Escaping Empire

Abstract

Abstract: This article explores the flight of indigenous communities from Philippine lowlands into mountain spaces, a frequent and widespread response to Spanish colonization in the seventeenth century. During this period, indigenous zones of refuge were not exceptional but present in almost every part of Luzon and the Visayas. The shared history of flight and resistance frustrated the ambitions of Spanish missionaries and military commanders for much of the colonial period and beyond. In the uplands, indigenous communities made use of local geographies and ecologies to bolster their resistance and maintain their autonomy. In dialogue with recent scholarship on colonial frontiers and indigenous hinterlands, this article challenges the perception of a colonial dominance that spread inexorably across the archipelago in the seventeenth century. It offers a new perspective on the history of colonization and confronts the perceived upland-lowland divide that has typified Southeast Asian historiography, demonstrating that upland and lowland spaces had shared histories of resistance, migration, and trade throughout the colonial period.