Throughout the nineteenth century, the Philippines was, in demographic terms, both an anomaly and a paradox. Compared to China and India, the region’s small population and relatively low human densities were anomalous. The rapid rise in population from the late eighteenth century to the mid-1870s is another surprise, an apparent paradox countering both precedent and demographic theory. But, above all, the sustained, rapid growth of Philippine population in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries calls out for explication. Was it caused by more births or fewer deaths? Or was there perhaps a regionally and temporally variable combination of the two? Was it due to an improvement in health practices or a decline in the virulence of disease? How was it linked to the growing integration of the Philippines into world markets? It is thus difficult to imagine a more important subject for those interested in social history, yet no set of questions of similar magnitude has received less direct attention from historians of the Philippines.

This volume of essays is thus a reconnaissance. Its long-range goal is a comprehensive demographic history of the Philippines as a subject intertwined with the study of social and economic change across the archipelago. We offer this volume, in part, as an enticement to others to join this effort. Much more exploration and discovery lie ahead. But above all, a larger task remains: understanding the evolution of social and economic life over time and space.

© Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Winner of the 1999 Manila Critics Circle National Book Award for the social sciences.