Preserved in the British Library in London is a wonderful 18th-century map of Spanish Manila. It provides an extraordinarily detailed rendering of the area inside (Intra-) the walls (Muros). When I first saw a grainy reproduction of this map as a college student, I wondered: how was a bird’s-eye view possible in the time before drones and Google Earth?
The ‘Roxas Topographical Map of Manila’ is now accessible online from the collection of King George III. If you look to the left of Fort Santiago, near the mouth of the Pasig River, you can see Tondo, Binondo, Quiapo, and Santa Cruz. The Binondo River and major structures are clearly identified. Houses with thatched roofs fill grid lines, showing trees, and shrubs in backyards and people walking down narrow streets. Inside Fort Santiago, tiny lines represent soldiers in formation, marching through a narrow passage toward the cathedral where they regroup. An officer on horseback leads the troop. Outside the walls, along what is Bonifacio Drive today, are native houses. If your eyes travel right toward present-day Rizal Park, you will see an area brimming with homes labeled ‘Bagumbayan’-which makes sense, as it was the ‘new’ town compared to the ‘old’ city inside Intramuros.
In 2019, Tom Harper, the British Library’s Lead Curator of Maps, showed me the original Roxas map. He pointed out a handwritten inscription on the lower right near the Bastión de San Diego (close to where the Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Manila stands today) and noted that it was likely penned by George III himself. This led me to imagine British East India Company officials briefing the King on the siege and occupation of Manila in October 1762. Two decades later, George would lose the American colonies-the very nation that would later acquire the Philippines from Spain and govern it from 1898 to 1946. Some scholars, however, argue that the handwritten inscription belongs not to the ‘Mad King’ George but to Alexander Dalrymple, a hydrographer for the East India Company.
Once, while lecturing on the Roxas map, a student interrupted with a question: ‘What would have happened if the British decided to stay in Manila instead of taking the ransom and sailing away?’ Before I could compose a reply, he followed up: ‘What if the Philippines had been colonized by the British rather than the Spanish? Were we colonized by the wrong country?’
In my long career as a teacher and public historian, I deploy counterfactuals to move a narrative forward. While I appreciated the student’s line of inquiry, it reminded me of a friendly scolding I once received from Teodoro A. Agoncillo, who did not share my taste for historical ‘what-ifs.’ He said, ‘Historians don’t have enough time to dig up and recreate all that actually happened in the past. Why waste your time chasing after what didn’t?’ I wanted to cite Agoncillo to wiggle out of the question, but the student’s query made a lot of sense.
First difference would be linguistic. Had the British not returned us to Spain in 1764, we would be speaking British rather than American English today. We would spell Manila with two ls, drive on the left side of the road, and favor tea over coffee. I am certain we would have indigenized English to make it distinctly our own, much as Singaporeans and Australians have done with their respective dialects. Curiously, we likely would have been categorized as ‘Malay’ or ‘East Indian’ rather than the Spanish ‘indio.’ And who knows if we would even be called ‘Filipinos’-or perhaps ‘Philippinos’-today?
Second difference would be religious and administrative. Spain’s primary driver in the colonial enterprise was the Catholic Church, with missionaries dispatched across the archipelago-even to places avoided by Spanish bureaucrats and military officers. The Church exercised immense control over land and local governance down to the parish level, giving rise to the concept of ‘bajo de las campanas’-living within earshot of the church bells. The British, by contrast, ran colonies for profit through trade, cash crops, and taxation. Their rule was exerted not directly through the Crown, but through a corporate enterprise: the British East India Company.
Third difference would be geopolitical. The Philippines likely would have been governed alongside British Malaya, Singapore, and North Borneo. Had that occurred, the modern dispute over Sabah (North Borneo) would not exist today. Being folded into this British sphere would have drawn Indian and Chinese laborers to the islands, dramatically shifting our demographics centuries earlier. Our civil service structure would be fundamentally altered, and we almost certainly would have been drawn into the 19th-century opium trade.
Looking back on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, it is clear that-with the exception of Thailand-all were born from colonial rule: Brunei, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Singapore were British; Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam were French; Indonesia was Dutch; and the Philippines was occupied successively by the Spanish, the Americans, and the Japanese. Would we have been ‘better’ or ‘worse’ under Britain? We don’t know. It never happened. But had they stayed, our reality would be different.