All events · Conquest and the Slave Trades

The Spanish Reduccion and Resettlement of the Philippine Lowlands

c. 1570–1700 · East & Southeast Asia

Displacement Territory Seized

Displaced

600,000

Spanish tribute lists and missionary reports record most of the lowland Christianised population - on the order of half a million to a million people in the seventeenth century - resettled from scattered barangay hamlets into nucleated pueblos 'under the bell'. Linda Newson's demographic reconstruction from tribute records estimates a Philippine population of roughly 1.5-2 million at contact and substantial decline in the resettled lowlands. The figures rest on tribute counts kept for taxation, which under-record those who fled to the uplands.

Share of the population affected

40%

of the population of the Philippine archipelago at the time of Spanish conquest, 1570

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What happened

From the 1570s Spanish colonial administrators and the Augustinian, Franciscan, Jesuit and Dominican orders pursued a policy of reduccion in the Philippines, gathering populations that had lived in scattered kin-based settlements into nucleated towns built around a church, in order to convert, tax and levy labour from them. Residents were subject to tribute, to the polo y servicios corvee that supplied labour for shipyards, fortifications and the Manila galleon trade, and to compulsory sale of produce; missionary and administrative records treat the concentration as largely complete in the Christianised lowlands of Luzon and the Visayas by the seventeenth century. Substantial numbers escaped by moving to the uplands or to unpacified areas, becoming the remontados and the still-independent peoples of the Cordillera and the Muslim south, whom Spain never subdued. Revolts against tribute and labour drafts recurred through the period. Linda Newson's reconstruction from tribute records finds significant population decline in the resettled lowlands from disease, labour drafts and disruption, though on nothing like the scale of Spanish America.

Parties

Spanish colonial authorities and missionary orders concentrated dispersed Philippine populations into mission towns and imposed tribute and forced labour

Disputed

How much of the lowland population was actually resettled, and how far demographic decline was caused by resettlement and labour drafts as opposed to introduced disease, are debated.

The denominator

Linda Newson's reconstruction from early tribute records in Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines (2009) gives about 1.5-1.6 million around 1570. Earlier estimates ranged from 500,000 to over 2 million; the tribute lists that underpin all of them counted taxable households in the pacified lowlands only.

Reduccion applied to the Christianised lowlands; the Cordillera highlands and the Muslim sultanates of Mindanao and Sulu were largely outside it and are inside this denominator.

Where the baseline comes from

Spanish East Indiesopen-edited
History of the Philippinesopen-edited

On the death toll

No defensible range. Newson's tribute-based reconstruction shows regional population decline in the century after conquest, but disentangling deaths caused by resettlement, labour drafts and epidemics from ordinary mortality is not possible with the surviving records.

Documented forms of violence

Forced LabourCultural Destruction

Spanish colonial and missionary records themselves document the polo y servicios labour draft and the suppression of indigenous religious practice in the reduccion towns.