Resource Guide

Introduction

In April 1996, I spent two weeks in the United States conducting a search for historical economic statistics for the Philippines at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. and at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. My objectives were, first, to ascertain the general condition of the economic statistics for the period when the Philippines was an American colony, and to find out whether the materials were available on microfilm; and, second, to verify the location of the statistics on trade in the latter half of the 19th century. Once we properly understand the general condition of the Philippine historical economic statistics of the colonial period, the Statistics Project will be able to formulate plans for obtaining microfilmed materials and I will be able to write a much different essay, but for now I will just explain briefly the importance of compiling trade statistics for the latter half of the 19th century. This essay also draws on my findings from fieldwork at the Philippine National Archives in August 1995.

Why Conduct Further Research on Trade Statistics of the Late 19th Century?

Why compile Philippine trade statistics of the second half of the 19th century for the Asian Historical Statistics Project? Above all, because this is the most interesting era in the history of Philippine trade. From the middle of the 16th century to the end of the 19th century, the Philippines was a Spanish colony, then became an American colony (apart from the period of Japanese occupation in 1942-45) until 1946, when the independence was achieved. From the 1920s until the early 1970s, Philippine foreign trade was conducted primarily with the US (apart from a surge in cotton goods imports from Japan in the 1930s). Thus, relations with the US were very close and those with nearby Asian countries rather distant, so that the Philippines was regarded as an exceptional case even within Southeast Asia. However, the Philippines was closely integrated into the Southeast Asian trade zone (broadly defined here to include China and India) during and prior to the second half of the 19th century. This background informs my pursuit of historical trade data.

Leads in the Research of Benito F. Legarda, Jr.

The Ph.D. dissertation of Benito F. Legarda, Jr., "Foreign Trade, Economic Change, and Entrepre-neurship in the Nineteenth Century Philippines" (Harvard University, 1955), is regarded as a pioneering work on the 19th century Philippine economy. (The dissertation is currently being revised and, I have heard, will soon be published.) While many research projects on the Philippines take trade statistics from The Census of the Philippine Islands: 1903 as their basic data, Legarda's work is distinguished for utilizing the import and export data for Major Commodity Groups and Major Trading Partners from the trade statistics volumes published during the latter half of the 19th century. However, because the separate figures for trading partners for major commodity groups are not shown in Legarda's dissertation, the mechanism by which Philippine trade was transacted in Asia is not at all clear. For this reason, I put together a list of materials on Philippine trade statistics of the second half of the 19th century while searching for materials in a number of library catalogs and verified their locations. I am especially indebted to A. Kohar Rony of the Asia Division of the Library of Congress for his help. Below are the newest additions to my list of publications on trade statistics, including the years they cover:

Balanza general del comercio de las Islas Filipinas, 1851-1855, 1857-1865.

A Cuadro general del comercio exterior de Filipinas, 1856.

B Estadistica mercantil del comercio exterior de las Islas Filipinas, 1866-1880.

C Estadistica general del comercio exterior de las Islas Filipinas, 1881-1894.

Table 1:Location of Material on Philippine Trade Statistics of the Second Half of the 19th Century

Explanatory notes

LC: US Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
USNA: US National Archives, Washington, D.C.
PNA: Philippine National Archive, Manila
Harv: Lamont Library, Harvard University
MBU: Museo-Biblioteca de Ultramar, Madrid

L … at the above library or Archives

M … also stored on microfilm at the Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University

C … microfilmed copies of these materials will be on order at the Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University

- … not avaiable

Source: *Information provided by Prof. Daniel F. Doeppers of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Note: Other sites holding Philippine trade statistics for this period include the following:

1. The Filipiniana Section of Philippine National Library(Manila) contains a number of volumes of trade statistics documents for the 1850s, but I have not yet completed the task of verifying what materials are available.

2. An online search conducted by the University of Wisconsin library staff on behalf of Prof. Doeppers found that the Biblioteca Nacional (Ma) appears to hold most of the trade statistics materials for the second half of the 19th century, but the years for which materials are available in unclear.

Reading Trade Statistics of the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

As can be understood in Chart 1, trade statistics publications are stored in America's Library of Congress and National Archives, and in the Philippines' National Archives, among others In addition, the microfilmed materials at the Institute of Economic Research at Hitotsubashi University indicate, first, that in the 1850s and 1860s the Philippines imported silk goods from China and conducted trade with Singapore, and second, that because the trade statistics volumes were originally compiled mainly to specify the amount of customs revenues collected, they faithfully recorded both the volumes and prices of imports and exports transacted, an unusual feature which greatly enhances their value as a research tool. I therefore expect that we will be able to use this information to compute the unit prices of the articles, and the results should make an important contribution to the construction of time-series data for the long-term economic statistics databank. However, this work has only just begun, and it is clear that many difficulties remain to be overcome.

Yoshiko Nagano
Kanagawa University