Conversion, ethnology, and law in the conquest of the Philippines

Résumé 0

This thesis is a political history of the long-neglected late sixteenth-century Philippines. It examines how Spanish settlers, officials, and missionaries established a colonial administration and what precisely this meant to people on the ground. To do so, it explores how the Spanish conquest was effected; the contingent and circumstantial development of local colonial policies and institutions; and the ways in which indigenous communities interacted with colonial impositions. It highlights the context of production of surviving documents and uses an ethnohistorical perspective to critically engage with sources that were entirely produced by colonial bureaucrats, in dialogue with scholarship on colonial Latin America. While the historiography has generally glossed over the limitations and silences of extant sources, this thesis centres their complicated and fragmented nature and reflects on the specificity of the archipelago. In place of the established problematic clean narrative of these early years, it instead advances a new interpretation of how the Spanish conquest happened, arguing that the invaders initially integrated into extant patterns of raiding and trading before a paradigmatic shift to conquest; and of the complex development of the colonial enterprise, examining the external and internal challenges it faced, demonstrating that it was far from secure, and exploring how these threats and the anxieties they generated fundamentally shaped how the colonial administration developed. It also shows that the unique circumstances of the Philippines resulted in the flourishing of academic textual production by civil and ecclesiastical officials in this period; of highly local colonial institutions, within which ecclesiastical figures acquired unprecedented political authority; and of unique systems of colonial extraction and governance, and the ways in which these impacted indigenous communities and were in turn shaped by the people and circumstances of the Philippines.