Zanjeras are resource management institutions that have endured for centuries in the Ilocos region of northern Luzon. By most accounts, these cooperative irrigation societies emerged during the Spanish regime when Augustinians were deployed to congregate indigenous populations into pueblos, convert them to Christianity, and raise tributes for the Crown. The book explores these challenges and proposes actions that governmental bodies can undertake to strengthen the adaptive capacity of zanjeras and other irrigation communities around the world.

Unlike other conventional histories, the unifying thread of A History of the Philippines is the struggle of the peoples themselves against various forms of oppression, from Spanish conquest and colonization to U.S. imperialism. Constantino provides a penetrating analysis of the productive relations and class structure in the Philippines, and how these have shaped―and been shaped by―the role of the Filipino people in the making of their own history. Additionally, he challenges the dominant views of Spanish and U.S. historians by exposing the myths and prejudices propagated in their work, and, in doing so, makes a major breakthrough toward intellectual decolonization. This book is an indispensible key to the history of conquest and resistance in the Philippine.

Scholars have long assumed that Spanish colonial rule had only a limited demographic impact on the Philippines. Filipinos, they believed, had acquired immunity to Old World diseases prior to Spanish arrival; conquest was thought to have been more benign than what took place in the Americas because of more enlightened colonial policies introduced by Philip II. Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines illuminates the demographic history of the Spanish Philippines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, in the process, challenges these assumptions. In this provocative new work, Linda Newson convincingly demonstrates that the Filipino population suffered a significant decline in the early colonial period. Newson argues that the sparse population of the islands meant that Old World diseases could not become endemic in pre-Spanish times. She also shows that the initial conquest of the Philippines was far bloodier than has often been supposed and that subsequent Spanish demands for tribute, labor, and land brought socioeconomic transformations and depopulation that were prolonged beyond the early conquest years. Comparisons are made with the impact of Spanish colonial rule in the Americas. Newson adopts a regional approach and examines critically each major area in Luzon and the Visayas in turn. Building on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, she proposes a new estimate for the population of the Visayas and Luzon of 1.57 million in 1565—slightly higher than that suggested by previous studies—and calculates that by the mid-seventeenth century this figure may have fallen by about two-thirds. Based on extensive archival research conducted in secular and missionary archives in the Philippines, Spain, and elsewhere, Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines is an exemplary contribution to our understanding of the formative influences on demographic change in premodern Southeast Asian society and the history of the early Spanish Philippines.

This volume includes folkloric material collected from de los Reyes' native province of Ilocos Sur, Zambales, and Malabon.