World Powers at Play in the Western Pacific: The Coastal Fortifications of Southern Cebu, Philippines

Abstract

Long before the western Pacific became an “American Lake” in the mid-twentieth century, European powers skirmished in the region. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a period of global conflict in Island Southeast Asia and the western Pacific. Spanish colonization of the Philippines and Guam secured a trading lane to China and control of the seas in the region. Incursions by Dutch and English in the southern Philippines through proxy armies of Taosug raiders and European pirates contested Spanish control and led to the fortification of the coastlines of Cebu, Bohol, and Negros Oriental and major fortified centers in Cebu City and Zamboanga by the Spanish. These coastal forts were enhanced by the Augustinian priest Julian Bermejo in the 1790s. He designed a chain of baluarte (watchtowers) and forts with intervisible smoke and fire signals, and local militia with canoes mounted with light cannon. These village militias mobilized on notice of Taosug armadas and effectively defended the southern Philippine seas until conflict abated following the resolution of European political struggles. In Guam and the Marianas, English pirates raided Spanish galleons plying silver from Mexico and Chinese goods to Acapulco. The War of 1812 and the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath had an immediate impact on the Philippines and Guam. Changing economic and political relations in Europe and Mexican independence ended the galleon trade and the cessation of Taosug raiding eliminated the need for Bermejo’s fortifications. The region became a backwater of world politics and a dumping ground for political exiles. After a hiatus of several decades, Cebu and the southern Philippines once again entered the world stage as a trading partner for sugar and other commodities. After 1815 the baluartes and forts were abandoned and absorbed by villagers as domestic spaces. The Republic of the Philippines records them as national property, but they have long been co-opted for use as chicken pens and abujan or kitchen hearths. This chapter presents an overview of the relict structures in south Cebu with a proposal for restoration, rehabilitation, and accessibility for these significant heritage sites. I argue that the true significance of the structures and the landscape in which they are set, as well as any potential World Heritage outstanding universal value, lies in the role they played in the global geopolitics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This is the time during which colonies in the Americas began to establish themselves as independent and sovereign states. This was the beginning of the end of colonialism, which as it played out in the Pacific powerfully shaped the history of the region well into the twentieth century. The histories of the United States and the Western Pacific are thus intertwined in two ways: Events in the Western Pacific during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries played a role in securing sovereignty for former colonies in America, and that sovereignty turned the tide of colonialism in a direction that continues to sweep through the Western Pacific.