago can be made only with these many caveats.

Historicizing labor control

Bosma emphasizes the acceleration of population growth in the Philippines and Indonesia starting in the early nineteenth century. In general, I agree with his presentation of this topic. From my standpoint, we can affirm Bosma's argument about population growth because very broadly it is consistent with what is known about Philippine demographic history: from the late eighteenth century until the mid-nineteenth century “the rate of population growth exceeded 1.7 percent per annum” (Doeppers and Xenos Reference Doeppers, Xenos, Doeppers and Xenos1998, p. 4). However, “Population growth fell off sharply after about 1875 with three decades of mortality crises,” but growth resumed from 1905 onward (ibid.). Bosma elides the population decline in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

With population growth came “abundant labor supplies for the developing plantation economies,” as Dr. Bosma writes in his response. The mobilization of this labor pool was informed by “a long history of bonded labor embedded in patron–client relationships” (Bosma Reference Bosma2019, p. 1). He argues that peripheralization was due to “a combination of sudden demographic growth with modes of labor control already in place in precolonial times” (ibid., p. 4). The argument that modes of labor control persisted from precolonial to colonial times needs a closer look.

But first we need to remember that modes of labor control are embedded in specific societies and are inseparable from the social relations found in any given social formation and from the broader ideational context, which is part and parcel of the social relations that enable things to be produced, as Maurice Godelier (Reference Godelier, Friedman and Rowlands1978a, Reference Godelier, Friedman and Rowlands1987b, Reference Godelier1986) demonstrated a long time ago. The worldview of the people must endow the controller of labor with the legitimacy to exert such control, in a way that is deemed socially acceptable. In the absence of a legitimizing ideational system, attempts at labor control will be resisted and opposed.

In the preconquest age, slavery existed in the islands of the Philippines, but debt peonage also existed. Non-slave labor services were rendered to the datu, who were believed to be magical men and were regarded by followers as a father or a friend but who also appropriated whatever local surpluses there were (Aguilar Reference Aguilar1998, pp. 63–67). The Spanish conquest, however, punctured the indigenous worldview, and people began to revere the datu less. Unlike the innumerable peons who worked for the preconquest elite, the number of peons in servitude to an indigenous elite family had been reduced to only two or three by the mid-seventeenth century. In addition, peons were no longer at the datu's beck and call; they had to be asked to help (ibid., 69–70). Luis Alonso (Reference Alonso Álvarez2003, pp. 89–90 n. 10) quotes a late sixteenth century manuscript that graphically describes the effects of the disintegration of the precolonial modes of labor control:

Spain retained the native chiefs as a means of indirect rule at the local level. Spain made these elites into hereditary heads of villages, but in the process they lost their preconquest prestige and their grip on the peasantry.

In this altered setting, according to Scott (Reference Scott1991, p. 60), “[t]yrannical enslavement presumably disappeared with the coopting of the datus, and the social status which had required the display and exchange, even sacrifice of slaves, was now revalidated in appropriate Church weddings and funerals.” Eventually, “Philippine slavery seems to have ended with the death of those slaves who were alive in 1692” (ibid., p. 61). Outside the Spanish realm, slavery persisted but only among unsubdued communities, foremost of which was the autonomous Sulu Sultanate (Salman Reference Salman2001; Warren Reference Warren1981). Thus, slavery had faded away in the Spanish-dominated parts of the Philippines by the early eighteenth century, a situation very different from the Netherlands Indies, where numerous “registered slaves” were prevalent as late as the 1870s (Bosma Reference Bosma2019, p. 66). In the Netherlands Indies, it is conceivable to argue, as Bosma does, that slavery rolled over into various forms of coerced labor in capitalist commodity production because of the temporal proximity between the abolition of slavery and the rise of export crop production. In the Philippines this was not the case.

Meanwhile, the old native elite in the Philippines had to invent new ways of mobilizing labor through the illegal acquisition of village land and by becoming clients of the Spanish friar (Aguilar Reference Aguilar1998, pp. 57–59, 75). Because of their inability to take advantage of the commercial revolution in the late eighteenth century, the old native elite eventually lost the lands they had usurped, and they blended into the peasantry. The demise of the preconquest native elite undermines the supposed continuity and stability of modes of labor control from precolonial to colonial times asserted by Bosma. Thus, the following statement is inapplicable to the Philippines: “The stability and resilience of these modes of labor control proved to be of great value to the colonial administrations of the Philippines and Java when they embarked on the promotion of commodity exports…. this was the basis for the emergence of plantation-style commodity production that peripheralized the societies in which the plantations were embedded” (Bosma Reference Bosma2019, p. 11).

Bosma's assertions about the plantation economy are even more disjointed as far as Philippine history is concerned. In my book review I pointed out several aspects of Philippine history that were overlooked in the book, such as the friar estates and the tobacco monopoly. I also wrote: “Madrid even considered the Cultivation System but decided against employing it in the Philippines.” Probably the most discussed topic of Netherlands Indies historiography, the Cultivation System (1830–1870) in Java obligated the peasantry to grow export crops (such as coffee, sugar cane, indigo, pepper, tobacco, and tea) on village land, with the produce handed over to the colonial administration at below-market value and incommensurate to the efforts of peasant cultivators, in the process generating huge profits for the Netherlands and rescuing it from the brink of bankruptcy. The Cultivation System had created a sugar industry that impressed the Spanish ambassador in The Hague, and in 1842 he enjoined Madrid to make Manila imitate Batavia. Madrid dismissed the suggestion (Aguilar Reference Aguilar1998, p. 83). Without realizing it, Madrid was correct in its response because there was one crucial factor extant in Java that was not found in the Philippines: the regions where an export-oriented sugar industry might be coerced into existence had no counterpart to the priyayi class, who were incorporated into the Cultivation System as critical intermediaries, for which they received a share of the export earnings and the validation of their social position. In the Philippines, what passed for a traditional aristocracy had disappeared by the late eighteenth century.

But there was a new native elite: the Chinese mestizos, who incidentally Bosma (Reference Bosma2019, p. 85) erroneously calls “nonindigenous.” As we have learned from Edgar Wickberg's (Reference Wickberg1964) pioneering study, the series of expulsions of ethnic Chinese in the late eighteenth century, which culminated in 1766 in the wake of Chinese cooperation with the British invasion of Manila in 1762–1764, resulted in a period of over half a century (until the Chinese were permitted entry in the 1830s) in which the immigrant Chinese was virtually absent on Philippine soil. The opportunity arose for a new social stratum to gain ascendance: the Chinese mestizo (mestizo de sangley or mestizo chino), progeny of a Catholicized Chinese father and a native mother – a category regarded as “native” of the Philippines. From the mid-eighteenth century onward, Chinese mestizos did not only constitute a separate tribute and legal category, but they also acquired a level of economic and social prominence that set them apart from the indios naturales (pure native). Between members of these two distinct categories there were well-documented antagonisms and hostilities (Aguilar Reference Aguilar1998, p. 60; Aguilar Reference Aguilar2019, pp. 389–96). Indeed, the nationalists of the early 1880s demanded the abolition of the tribute so that the categories responsible for the deep divide between the two sections of native society would disappear. Because it wanted to augment colonial state revenue by introducing a relatively modern tax system, Spain abolished the tribute in 1884. Unanticipated by Spain, the erasure of the race-based tribute categories was a critical step in the formation of a national community (Aguilar Reference Aguilar2019).

However, before the homogenizing effect of nationalism took effect, the racial gap prevented Chinese mestizos from possessing the social legitimacy to command the labor of indios naturales. In Central Luzon, many Chinese mestizos acquired small and scattered land parcels based on moneylending and trade. The Chinese mestizos made their properties productive by entering into share tenancy arrangements known as kasamahan (partnership) with indios naturales, who enjoyed wide latitude and autonomy and could not be dictated upon by the mestizo landowners (Aguilar Reference Aguilar1998, pp. 78–82). To gain the upper hand, the mestizos instrumentalized debt to create a cultural solvent; they also formed fictive bonds with their tenants such as through godparenthood until, in time, patron–client relationships were established (ibid., 86–90).

As a new social and economic elite, Chinese mestizos initially did not have the legitimacy and dominance of a propertied class. In the central Visayas, the mestizo-dominated and export-oriented sugar economy on Negros Island that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century had to “beg” for laborers, who would agree to work in the sugar haciendas only if cash advances were offered; planters also sought to acquire labor by competing among themselves in offering attractive rates to workers (ibid., pp. 126–41). Unlike the portrait sketched by Bosma of labor being transferred unproblematically from rice to sugar, there was a lack of workers on Negros Island, which had to draw migrants from neighboring islands to populate Negros. Apart from cash advances given to workers – some of whom absconded – the sugar haciendas acquired labor by resorting to sharecropping, akin to the kasamahan. The sugar planters enticed farm tenants into dependency relations through the deliberate invention of paternalism (ibid., pp. 141–49). Thus, the Philippines became an exporter of primary commodities, particularly sugar, on the back of partnership agreements between usually mestizo landowners and indio peasant cultivators. It was very different from the Cultivation System. As I have also argued (Aguilar Reference Aguilar1998, pp. 135–41), the sugar planters of Negros did not have the wholesale support of the colonial state. If anything, the planters resorted to several anti-state strategies to promote their interests (cf. Aguilar Reference Aguilar2017). Again, it was markedly different from Java. The Philippines also did not have anything comparable to the Deli plantations in East Sumatra, with their system of penal sanctions.

Were these mestizo (“nonindigenous”?) planters the “indigenous plantocracies” referred to by Bosma (Reference Bosma2019, p. 17)? In any event, the sugar planters of Negros in the late nineteenth century could be deemed a “plantocracy” only in an insecure sense. Only in the 1930s were the sugar planters – now homogenized under the label Filipino – able to consolidate their class hegemony in the context of the American colonial state's infusion of capital into the building of centrifugal mills, which compelled the sugar haciendas to eliminate sharecropping and utilize wage labor. The planters also began to be perceived as magical men. Only then could the sugar planters of Negros exploit patron–client relationships as a relatively easy mode of labor control (Aguilar Reference Aguilar1998, pp. 189–228). Patron–client relationships cannot be assumed as given, but must be understood historically. We need to eschew simple linear trajectories.

International labor migration

According to Bosma (Reference Bosma2019, p. 152), “the central question of this book [is]: how Island Southeast Asia became a mass exporter of labor.” As I stated in my review, the last section of Chapter 5, bannered as “Toward International Migration: Education and Urbanization” (ibid., p. 151), does not directly associate international migration with the plantation economy or modes of labor control, but instead highlights rising educational levels and rates of urbanization in the context of high demographic growth. Island Southeast Asia is said to have entered the mobility transition (first internally, and then internationally) “at the turn of the twentieth century” (ibid., p. 152). At the outset the reader was told that “patron-client mechanisms … definitely resurfaced in migration networks that function through the same hierarchical bonds of mutual obligations” (ibid., p. 8). Yet, when Island Southeast Asia supposedly commences its mobility transition, more is said about literacy, educational aspirations, and an outward-looking orientation than about labor recruitment processes; in fact, that section says nothing at all about patron–client relationships and the recruitment of migrant labor. The sixth chapter, “Postcolonial Continuities in Plantations and Migrations,” offers data on overseas migrant labor recruitment, but these are for the 1980s and the 1990s. Nonetheless, despite the lack of similar recruitment data for the early twentieth century, the reader is expected to see “continuities” and make assumptions about changelessness.

The silence on the recruitment of migrant labor is unnecessary. Several sources are available. Bruno Lasker's (Reference Lasker1931) Filipino Immigration to Continental United States and to Hawaii is one such source. We know that the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association (HSPA), which recruited plantation workers from the Philippines through intermediaries, offered free transportation on vessels to Hawaii and free passage back to the Philippines after completion of 720 working days. However, in 1926 free passage to Hawaii was discontinued as there were more than enough men who wanted to go there (Lasker Reference Lasker1931, p. 164), but the free return fare remained. In the early years, the HSPA showed “films depicting an enticing life in Hawaii” (Ng Reference Ng1995, p. 444). The HSPA also brought back to the Philippines workers who gave testimonies of their experiences to convince others to embark on a similar journey. Through its aggressive labor recruitment, the HSPA drew large numbers of mostly single young men from rural villages with little or no formal schooling to work in Hawaii. From 1909 until 1946, when recruitment ended, more than 126,000 Filipinos immigrated to Hawaii (Clifford Reference Clifford and Saniel1967, p. 28).

An estimated 61,000 returned to the Philippines, while at least 19,000 (roughly 15 percent) moved on to the US mainland, principally California. Note that there was no comparable labor recruitment to the US mainland, where the so-called “Filipino invasion” of California occurred in 1923 with the arrival of 2,426 Filipinos, only 15 percent of whom came directly from the Philippines, the remainder coming from Hawaii. Soon the direct flow of immigrants from the Philippines to the West Coast accelerated. Families in northern Luzon sold plots of land to pay for a third-class ticket, costing around US$100 (May Reference May2013, p. 141). In 1929 a total of 5,795 Filipinos landed in California, roughly equally divided between those coming from Hawaii and from Manila (Ng Reference Ng1995, p. 446). Filipinos took on menial jobs in hotels and restaurants in cities and worked as farm hands in California and other states, while some went further north to the salmon canneries of Alaska (Bautista Reference Bautista1998, pp. 125–28, 136–41; Cordova Reference Cordova1983, pp. 36–71). Filipinos formed a mobile workforce as they moved to other states in search of seasonal work. This highly abbreviated overview suggests a few points. Contrary to Bosma's emphasis on education, the labor migrants to Hawaii had little or no formal schooling. We know that migration to Hawaii occurred through organized networks, which may have involved patron–client relationships, but this point needs to be verified. Importantly, no comparable organization occurred in the migration to the US mainland, a fact that alerts us to different migration streams. That workers who had completed their contracts in Hawaii could either move back to the Philippines or move on to the US mainland indicates a substantial level of decision making unhindered by “hierarchical bonds of mutual obligations.” Indeed, the “free labor migrant” and the “unfree labor migrant” are historical creations, as Adam McKeown (Reference McKeown2008) has demonstrated. In The Making of a Periphery, there is hardly any data that will enable the reader to arrive at a nuanced understanding of international migration from Island Southeast Asia in the first half of the twentieth century.

Bosma's work implies a linear chronology from plantation agriculture to internal migration and eventually overseas migration. In his response to my review, he stressed “how Island Southeast Asia became a mass exporter first of commodities and subsequently of labour.” In the book he wrote, “Since the capacity of the frontiers to absorb settlers or plantation laborers was limited, international migration became the way out” (Bosma Reference Bosma2019, p. 19), which occurred in the postwar period.

Contrary to this depiction, however, Filipinos had worked and migrated to overseas destinations during the colonial epoch. Apart from the transpacific migration that was linked to the Galleon Trade between Manila and Acapulco (1565–1815), Filipinos were involved in transcontinental seafaring long before the Philippines became a major exporter of primary commodities. There are no statistics because there was no central agency in charge of labor recruitment for overseas postings, but there were hundreds of these seafarers from the Spanish colony, known in the Anglophone world as Manilamen. As I have shown elsewhere (Aguilar Reference Aguilar2012, pp. 371–72), data culled from various notarized documents (protocolos) for a random year like 1851 indicate that forty vessels (half of them American and only one Spanish) hired 221 native seamen, who came from different parts of the Philippine archipelago. Most were hired as seamen (plaza de marineros), although a few were employed for the position of steward (mayordomo). Some returned to the Philippines, while others settled down in various locations around the world, such as Singapore, Cape Town, Barcelona, Liverpool, and Philadelphia. Starting in the 1870s, hundreds of native males from the Philippines were also involved in tropical Australia's pearl-shell industry (ibid., pp. 379–83); some of them settled down and married Indigenous Australian women (Wall Reference Wall2016). A few women also worked overseas. In 1888 and 1889 69 Filipinas were brought by a Dutch company to Semarang in Java to work in the cigar factory there (Aguilar Reference Aguilar, Elizalde and Delgado2011, p. 186). By the 1880s Filipino musicians were also working in Penang, Singapore, and Sarawak (ibid., pp. 186–87). Observe that the demand for Filipino workers abroad did not come primarily from within the Spanish empire, the economy of which was moribund. The demand for Filipino labor came from diverse nodes of global capitalism; hence, the distribution of workers was similarly geographically dispersed. Note also that the Philippines was not a source of indentured labor for other European empires. How then will these international migrations throughout the nineteenth century fit into Bosma's conceptual and chronological schema? The early engagement of Filipinos with the global labor market seems to suggest the decoupling of international labor migration from the Philippines's immersion in primary export production.

What I find intriguing is that Bosma does not include in his discussion of international migration the movement of indentured workers from Java to British Malaya starting in the 1870s and to Suriname and New Caledonia starting in the 1890s. For instance, in the wake of the abolition of slavery in Suriname in 1863 and the uncertainties surrounding indentured labor from British India, the Netherlands Indies allowed the recruitment of Javanese workers who were brought to the South American territory to work on sugar plantations, the practice peaking from 1917 to 1928 (Lockard Reference Lockard1971, pp. 46–50). In the 1930s “[s]everal thousand free immigrants came from Java” to Suriname, most of them “settling on or near plantations” (ibid., pp. 51–52). “Between 1890 and 1939 some 32,956 Javanese emigrated to Surinam [sic], the overwhelming majority as contract laborers” (ibid., 50). For such a major long-distance movement of workers, why would Bosma (Reference Bosma2019, p. 220 n. 49) relegate its mention to an endnote? Is it because this historical phenomenon does not fit his proposed chronology? It is also enigmatic that Javanese emigration to Malaya, Suriname, and New Caledonia was referenced in his discussion of internal migrations within the Netherlands Indies and the government's strategy of “stemming the influx of workers from China” (ibid., p. 113) rather than in the book's sections on international migration.

Finally, in my review of The Making of a Periphery I wrote that “[w]hile trafficking does occur, it's intensity and extensity is not discussed. Unauthorized migration is mentioned, but its scale is also not tackled. Other types of migratory movements do not enter Bosma's reckoning.” In his response, Dr. Bosma says,

Nevertheless, we are not totally bereft of information or of estimates. Scholars do study undocumented or unauthorized migration (e.g., Battistella and Asis Reference Battistella and Asis2003). The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the US Department of State issue global reports on trafficking in persons (e.g., UNDOC 2020; US Department of State 2020). Human trafficking is horrific, but a scholarly analysis of this topic is possible.

Colonialism versus peripheralization

In his response to my book review, Dr. Bosma repeated his assertion that his book “convincingly shows that the concepts of peripheralization and colonialism are distinct and as such the words should not be used interchangeably.” If there is a place in Island Southeast Asia where this injunction is easy to heed, it is the Philippines. Spain, which colonized the Philippines for over three centuries, was a decrepit empire by the nineteenth century, its economy in debt especially after the loss of Mexico in 1821. A common jibe against Spaniards in the late nineteenth century was that the Philippines was an Anglo-Chinese colony that flew the Spanish flag. As Legarda (Reference Legarda2012) put it, “The political metropole was Spain, but Spain was too poor and too wracked by civil dissension to play a substantial role in the Philippine economy.” Spain was in no position to peripheralize the Philippines. Looking at that period, we would find it relatively easy to conceptually distinguish peripheralization from colonialism, which would not be the case after the takeover of the Philippines by the United States in 1898. Nonetheless, as I have argued in this essay, the Philippines does not fit the historical and conceptual framework offered by The Making of a Periphery: How Island Southeast Asia Became a Mass Exporter of Labor. The messy realities and the twists and turns of Philippine history prevent it from being subsumed in Dr. Bosma's attempt at a regional narrative. A theorization on the peripheralization of the Philippines will need to wait for another work of scholarship that has a deep familiarity with and sensitivity to knowledge of the area.