Slavery and raids in the early colonial Philippines.

Note to self. A debate could be had as to whether the imputation of a local slave trading regime is imposed or copied from outside. No less than the Philippines’ national hero José Rizal had annotated an edition of Antonio de Morga, in which Morga explains that the Spanish, 100 years earlier than his writing in 1602, had effectively made space for the Mindanao and Sebu Mohammadans to begin raids on the pintados (Spanish for the painted ones) to capture them as slaves. On raids, it is interesting to note Rizal’s annotations where Morga explains how the Spanish Governor ordered a certain Captain Villagra to ‘burn the fortress which had been constructed in Caldera Bay; and return with all his men and vessels he had with him, to Manila’ (Morga [1609] 1962: 132). The soldiers certainly wanted to return home but in what Rizal comments as ‘the first piracy of the inhabitants of the South recorded in the history of the Philippines’ (Rizal [1890] 1962: 134) saw the Sulus ‘sail to the coasts of…