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Historical records show that the rulers of the barangays in pre-colonial Manila seemed to have formed the nucleus of a trading and commercial community at the mouth of the Pasig River. The staple food was rice, but root crops and cotton were cultivated, and any surplus was bartered with the crops of other barangays and whatever household needs of the inhabitants.Īmong the barangays, Manila had indicated prominence much early on. These needs determined to a large extent the pattern of land use and landholdings which were communal. They had subsistence economies with agricultural production geared mainly to the needs of the community. Headed by a chief called datu, these communities were social units or kinship groups rather than political units. Like Manila, small, relatively isolated barangays were already existing in the Philippines long before the Spaniards came. Manila was a thriving barangay (local term for community) of some 2,000 people when the Spaniards found it in May 1570. In order to understand and appreciate its contemporary problems and challenges, it will be helpful to look back briefly at certain events in its history that planted the seeds of many of its present conditions. Many of its problems fostered by centuries of colonial rule and its slow and erratic socio-economic growth continue to afflict present-day urban life, greatly affecting national development. The historical development and transformation of Manila and its surrounding areas mirrors that of the entire nation. Placed at the apex of colonial rule for almost 350 years by Spain and 45 years by the United States, Manila has been entrenched as Capital and hub of political, economic, cultural and religious transformation of Philippine society under the aegis of colonization. When the Americans took over the reins of colonial power, they maintained Manila as seat of government and center of economic activities.
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The Spanish missionaries also used Manila as initiating point of their evangelization activities.
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Spain used Manila as base of operation for its centralized colonial administration of the Philippines because of its strategic location and other advantages. Since then it has dramatized its importance in world affairs, confirming the geographic reality that it is strategically and centrally located on the world map.īut if Spain contributed to the fertilization of the Philippine heritage and the “Europeanization” of its environment, America further invigorated it with the Anglo-Saxon way of life, the “city-beautiful” concept, and the English language. Who would have imagined almost four centuries ago that out of the palisaded Muslim settlement of some 2,000 inhabitants, Manila would emerge as an urban complex? With its strategic location at the mouth of the Pasig River and Manila Bay, Manila was initiated by the Spaniards into its role as the gateway to the Americas, attributing to it an urban dimension. Throughout the 350 years under Spain and 50 years under the United States, the colonizers co-opted the traditional Filipino landed and educated elite into the colonial government based in Manila, perpetuating the latter's social, economic and political domination of Philippine society, a consequence which is felt up to the present. Similar to the time of Spanish rule, the Philippines was economically exploited during the American regime to support the colonial bureaucracy in the capital city of Manila, and less obvious than during the Spanish era but no less unjust, the country's natural resources were developed to support the commercial and industrial interests of the new colonizer, the United States. The Americans introduced universal public education, the institutions of American democracy, modern amenities of urban living, and a system of popularly elected local officials but they did little to alter the inequitable socio-economic structure that the Spaniards left behind.