Linda Newson, Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines

Abstract

What was the impact of Spanish conquest on the Philippine population? It has long been thought that Spain's foothold in Southeast Asia escaped the kind of demographic disaster that ravaged the Americas. Any decline in the Philippine population, it has been argued, occurred not during the main campaigns of conquest in the 1560s and 1570s but as a consequence of the Spanish war against the Dutch in the early decades of the seventeenth century. It has also been suggested that, due to their established trading contacts with other parts of Asia, the native peoples of the Philippines had gained some measure of immunity from the Old World diseases that had decimated native populations in the Americas. In Conquest and Pestilence, Linda Newson assesses the support for these claims and shows them to have only limited foundation. She marshals a staggering array of new evidence and, with careful and judicious analysis, proposes a strikingly different picture of how the Philippine population was affected from the moment of first contact.