Vanished History: Recovering Pre-Colonial Philippine Transnational History

• In Event: 60. Crossing and Contesting Borders in Island and Mainland Southeast Asia

Abstract

The noted American historian, Kenton Clymer, referred to the Philippines as “forgotten history.” Though referring particularly to Philippine-American history, he might as well refer to the reckoning of all Philippine history in terms of its colonial past and its post-colonial present. Many Philippine history textbooks report a sequence of events spanning five centuries that began with Spain’s “discovery” of the islands in 1521, Catholic colonization by the friars over four centuries, and American intervention that drove out the Spaniards in 1898. What remains under-explored is the long, mostly unrecognized pre-colonial history of what is today known as the Philippine archipelago. Paraphrasing Clymer, pre-colonial Philippine history might as well be referred to as “vanished history.”
This paper aims to “recover” Philippine history by referencing pre-colonial accounts of a geo-economic/political/social space that has, not coincidentally, “disappeared” in the reckoning by colonial historiography that has since dominated Philippine historical studies. Second, this research veers away from the conception of the archipelago as a distinct and seamless territorial unit with a “homogeneous” Christianized/Hispanized/Americanized population. Re-cast from the traditional Eurocentric, Catholicized and nationalist versions, Philippine transhistory is rescued from parochial accounts that tend toward the “homogenization” of Philippine society, as though “there has ever existed a ‘homogenous’ society anywhere in the world” (Iriye 2016). Finally, this paper expands the field of Philippine historical studies beyond “methodological nationalism.”

Author

• Teresita Cruz-del Rosario, National University of Singapore