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Bandits, Banditry and Landscapes of Crime in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

Greg Bankoff
Greg Bankoff
Affiliation:
University of Auckland
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Extract

With few exceptions, commentators agree that bandits were a major socio-economic phenomenon of the nineteenth-century Philippines. Historians and contemporary observers are united in lamenting the deplorable state to which the countryside was reduced by their depredations. Bandits infested the roads and rivers, ravaged fields and farms, sacked towns, pillaged churches and set light to houses in an orgy of murder, robbery and rapine in which there was “hardly an evil deed that their rash boldness [did] not perform”. Modern historiography has usually been content to interpret such crimes as either being indicative of social tensions within a society or as representing “a basic social activity with its own internal logic and historical development”. Only superficial attention has been paid to the environment within which these crimes were committed, historians merely noting that such and such an offence was committed in an urban or rural setting.

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Articles
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , September 1998 , pp. 319 - 339
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1998

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References

1 Some contemporary accounts deny that banditry was widespread in rural areas and complain instead of the bad press given to isolated instances of robbery committed by groups of rateros or petty thieves. See, for example, a letter from Bulacan dated 7 Apr. 1888 published in a Manila newspaper that reassures readers that the province is in a state of the “completest tranquillity”. El Comercio, 8 04 1881Google Scholar.

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50 Provincial governors and other responsible persons were asked to provide information on five points: how long such lawlessness had been endemic within their jurisdictions; what effects it was having; why local authorities failed in executing their duties; what obstacles prevented the apprehension of such robbers; and the reasons why local people frequently perjured themselves. “Malhechores…1776”. PNA, Bandos y Circulares.

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90 The cultural landscape is not exclusively the product of human activity on the environment but also extends to the actions of other species as well.

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101 “Rafael Ripoll to Capitan-General (two women), Cavite 3 February 1837”, PNA, Erectión de Pueblos, Cavite, Unreferenced Bundle.

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106 The increasing number, size and complexity of sailing ships caused a significant rise in the demand for marine cordage during the century. Manila hemp was superior to its major Russian competitor because it did not need to be coated with tar to protect it from the effects of salt water, a process that made the rope heavier, dirtier, less flexible and more costly.

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117 y Larre, Joaquin Rajal, Memoria acerca de la Provincia de Nueva Ecija en Filipinos (Madrid: Establecimiento Tipográfico de Fortanet, 1890)Google Scholar. The manuscript held in the archive is so similar to Rajal y Larre's published account of Nueva Ecija that the one may be simply an earlier version of the other.