Newly available with an updated bibliographic essay, this highly acclaimed work explores the Huk rebellion, a momentous peasant revolt in the Philippines. Unlike prevailing top-down analysis, Kerkvliet seeks to understand the movement from the point of view of its participants and sympathizers. He argues that seeing a peasant revolt through the eyes of those who rebelled explains and clarifies the actions of people who otherwise might appear irrational. Drawing on a rich array of documents and in-depth interviews with peasants and rebel leaders, the author provides definitive answers to the causes of the rebellion, the goals of the rebels, and the process of resistance.

Scholars have long assumed that Spanish colonial rule had only a limited demographic impact on the Philippines. Filipinos, they believed, had acquired immunity to Old World diseases prior to Spanish arrival; conquest was thought to have been more benign than what took place in the Americas because of more enlightened colonial policies introduced by Philip II. Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines illuminates the demographic history of the Spanish Philippines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, in the process, challenges these assumptions. In this provocative new work, Linda Newson convincingly demonstrates that the Filipino population suffered a significant decline in the early colonial period. Newson argues that the sparse population of the islands meant that Old World diseases could not become endemic in pre-Spanish times. She also shows that the initial conquest of the Philippines was far bloodier than has often been supposed and that subsequent Spanish demands for tribute, labor, and land brought socioeconomic transformations and depopulation that were prolonged beyond the early conquest years. Comparisons are made with the impact of Spanish colonial rule in the Americas. Newson adopts a regional approach and examines critically each major area in Luzon and the Visayas in turn. Building on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, she proposes a new estimate for the population of the Visayas and Luzon of 1.57 million in 1565—slightly higher than that suggested by previous studies—and calculates that by the mid-seventeenth century this figure may have fallen by about two-thirds. Based on extensive archival research conducted in secular and missionary archives in the Philippines, Spain, and elsewhere, Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines is an exemplary contribution to our understanding of the formative influences on demographic change in premodern Southeast Asian society and the history of the early Spanish Philippines.

A Companion to American Art presents 35 newly-commissioned essays by leading scholars that explore the methodology, historiography, and current state of the field of American art history. Features contributions from a balance of established and emerging scholars, art and architectural historians, and other specialists Includes several paired essays to emphasize dialogue and debate between scholars on important contemporary issues in American art history Examines topics such as the methodological stakes in the writing of American art history, changing ideas about what constitutes “Americanness,” and the relationship of art to public culture Offers a fascinating portrait of the evolution and current state of the field of American art history and suggests future directions of scholarship

The Spanish Pacific designates the space Spain colonized or aspired to rule in Asia between 1521 -- with the arrival of Ferdinand Magellan -- and 1815 -- the end of the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route. It encompasses what we identify today as the Philippines and the Marianas, but also Spanish America, China, Japan, and other parts of Asia that in the Spanish imagination were extensions of its Latin American colonies. This reader provides a selection of documents relevant to the encounters and entanglements that arose in the Spanish Pacific among Europeans, Spanish Americans, and Asians while highlighting the role of natives, mestizos, and women. A-first-of-its-kind, each of the documents in this collection was selected, translated into English, and edited by a different scholar in the field of early modern Spanish Pacific studies, who also provided commentary and bibliography.

This book examines how the colonial Philippine constitution weakened the safeguards that shielded liberty from power and unleashed a constitutional despotism.