Over the long holiday there were three historical ideas that I was working through (as in randomly staring off into the distance during get togethers), really unrelated to anything else I’ve been working on lately. Yeah.

• In some sense you can separate the Spanish period into two broad categories, with the invasion of the Philippines by Britain and the subsequent governing periods of Anda and Basco y Vargas as the ‘mid-point’. One intriguing hallmark of the Philippine colonial experience is the retention of language and culture (especially pre-Hispanic rites and rituals) to a certain extent. They exist in many ways through various fiestas and other customs. Part of that is in the form that early colonization (as in the first 200 odd years) took. From a certain perspective, the first 200 years were a period of Christianization, not necessarily colonization in the economic and political sense. Economic and political reforms necessary to displace the power of the Church and form a unified political and economic entity took place post-British invasion. So, for me, those first 200 years were in some way the prelude to ‘traditional’ economic colonization, political and nationalist growth that were the hallmarks of the late 18th and 19th centuries.
• Rizal was not a martyr for the 1896 and 1898 Revolution. He did die for a revolution (to paraphrase Schumacher) but not that revolution. In many ways, Rizal’s revolution is not ‘unfinished’, it never began (or has ever commenced since his passing).
• The perceived gap between the ‘haves’ (elites) and the ‘rest of the country’ was reinforced and manufactured during the American era. The early part of the US period was marked by resistance throughout the Philippine socio-economic spectrum. However, the US took a policy of ‘encouraging’ and favoring certain sympathetic elite leaders and families. Thus, while the Philippines during the latter part of the 19th century was far from a monolithic society moving lock-in-step towards independence, the perception of elite leaders taking advantage of the ‘masses’ is far from the truth as well.