Note 1 — THE PHILIPPINES, 1860–1898—SOME COMMENT AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Looking primarily at the expansion of trade and foreign relations, we might date the new era in the Philippines from the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Yet that event, while greatly stimulating trade and agricultural development, did not inaugurate the modern era in that respect. The presence of foreign traders, introducing agricultural machinery and advancing money on crops, was the chief stimulus to the opening of new areas of cultivation, the betterment of methods of tilling and preparing crops for the market, and the consequent growth of exports; indeed, one may almost say that certain American (United States) and English trading houses nurtured the sugar and hemp crops of the Philippines into existence. And their pioneer work in this respect was done before the opening of the Suez Canal brought the Philippines into vital touch with Europe by means of steam navigation—American influence being then, in fact, already on the wane. One might more readily, from this point of view, assign importance as a date to 1856, when Iloilo (and soon after Sebú) was opened to foreign trade (hitherto confined to one port of entry, Manila) and foreigners were permitted to open business houses outside of Manila and to trade and traffic in the provinces; or, even, to 1859, when the first steam sugar-mill was set up in Negros island. But the entering wedge had been driven by foreign traders into Spain’s policy of exclusion even before the cessation of the galleon-trade, the monopoly which confined Manila’s trade to a few Spaniards resident there and their backers in Mexico, who saw in Manila only a depot of exchange for Chinese and other Oriental commodities, and commonly despised the idea of giving any attention to the crude products of the Philippines or endeavoring to stimulate Philippine agriculture and exportation properly so called. From the date when this ruinous monopoly expired with the occupation by Mexican insurgents of Acapulco, the port to which the galleons brought their silks, cottons, etc., attention was perforce turned upon Philippine products as a source of trade, and Philippine exports began to grow.1 Spanish traders being too few, and utterly untrained in the ways of competition, and Spanish ships being scarce in the Orient, foreign traders and foreign ships gathered the bulk of the business even in the face of useless and annoying restrictions, until finally these foreigners had broken down the barriers sufficiently to enter and take a hand in actively fostering agricultural development in the Philippines. Hence, the opening of the Suez Canal only gave a new turn and a great acceleration to a movement that, as regards Philippine internal development, may more logically be dated from 1815, the year of the last voyage of the galleon.