Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves: Lost Tales from the Philippine Colonial Period, 1565–1946
Lio Mangubat
Faction Press: 2024
For a relatively slim volume, Lio Mangubat’s Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves: Lost Tales from the Philippine Colonial Period, 1565–1946 covers a broad swath of Philippine history. The thirteen essays are distilled from his successful podcast, The Colonial Dept., and explore “lost” stories, starting from Spain’s establishment of colonial rule on the islands in 1565 and ending with Philippine independence from the United States after the Second World War. Providing a comprehensive chronological account covering nearly 400 years is a tall task that Mangubat doesn’t bother attempting here. Instead, his essays let readers dive into single, standalone vignettes that vividly bring to life forgotten moments from this period, making for a highly accessible, episodic and engaging inquiry into Philippine colonial history.

In an interview with Nicholas Gordon for the Asian Review of Books, Mangubat introduces his book as an exploration of “collisions… the frictions that happen when these foreigners arrived in these islands”. The book primarily reveals foreigners’ accounts of these interactions, rendering Filipinos as secondary characters in their own stories. The cast of characters include a Spanish missionary priest who encountered Aeta tribes given to fits of “sumpong” (irrational behaviours attributed to “the gods”), an American “slot machine king” who employed “Manilamen” into his global workforce and a French plantation owner in search of a human-eating “monster of a croc”. As has often been the case, the colonisers told stories that centred themselves as heroes pursuing their ambitions or justified their global conquests.

• Tags: Issue 38, Lio Mangubat, Miguel de la Fuente-Lau, Philippines