Islam was the first of the world religions to impact upon the folk religious base of the peoples of the Philippines. It is impossible to date precisely the arrival of Islam in the southern islands of the Philippines, but by the middle of the 16th century the ruler of Sulu had converted to Islam, as had the court in Mindanao island and the influence of Islam slowly moved north to the island of Luzon where the Manila region was under the control of an Islamic ruler.
n 1494 the Pope determined that Spanish expeditions should sail westwards and Portuguese expeditions eastwards of an imaginary north/south line in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. Hence, Portugal established colonies in Africa, India, Malaya, the Indonesian archipelago and on the China coast, while Spain moved into the New World, establishing a base in New Spain (present day Mexico) and from there moving to conquer much of Central and South America.
The Spanish explorer Ferdinand Magellan led an expedition that became the first to circumnavigate the globe in 1522. Magellan did not survive and was killed in the Philippines. A few years later another expedition arrived in the Philippines in search of the fabled spice islands. The spice islands were in what are now known as the Malukas in the Indonesian archipelago.
An important factor in ascertaining the old spice routes from Southeast Asia is the trail of cloves from Maluku and the southern Philippines north to South China and Indochina and then south again along the coast to the Strait of Malacca.
From there the cloves went to India spice markets and points further west. This north-south direction of commerce through the Philippines has recently been recognized by UNESCO as part of the ancient maritime spice route. The Philippine-Maluku hub persisted into Muslim times and is chronicled in Arabic historical and geographic writings.
In the 17th century Spain tried to create an Asian trading empire, based on Manila as both an entrepot and a naval base from which it could challenge the Dutch in the Moluccas. The attempt failed. Spanish economic and political power steadily declined and Spain was no match for the resurgent northern European protestant nations of Britain and the Netherlands, both of which aggressively sought Asian empires.
Manila was quickly transformed from a small but busy port town linked to regional trading networks into one of the major colonial port cities in Southeast Asia. Its rival in the 17th and 18th century was Batavia (Jakarta). In the 19th century Singapore outstripped both. Chinese merchants controlled Manila’s trading lifeblood, although their numbers were only small. At the beginning of the 19th century there were probably no more than four thousand Chinese in the Philippines, mostly based in Manila. Many of the Chinese married locally and over time became a mestizo community. 17th and 18th century Manila was in many ways a Chinese city, or at least a city of Chinese and mestizos.
From the late 18th century social and economic structures in the Philippines were transformed. The Philippines, along with the rest of Southeast Asia, was drawn into the world trading system. The catalyst was Britain’s occupation of Manila in 1762. Britain occupied Manila in order to prevent a French threat to its China trade. Manila was sacked, galleons were captured and bullion confiscated. The British naval forces quickly departed leaving behind a considerably poorer Spanish colony. In the context of a general decline in Spain’s economic power in the 18th century successive Spanish governors were forced to seek new sources of wealth and revenue.
At the time Spain was confronted by open rebellion in the Philippines, it was fighting a major rebellion in Cuba. United States intervention in Cuba resulted in the American–Spanish war. As a consequence the United States Pacific fleet sailed into Manila Bay, destroyed the Spanish fleet and laid seige to Manila. Philippine nationalists took advantage of a weakened Spain by declaring independence on June 12, 1898; the Filipinos were the first people in Asia successfully to fight their colonial power and create a modern nation-state.
The United States decided that occupation of the Philippines would provide it with a base in the western Pacific from which it could promote its political and economic interests in East Asia. Early in 1899 warfare broke out between the Philippine Republic and the United States, eventually involving more than 10,000 United States troops descending on the islands. Most hostilities ended in 1901 when the United States promised to maintain their wealth and power in return for collaboration with American colonial rule.