The "Spanish colonial past" in the construction of modern Philippine history: A critical inquiry into the (mis)use of Spanish sources

Abstract

In 1868 Spain suffered an unprecedented crisis, in the last three last colonies -Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines- which would lead the Spanish dominion to rectify drastically the guidelines of its colonial policy. The Spanish government realized that her colonies suffered, on the one hand, a crisis of representation -meaning who and how the interest of the three colonies were administered- and, on the other a crisis of the colonial model itself since the internal problems of the colony, the expansion of capitalism and European imperialism modified the Spanish perceptions, assumptions and objectives of the colonial enterprise.In this concept, Spain was to restructure the colonial model in the Philippines by opening two reformist lines. The first line of reforms was fiscal; the second and most important was a total institutional reform: administrative, judicial and municipal. This reformism was to be reflected in the publication of books and newspapers.This thesis explores how, when the Americans decided to occupy the Philippines in 1898, they started to suppress those Spanish books which explained the Spanish colonial restructuring. Instead they began to construct a distorted and amorphous image of the Spanish regime as anachronistic, despotic and above all medieval. This portrayal justified, de facto, American tutelage in the Philippines since the natives were deemed to have lived for more than three hundred years in a state of backwardness and ignorance. 1898, therefore, is the starting point in the genealogy of the Spanish Dark age in American colonial discourse, which was to culminate in 1914.