Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asiaafter the defeat of the Dutch, the island’s incorporation in the Heavenly
Empire.^3
Luzon and the VisayasThe northern and central part of the archipelago nowadays called the
Philippines covers the areas of Luzon and the Visayas. Their combined
surface area measures about 190,000 km^2 , almost half the size of Spain,
from 1564 onwards their colonizer. In sixteenth-century Luzon and the
Visayas, the population used to live scattered far and wide, sometimes in
jungle areas, and was divided in settlements ranging from 50 people to
those of 2,000 strong, the lowest numbers being found in mountainous
hamlets, which were connected to the coast through trails following riv-
ers or mountain ridges. In the Visayas, the maximum size of a settlement
was no more than one thousand people, Cebu excepted. According to
Anthony Reid, Luzon and the Visayas might have had a total population
of over 500,000. Politically speaking, the situation, as in Formosa, was a
patchwork of independent chiefdoms, called barangay, each with a chief
called datu at the head of about 100 families. Despite this small-scale ar-
rangement, the society seems to have been quite stratified. In a few parts
of the area, there were also supra-local powers, i.e. village federation-like
concentrations or regional alliances. In some places, for instance in Cebu
and Bohol in the Visayas and Manila in Luzon, one could even speak
of “harbour principalities” of the type seen in other parts of Southeast
Asia’s island world. In Manila, Islam had gained a foothold in the middle
of the sixteenth century, the time when also the Spaniards arrived on
the scene. Luzon seems to have been economically a little more “de-
veloped” than the Visayas, in the sense that its trade relations with the
outside world, i.e. China and Borneo, had a more regular character and
its agriculture a somewhat more “advanced” nature, especially where it
concerned rice production.^4
- L. Blussé, N. Everts, E. French, (eds), The Formosan Encounter: Notes on Formosa’s
Aboriginal Society, A Selection of Documents from Dutch Archival Sources. Volume I:
1623–1635 (Taipei: Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborgines, 1999): 5, 9–10,
96–100; Chiu, Colonial ‘Civilizing Process,’ 18–25; Andrade, How Taiwan became
Chinese, 25–31; Lorge, Asian Military Revolution, 66, 69. - F. M. Keesing, The Ethnohistory of Northern Luzon (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1962): 16, 21–22, 314-15; F. Landa Jocana, The Philippines at the Spanish
Contact: Some Major Accounts of Early Filipino Society and Culture (Manila: MCS