PHILIPPINES
It is often the case, when I write these articles,
that there is no one out there to call me to account for my mistatements.
Very few people have been there, wherever it happens to be. I can
write, you can read, its fun. I feel my situation to be a bit shakier
with the Philippines. A lot of potential readers have been there,
maybe not so recently, but certainly 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years ago.
I have never been there.
I’ve had several people tell me tall tales that
could not possibly be true. Old guys, who fought in World War II.
One guy back in the 1980s claimed that he had been there in the army of
occupation before the war, and told me scurrilously nonsensical anatomical
and cultural details about a certain tribe that I will not dignify with
a repetition. “I was there,” he said. “I saw it with
my own eyes.”
Ha!
But I haven’t been there, so when I get it wrong,
cut me some slack. Just let me know. I’ll fix it.
Well, here are some basics about the Philippines,
in which far flung land I shall shortly place a short but intense numismatic
series. The land area is a bit bigger than the state of Nevada, but
is split up into two big islands, 8 smaller ones, and about 7000 little
ones out there in the Pacific Ocean. Nevada has, roughly speaking,
about 2 million people. Roughly speaking, there are getting to be
about 90 million Philippinos.
The tip of the big northern island, Luzon, is 250
miles from Taiwan. A tip of the big southern island, Mindanao, is
about 200 miles from Borneo, which is part of Malaysia, and there is a
smaller island, Palawan, that is only 100 miles away. China, Vietnam,
Indonesia, Australia, Japan, are all, under most circumstances, a pleasant
few days of sailing away, or a few hours by plane.
Before the world was round, so to speak, the Philippines
were kind of out of the way, but after the ragged shreds of Magellan’s
globe girdling fleet limped back to Europe the strategic value of a relatively
undeveloped region close to the teeming orient was quickly appreciated.
But let’s step back a bit from that clash of cultures
moment of the 16th century. Way back.
There were probably humans “just like us” in
the Philippines about 40,000 years ago. It is thought that they came
across in small boats. They were the dark skinned, curly haired people
whom the Spanish called “negrito” (little black) and that we call these
days “melanesian.” The earliest stone tools, found on Palawan,
have been dated to about 30,000 BCE. The oldest human bones, also
from Palawan, are about 24,000 years old.
It is thought that the earliest arrivals had a hunting-gathering
type of culture, with specialized stone and wood tools. Later arrivals
brought slash and burn type agriculture, and still later groups brought
settled field cultivation. Much later, but still in the BCE range,
people related to the Malays arrived in several waves of migration, bringing
polished stone tools, pottery, domestic animals, the panoply of neolithic
culture. It appears that these people came first to northern Luzon
from Taiwan, and that the same people set up colonies as far flung as Madagascar
and Hawaii. Their descendants make up the majority of the population
of the Philippines.
The period circa 1000 BCE to circa 500 AD is hazy
enough for Southeast Asia and Indonesia. People who discuss this
period like to refer to known doings in China and India and extrapolate
outward into the island zone, supposing that the deep past resembled the
more recent past. They paint a picture of traders from the culture
centers voyaging out to the islands, looking for gold and other good stuff,
bringing their more elaborate cultural artifacts with them. The natives,
suitably dazzled, adopted some of the exotica these traders brought: the
metalworking, the rice cultivation, maybe some of the religious rituals,
perhaps some administrative and economic practices. But no coins,
not yet.
Kingdoms organized in Indonesia in the early centuries
CE. The largest and most powerful for a while was Srivijaya, out
of Palembang in Indonesia. In Java the Sailana kings built Borobodur.
These people had a religion that was part Buddhist, part Hindu, part local.
Their politics was absolute monarchy of the god-king variety, with a heavy
spicing of palace intrigue. Their economics was mercantile.
Coins were used in China perhaps as early as 1000
BCE, in India at least as early as 450 BCE, in Burma possibly 200-300 CE,
in Vietnam around 900 CE.
Some little billon things are attributed to later Srivijaya, maybe
1000 CE. This is how it is with early Philippines history.
People talk about Indonesia. About the Philippines they have nothing
much to say.
Srivijaya ruled an empire, and in every empire there
are top dogs and bottom dogs. The bottom dogs grumble and growl,
and eventually the top dogs weaken or the bottom dogs get strong.
The situation becomes tenuous, then things change. From the late
10th century CE Srivijaya was repeatedly attacked by the Cholas of southern
India and Ceylon. The pressure was enough to bring China in to some
degree on the Srivijaya side, but their aid did not prevent the slide.
In the growing political vacuum local kingdoms sprung
up on Java, Borneo, etc. Some noble refugees from Borneo, the “ten
Datus,” settled in the central islands of the Philippines in 1212.
The references I’m reading are describing a zone
that was peripheral to all of these political goings on. No Philippine
Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms, no international presence, no notes by Chinese
travellers, no invasions by the Mongols. In most of the Philippines
of the 12th and 13th centuries they seem to be looking at, or, rather,
ignoring, people in loincloths hunting with stones and sticks, paddling
around in dugout canoes, living in little huts in little villages.
Like New Guinea, maybe. While down in Indonesia they were playing
politics and dressing their women in gold, importing porcelain jars from
China.
Actually, some of those jars got up into the Philippines,
where they were revered, coveted, valued. Porcelain jars are special
in the Southeast Asia-Pacific context. In some places they had spirits
and magical powers. They were highly valued and eagerly traded.
If you want to call them money, you would not be far wrong. But the
magic aspect should not be ignored when thinking about jars. Think
about the stone “money” of Yap island. Each piece has a soul.
So it was with the jars.
Where are we? Late 13th century CE.
The Mongols invaded Indonesia, inadvertently interfering in a nascent dynastic
squabble. The rebels allied with the Mongols to annihilate the other
side, after which they turned on the Mongols, somewhat out of their element
in their boats in a tropical country, and annihilated
them as well. That was the start of the Majapahit kingdom.
There is a coin, finally. It’s a little
gold thing, bean shaped, called “piloncito” these days, in the Philippine
context. I looked all over the web for a
Philippine example, but all I found were pictures of similar things
from Majapahit in Java. In the Javanese context they are called “krishnala,”
and are obtainable.
The only picture of the Philippine piloncito I could
find is a drawing on the coat of arms of the Philippine Numismatic Society.
That picture has a type different from the Java version. The PNS
picture displays a specimen with a horned circle for a type. The
Javanese coin has a design that I shall describe in the manner of the Victorians,
skilled in the use of allusion and veiled reference, as a “lingam.”
All these words for one coin, and, as is almost
always the case in the pre-Spanish period, its Indonesian.
Meanwhile Muslim traders had appeared in Southeast
Asia, and their influence spread rapidly. They brought with them
a religion of personal salvation, very refreshing in the context of an
ossified Hindu-Buddhist ritual regime designed primarily to enforce obedience
to the sovereign. They also brought gunpowder and cannons, the uses
of which they had learned the hard way from the Mongols. Within 100
years there was a string of Islamic sultanates in Malaya and the Islands
all the way up to Mindanao. The strongest was fabled Malacca.
The raja of Malacca converted to Islam in 1414,
taking, as was the norm, all of his subjects with him. Majapahit,
the enemy, followed suit in 1447. Attacks by Thailand were repulsed.
In 1498 Malacca had quelled all rivals and had obtained a monopoly of trade
in the region.
That same year however, the Portuguese explorer
Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope off South Africa and sailed
on to make landfall in Calicut, in southern India. The Portuguese
palavered with the Indians and found that among the things they had in
common was a deep hatred of Muslims.
The Portuguese had the tradition of fighting Muslims
for centuries, and the Indians had the ongoing conflict with the Muslims
that had been one of the facts of life in India for 400 years. They
thought they had common ground.
Let us take note of the major trends in human events
of the 15th century. In Eurasia the population had recovered from
the trimming it had received from the Black Death. The Ottoman Turks
had conquered Constantinople, putting up a solid political wall between
Europe and the Orient. The Orient, where the spices were, and the
silk, and the porcelain, had gone through some interesting political shifts.
China, which had been geographically expansionist, cancelled its colonial
programs in the Pacific Islands and North America when the Emperor got
a bad horoscope one day. The southern tier of Southeast Asia acquired
brand new Muslim governments. Guns, mostly in the form of cannons,
became fairly common as top level weapons throughout Eurasia, and the possessors
of those guns, mostly Muslim, began to press forward into the lands occupied
by the “old people,” the hunter-gatherers, the stone knapping slash-and-burn
agriculturalists.
Europeans, blocked from the Oriental stuff they
liked so much, started thinking about a way past the Turks, who controlled
the western terminus of the caravan trade that traversed the Silk Road.
There were two possibilities: a northern land route that had never been
considered viable because of weather, and ocean sailing around Africa.
Or maybe, who knew, sailing west might be worth trying.
For pepper. They were looking for pepper.
Cinnamon. Cloves. And porcelain and silk. Rich people
changing the world with the strength of their desire for luxurious stuff.
The results of their greed are obvious. Here we are, Europeans in
the Western Hemisphere.
The Portuguese took baby steps Africa, establishing
trading posts down the west coast. Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape
of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean in 1498, making landfall in southern
India.
While the Spanish were trying to figure out what
to do with their “New World” the Portuguese set out to conquer the
old one. Malacca, gateway to the islands, was taken in 1511.
This, and their station in southern India, gave them a lock on the Indian
Ocean route. Spain fretted, sent Magellan to see what he could do.
What Magellan did was, when he had toddled all the way out to the Philippines,
was to make friends with the enemy of an enemy, the raja of the island
of Cebu. Magellan put his ships at the disposal of the raja in an
action against a rebel, one Lapulapu, on an island called Mactan.
Complications ensued. Magellan was killed
in 1521. The survivors eventually completed the first recorded circumnavigation
of the world and returned to Spain to tell the tale, the gist of which
was that Malacca was a tough nut to crack but that those islands to the
northeast, on one of which Magellan had met his end, were sort of there
for the taking, filled with the sort of people whom the Spanish had been
rolling over in the New World.
The Spanish government thought the situation was
reasonable, and sent out a series of expeditions that established a foothold
in those islands, named by the commander of the third expedition (1536)
for the heir to the Spanish throne, who would be Philip II. They
thought they would perhaps take the Moluccas, with their fabulous spices,
from the Portuguese, but the Portuguese did not cooperate, and the Spanish
perforce must content themselves with their Philippine islands.
The Philippines is quite the strategic spot if one
needs a coaling station in the midst of the Pacific Ocean, but in the age
of sail it was almost as far away as one could get, and the Spanish were
rather slow to develop their foothold. It was only in 1565 that Cebu
was taken. Manila was founded only in 1571. The attention of
the Spanish government was rather heavily taken up with the business of
the New World, not to mention the Protestant Reformation. There was
not much gold way over there, it seemed. Why take men and materiel
all the way over to the other side of the world to throw at the Portuguese
when there were things to throw them at much closer to home?
The standoff between the two Iberian empires became
temporarily moot in 1580, when a Portuguese crisis of succession provided
an opportunity for Philip II of Spain to take over Portugal. All
of a sudden there was nothing to fight about in South America, in Africa,
or in the straits of Malacca. It was all Spanish. The Iberian
union endured until 1640, and when it came to an end Portugal was no longer
a contender in world politics. One year later Malacca fell to the
Dutch and the Portuguese were thrown out of east Asia, retaining only a
foothold in southern India.
The Spanish were thus left alone to do as they wished
with the Philippines, and they slowly grew their operation there.
But the islands never quite paid for themselves, there being nothing much
produced there that was valued at the time. The chief sources of
income were the duties on the China and Japan trades, supplemented with
a subsidy from customs duties in Acapulco in Mexico.
There being so little in the way of mercantile trade
on the islands whatever need for specie there was would have been served
by the leakage of silver from the Mexican boats stopping on their way to
China. Spanish cobs circulated in the islands, occasionally countermarked
in various locations in Indonesia, though not in the Philippines.
There was a tendency for the silver to leave the Philippines after a short
stay, and one does not encounter cobs from Philippino hoards today.
The economy of the European sector continued to
grow slowly in the 18th century, and at a certain point a need for small
change was experienced in Manila. This led to the production of a
funny looking local coin, the “barilla.” These were thick coins
cast mostly in copper, a few in lead, made at various times between 1701
and 1743. All of the runs were very small, they circulated very little
if at all. The Standard Catalog now lists them as patterns, which
may or may not be true in a technical sense. Be that as it may, there
was never really anything like a “production run.” All of the
barillas are very rare, and, when they turn up, are found to be, despite
their crudity, in high grade.
Eventually they got some machinery in Manila, and
the first struck coin, still called “barilla,” appeared with the date
1766. Thereafter, more coppers were struck, quarters and eighths
of the silver real through the end of the 18th century and into the 19th.
The coins are typically rather crude, sometimes with blundered devices
and legends. They tended to see heavy use and are thus usually found
in very circulated grades. Specimens from old collections can have
decent surfaces, but new finds typically come out of the ground and most
have significant corrosion.
One finds cast versions of these coins, often of
a brassy material described as “bell metal.” It is unclear whether
these are official emergency coins, made when the machinery was broken,
or contemporary counterfeits. They are usually offered as genuine
and official, and are collected as such.
This brings me to the subject of the collector market
for coins of the Philippines. It has been a standard maxim of mine
that the state of the market for the coins of a given country is directly
dependent on the presence and health of collector interest in that country
itself. If there is no home interest the market will be weak.
If there is, and only as long as and to the extent that there is, the market
will be “healthy.”
There actually is a home market in the Philippines.
It is not large, but it is dedicated, and it has a contingent of younger
aficionados to build a future, whatever it happens to turn out to be.
There is a Philippine Numismatic and Antiquarian Society (http://pnas1mr.tripod.com/)
that sponsors research, publishes, and conducts well attended auctions.
In addition, there is a set of collectors of Philippine
material resident in the USA. Many of these people were involved
in the Philippines during the American occupation, or during World War
II, or were stationed there afterwards, or are immigrants who now live
stateside. There are some Americans who collect the American colonial
coins because the are of the same artistic set as the St. Gaudens double
eagle, etc., and are quite beautiful. There are some Spanish collectors
as well.
There have also been, and still are, a few promoters
of Philippino coins in general. These people have been touting the
series, since, it seems, before I was born. They have put out occasional
price lists with many coins, common and rare, at high prices, attempting
to build the market, and hopefully to create a boom. This has not
happened, but publicity is always helpful, and if one notices that someone
is continuing to blow the same horn over a span of 30 years one will naturally
wonder if perhaps there is something to that tune.
The result of this interested base is that early
Philipino material priced reasonably will disappear quickly from dealer
stock, as has mine. Normal prices for 18th and early 19th century
coins are in the “over catalog” zone, typically at least double in
the normal low grades. The only way to keep such coins in stock is
to charge too much for them.
If you look insome editions of the Standard
Catalog for that era you will find a silver quarter real of the type that
was standard in the Spanish colonies in the 1790s. That particular
coin has neither date nor mintmark, and is probably from Peru rather than
from Manila.
Interesting winds of change were blowing across
the world at the dawn of the 19th century. There was a new country
in North America, a republic, of all things, with a president who had actually
stepped down when his term of office was done. Highly unusual.
Then there was that upheaval in France, which had gone through various
stages of badness, and was not over yet, but which had obviously put an
end to the old system. Slavery was coming to be seen as a serious
ethical problem rather than as an economic advantage. Some interesting
scientific things were happening, though practical applications were perhaps
not immediately apparent. In Asia, and in Africa for that matter,
there were little pockets of Europeans here and there, holding down strips
of territory, interfering in local politics, trading, trying to gain an
advantage. In a few places they were beginning to gain the upper
hand. In India the British controlled large swaths of territory and
exerted a dominating influence over most of the subcontinent. Similarly
with the Dutch in Java, at least in the coastal reasons. European
presence was fairly light on the ground in the colonial zone in 1800.
If you were a native and you didn’t live in one of the cities you could
live your whole life and never see a white devil. And most of the
land was still closed. Europeans could not get into China, Japan,
Korea. The Ottoman Empire, Iran, Afghanistan, and points north were
independent sovereign states. One could send ambassadors, but colonization
was out of the question.
In the really far flung zones European presence
was very light indeed. Not very much colonizing going on in Borneo,
hardly any in New Guinea. And then there was the Philippines.
In 1800 Spain was kind of in the doldrums. The king was pretty much
incompetent, and the ship of state floated along by inertia, erratically
guided by ministerial and court intrigues. The enormous colonial
enterprise ground on as it had before, taxes remitted, duties charged,
good shipped. The Philippines was the end of the line of the Spanish
colonial enterprise. That is where the some of the silver of Mexico
and Potosi ended up before it was sent on to China and Japan in trade for
porcelain crockery and silk. To the Spanish that was what the Philippines
were for. They built the port of Manila, and the high and mighty
built fancy houses there, but that’s about all they did. A bit
of logging and shipbuilding, a bit of agriculture, particularly of tobacco,
which would come to be a mainstay of the Philippine economy, and of sugar
cane. No significant explorations of the interior of the big islands,
and no significant settlement by Spaniards of the smaller ones either.
If you were a native you might live your entire life and never know the
Spanish were there.
Then came Napoleon and Europe flipped over again.
For Spain Napoleon meant the temporary end of the
monarchy, or at least of the dynasty. The colonies were cut off from
the homeland, and had to decide what to do. In the Americas the administrations
all eventually came to the conclusion that they should remain loyal to
king Ferdinand but should be opposed to the Napoleonic government.
In any event, the coinage situation continued as before. There was
local copper in various denominations from octavo (de real) to 4 quartos
(= 1 real). It is a desultory series, with dates ranging from the
1760s to the 1830s. Most common denomination is the quarto, then
the octavo. 2 and 4 quartos are rare. Die work tends to be
inferior with lots of blunders. Planchets are typically crude.
They are often found very worn, and are frequently corroded. Catalog
prices tend to be low for all grades.
Silver and gold during that period was all foreign.
You can figure it was about 98% Spanish colonial, the silver from Mexico,
Lima, Potosi, the gold from Mexico and Nueva Reino. A lot of silver
and a little bit of gold passed through Manila on its way to China.
Relatively speaking, not very much of it stuck around.
The fall of Napoleon clarified the situation of
the Spanish colonies vis a vis the homeland, but by that time the Americas
were in revolt. By 1815 Mexico was gone. The Philippines was
technically subsidiary to Mexico, and part of its revenues came from port
fees collected at Acapulco. These fees disappeared with Mexican independence.
This was a problem, that was a good chunk of money, and nothing to be done
about it. Good thing the tobacco was coming along. But there
was disruption during the second and third decades of the 19th century
as the tidal wave of revolution rolled across the Americas.
The Spanish government had never been good at making
quick changes and they took their sweet time adjusting to the new realities.
Meanwhile the old monopolistic trade policies that had been imposed for
centuries were is tatters, ships of all nations stopping in Manila to do
whatever business there was to be done. They left some of their money
there, and some of it stayed. As the 1810s turned into the 1820s
the quantity of colonial coins diminished and the quantity of coins from
those nasty upstart rebel countries increased. It was officially
annoying to the royal government to have this treasonous specie passing
through the loyal commerce of Manila. It didn’t seem that it was
going to stop. Something should be done.
What they did was make counterstamps.
There was a Manila mint. It made small copper
coins, not very well. The counterstamp envisioned was a pair of dies
the size of a silver 8 reales, the Spanish dollar. On one side it
would have MANILA 1828 and a border of radiating lines around the edge.
The other side would have the royal Spanish arms and the royal titles.
The idea was to obliterate the traitorous rebel legends and devices.
Basically they wanted to make new coins. But the machinery was decidedly
not up to the job, so this type I counterstamp was discontinued after a
few months and the type Is are rare.
They were still up for the counterstamping project,
so they made a new set of dies without the edge work. These worked
much better. The central elements had not been a problem. But
they were only used for a couple more months and the type IIs are rare
too. A third 1828 type is known, evidently from a single example,
and a very rare 1830 type for which a few examples are known.
They then took a breather until 1832, when they
resumed the counterstamping project. This time they used sensible
small countermarks, type crowned F.7.o, oval or round, on many more coins,
until 1835. If you’re going to find a Philippine counterstamp coin
its probably going to be this type, probably the round version, and its
probably going to be a Mexican royal coin. From this we can deduce
that the political dimension of this countermarking was taking a back seat
to the needs of commerce. And we can see a little bit of fiat cheating
by the government in the countermarking of base Bolivian coins and even
baser coins of Cundinamarca in Colombia. Official sanction of base
coins always meant that there was a cash flow problem. They needed
coins on the street. Anything would do.
Ferdinand died at the end of 1834 and was replaced
by queen Isabel, therefore the counterstamp was replaced as well.
The countermarking was applied to minor coins, and latterly on previously
countermarked coins - everything. These Isabel marked coins are scarce.
In 1837 Spain gave up and recognized the independence
of most of the new American states. The countermarking was then abandoned.
Collecting these countermarks is interesting, and
not merely because they are expensive and good investments. One can
approach the collection of countermarked coins in several ways. One
can go simple with a single example of the mark on any old coin, or on
every size. Or you can go for every type of
undercoin, which can become a rather large undertaking. Extremists
can collect by undertype and date, which is the next thing to getting every
one you see. A middle path is probably to be recommended.
Another thing that happened in 1834, aside from
a new monarch, was that the protective trade policies that had suppressed
commerce in Manila were removed and the port opened to visits by foreign
ships. This had been going on under the table for decades, but now
it was legalized, providing a big shot in the arm to the local economy.
With the abandonment of the countermarking project Manila opened up to
the foreign specie that was flooding the world. The vast majority
of it was Mexican.
As the 19th century progressed a middle class of
sorts emerged, trade and agriculture developed, even a bit of industry,
rope manufacture, etc. Education was advanced and people started
to think differently, like about things like freedom and independence.
Not much, just a little. News came in from abroad. Things were
happening all over.
Spanish coinage went decimal in the 1850s and they
decided to make colonial coins again after a long sleep. For the
Philippines it was silver minors, 10, 20, and 50 centimos, and gold 1,
2, and 4 pesos. The first series of these had queen Isabel’s portrait,
struck between 1861 and 1868, with various overdates. For the silver
1868 is the most common dates by far. For the gold there are some
common dates, some scarce, but the big difference is in the denominations.
1 and 2 pesos are far more common than 4 pesos. A lot of the little
ones were mounted, so get out that magnifying glass when you’re looking
at them.
There are some patterns of the 1850s which might
or might not be authorized. They’re rare.
They had a bit of trouble in Spain after the death
of Isabel, with several different government of various kinds, a pretender
making claims, an abortive republic. The discontinuity lasted until
the ascension of king Alfonso XII in 1880.
During the troubles the colonial coinage lapsed,
not to be resumed until Alfonso. The only common date for the Alfonso
coins is 1885. The others are quite scarce. Gold 4 pesos with
that king’s face are very rare.
A final Spanish issue, a silver peso, was brought
out in 1897 with the face of the new king, the boy Alfonso XIII.
This coin is not rare, but is popular, being as it is the only colonial
crown. It marks the end of an era. The Spanish ship of state
was about to collide with an American iceberg, so to speak.
The 1890s was an interesting decade, worth a brief
overview of world conditions before focusing in on our current subject:
the coinage of the Philippines. Of particular interest to us coin
people would be the economic situation of the world, for such conditions
determine directly the kind of coins that get made for us to pore over
and collect. And, of course, behind the economics are the governments
that make the monetary instruments “for the facilitation of trade,”
responding to events, sometimes producing them. The governments are
run by people, often these people are possessed of distorted and unstable
personalities. Enormous projects are undertaken for private and personal
reasons. This is as true today as it was 100 years ago. Good
thing, I suppose, that we’re looking at 100 years ago.
The dominant economic factors at the end of the
19th century were mostly new. There was precision mass manufacture,
of, for example, guns, farm implements, textiles, etc. This gave
the possessors of factories a crushing advantage over those who did not
possess them. There were railroads and steamships, which permitted
the transport of enormous tonnages of stuff at revolutionarily low rates.
In a few places there was electric lighting, which permitted people to
keep their factories open 24 hours a day if they wanted to. All brand
new factors.
All the new factories needed raw materials to keep
producing things. A scramble for resources ensued amongst the industrializing
nations, all of them save one located in Europe. A very small handlful
of nations these were that were capable of projecting power into the rest
of the world, overthrowing local governments and appropriating those lands
into their more modern systems, albeit at rather unfair and exploitative
terms. We lump the appropriations under the general rubric of “colonialism."
We can count those colonizing nations of the late
19th century on our fingers. Britain, far and away the greatest colonizer,
France the distant runner up, wannabe countries Germany and Japan, those
old, worn out remnant Spains and Portugal with their bits and pieces.
Russia had busied itself for much of the century annexing territory in
Central Asia. Denmark had a couple of islands in the Caribbean.
Belgium took a big piece of Central Africa.
And, analyzing the situation, asking themselves
if this was a good idea, were the businessmen, and their elected representatives,
of the country that had become, without anyone really noticing, the richest
in the world. That being, of course, the United States of America.
American businessmen and other visionaries had been
thinking about colonies, or suitably democratic substitute, since the very
beginning of the nation. What else, after all, was that western expansion
thing all about? More recognizably colonial were the several plans
floated at various times to “acquire” Central America in one way or
another, usually with one eye toward the building of a canal from the Atlantic
to the Pacific oceans.
During the 1880s the big colonialist nations went
on a tear, carving up Africa and big chunks of Asia, nailing down all kinds
of strategic materials and lucrative crops, setting the cowed populations
of those lands to various kinds of more or less forced labor in the extraction
of those commodities. Lots of money was made. It looked like
a lucrative system, though later on some of the practitioners, and, later
still, all of them, would learn that they had actually lost money on these
colonial operations. But in the late 19th century colonialism was
what was happening. American big business decided it wanted some
of this kind of action.
At the same time there was a kind of economic war
going on between, more or less, big business and small business.
The tendency toward concentration of capital in relatively few hands has
been fixture of human history. Time after time the rich got richer,
the poor got poorer. Time after time a tipping point was reached
and a crop of rich people got themselves ruined through wars or revolutions.
In the late 19th century there was essentially a
worldwide economic system in place based on the relatively free circulation
of silver and gold coins. Many countries made their gold and/or silver
coins equal in value to that of other countries for convenience or relative
advantage. Small business was done in silver. Big business
was done in gold. Contracts would frequently specify payment in one
or the other metal. Both metals floated on the open market.
A lot of silver flowed to China. A lot of gold flowed to England.
At various times governments would set their coinage ratios in terms of
one or the other metal. The reasons could be projective, being attempts
to give an advantage to either big or small business, reactive, as would
be the case if a new source of one of the metals opened up, or ideological/political,
an example of which might be Bryan’s “free silver” crusade.
Silver was “the standard” during much of the
19th century, but in the 1890s, for various reasons, the world, or all
of it that mattered, went on “the gold standard” This meant that
the silver was defined in terms of its gold value. The value of silver
rose at that time, and silver dollars disappeared from circulation, many
going to China, many resting in government vaults. If you didn’t
have enough business to do it in gold you suffered. If you had gold
you were doing fine. You got richer.
As the 1890s chugged on American big business was
looking for things to do, and thinking, as was the habit in those days,
about overseas territories with underutilized resources of materials and
people. They developed an ideological framework that would permit
them to feel good about foreign adventures, and started trying some muscle
flexing exercises, such as the takeover of Hawaii, which took place in
a number of stages over a number of years and was substantially in place
“just in time” for the critical episode of modern Philippine history;
the Spanish-American war.
The surface events that led up to that war involved
a revolt in the Spanish colony of Cuba. Cuba had been the object
of covetous speculation by various groups in America for a number of decades.
Spain was generally considered to be a backward, toothless old has-been
country. The revolt dragged on, the American press generally complained
about the situation and expressed sympathy for the rebels. Spain
remonstrated, the American press told Spain where to put it. Pressure
grew. Then came the incident of the sinking of the Maine.
If I’m not mistaken, it is now official US government
opinion that the explosion that sank the Maine was an accident, though
there are still people who blame Spain one way or another. At the
time, 1898, the incident was whipped into a froth by the American press.
Spanish and American investigating committees reached different conclusions.
McKinley felt that he was forced by the situation to demand freedom for
Cuba. Spain told America to mind its own business. The next
step was a blockade of Cuba, then a declaration of war by Spain, reciprocated
in short order by the USA.
The war was short, swift, and involved, for strategic
reasons, the Philippines. I’ll skip the details. In 1899
the USA had Cuba, Puerto Rico, some miscellaneous islands in the Pacific,
and the Philippines, in which it spent the next several years suppressing
an armed independence movement at great cost in life, money, and materiel.
OK, there’s the American empire. Here are
the colonies. What to do with them? America thought it was
a different thing than those other colonial powers. All of them had
official ideologies involving uplifting of the native populations, and
all of them were quite obviously putting extractive profits ahead of any
kind of altruism. America felt that it should and would be different.
It would really uplift the subject peoples. Yes.
The long and brutal war against the Philippino independence
fighters immediately introduced significant shades of gray into the dream
of uplifting tutelage. When the smoke cleared in the early years
of the 20th century administration proceeded along the general track of
colonies at the time. Money was poured in, profits were pulled out,
things got done. Some of it was good, some bad, a lot kind of mixed.
The stated goal of the American presence in the Philippines was that they
would leave some day, when, in their opinion, the locals were ready to
go it alone.
Among the things that America decided needed to
be done was the establishment of a sound local economy, a thing that had
never really been attempted in the Philippines. Arguments between
proponents of a “gold standard” currency and a free silver group were
resolved in favor of gold, though no coins of that metal were contemplated
or struck. Designs were submitted, and those of one Miliceo Figueroa,
a Philippine artist living in California, were adopted.
Starting in 1903 coins were struck at the Philadelphia
and San Francisco mints, a first series with the USA shield on the reverse.
In 1906 increased value of silver caused a coinage crisis around the world
and the silver content of the Philippine coins was reduced, about 34% for
the peso and about 61% for the minors. One might wonder why the contemporary
USA coinage did not undergo a similar reduction, and the answer has two
parts: on the one hand, production of high value silver dollars had ceased
in 1904, and on the other it was thought that the country could afford
to keep the lower value minors unchanged. But the Philippines got
their money changed, and much of the old heavy stuff was melted.
There is a not inconsiderable interest in the collection
of the Philippine coins of the American occupation, and has been for a
number of decades. A number of pamphlets have been written (I have
Neil Shafer’s 1961 effort in front of me as I write), and there has been
a string of specialist dealers promoting the series. One of the currently
active ones is Ray Czahor, who runs periodic mailbid auctions of Philippine
material only. His contact information: Ray Czahor, Cookie Jar Collectibles,
Box 597, Columbia, MD 21045.
You want to know the details of something, you ask
the specialist. Ray was generous with his expertise. As usual,
mintage figures do not tell the whole story, and prices in the catalogs
can be misleading. So, if you have a mind to, get out your Standard
Catalogs and compare notes. The 1903 half centavo is common, 1904
less so. No one liked them and they did not circulate to any extent,
which is why they are usually found in high grade. As is typical
of American coins, when an issue is not working they keep making them anyway
for a while, thus the 1905-08 half centavos in proof only. I’ll
get back to the proofs.
Though I have not personally seen all of the 1 centavo
dates, I have actually abstracted most of them from recent batches poundage,
albeit in low grade. This includes the scarce 1915S, but, interestingly,
no 1931, 1932, or 1934. Ray says they’re all available in high
grade, a function of guys bringing back the low denominations as souvenirs
over the years.
Varieties of 1 centavo mentioned in Neil Shafer’s
book: “United States Territorial Coinage for the Philippine Islands”:
1908S “horned S,” 1908S with repunched mintmark and first 2 digits
of date, and the 1918S “large S.” The 5 centavos of the US shield
series are all tough in high grade, even in nice circulated for that matter.
I have pulled a number of the early dates - 1903-18, out of recent poundage,
but the average condition was “lousy corroded.” None of the 20s
and 30s dates were found. Overall, the later early 5 centavos, of
reduced size, are somewhat scarce.
5 centavos varieties: 1918S mule with 20 centavos
reverse. The shield on the mule is about 8.5mm wide. On the
regular coins it is about 7mm.
10 centavos of both large and reduced size have
been reasonably easy to find in circulated grades, including the low mintage
1904 and 1909S. They are rather difficult in high grade. The
1910S is not known to have been struck, and all known specimens have been
condemned as fakes.
10 centavos varieties: 1909S over S and 1914S with
long and short crossbar to 4.
Same comments for 20 centavos as for 10 centavos.
1904 is the scarce date, but is available. 1928, a rush order at
the Manila mint, was struck using the reverse die for the 5 centavos, and
is common.
20 centavos varieties: 1905S with recut S and 1
of date, and for 1916S “horned S” and also “tilted-open” and “straight-closed”
6.
50 centavos include the odd 1903S, 2 pieces known,
maybe 3, one sold a few years back. 1904 is scarce but available.
Some dates are available in high grade, but a lot of the XF or better coins
I’ve seen have hairlines from cleaning. There are no die varieties.
1 peso coins include the uncommon 1904, the scarce
1906S, most of which were melted (beware of fakes), and the 1911S and 1912S,
most of which were kept in the bank at Manila as backing for the silver
certificates, and were subsequently dumped in Manila Bay when the Japanese
invaded. Some were salvaged, but they are ugly enough that they have
not had much presence in the collector market. The other dates are
fairly common. As with the 50 centavos, a lot of the high grades
are found with some cleaning. Oh well. Proofs were made as
sets, both for diplomatic use and for sale to collectors. Ray Czahor
says they are all available, though expensive. Some of the unsold
coins were put into circulation. I’ve run across the 1903 50 centavos
a couple of times. Ray says he’s never seen any of the 1903-08
coins as original sets in original cases, if indeed there were cases.
Bear with me for a moment while I propose a theory
of why World War II happened.
In Japan the military people who I shall refer to
as “bandits” saw an opportunity in the extreme weakness of China.
They thought: “They are big, we are little. If we wait until they
get their act together we Japanese are finished. This is our only
opportunity. Let’s take it.”
And they did.
Over in Germany Hitler and a bunch of military people
were thinking “Russia is huge. If they get their act together we
Germans are through. This is our only opportunity. Let’s
take it.”
And they did too. They calculated that they
had, through modern communications media, an immensely improved ability
to mobilize and control their people towards a set of goals. They
were not dummies, and realized that their industrial and economic strength
was not supreme, but it was not going to get much better unless they had
the resources of land and stuff they needed to expand. Germany and
Japan, even in the depths of the depression, were the preiminent economies
of their respective regions, but unless they eliminated their competition,
as they saw it, they would lose out in the long run. So they rolled
the dice.
In retrospect we can say that they played their
cards badly on both a micro and a macro scale. Micro because they
evidently believed their own particularist supremacist ideology, which
caused them to behave very badly toward the inhabitants of the lands they
conquered and to waste resources on meaningless objectives like exterminating
the Jews. Macro because they failed to keep the USA out of the war.
Both Germany and Japan realized from the beginning
of their venture that if the USA got involved they would lose. The
USA, essentially without a serious military in 1940, was the still richest
and most powerful country in the world, and they knew that only extreme
political navigation, or great good luck, or some deus ex machina like
a death ray or an atom bomb could possibly allow them to prevail against
the USA.
But in the midst of the war they found themselves
critically short of checks and balances. Hitler had no one to tell
him he was wrong when he waited too long to invade Russia. Japan
allowed Roosevelt to manipulate them into imagining that a “knockout
punch” might do the trick. So they rolled and lost. Here
we are.
This little disquisition on “the” war bears
directly on the subject at hand, which is Philippine coinage. A lot
of coins were dumped in the ocean when the Japanese invaded. A number
of commemoratives were struck honoring heroes and events of the war.
It was not some kind of flash in the pan.
The occupying Americans put together a system that
looked like the American government in the first decade of the 20th century.
One of the problems with the American system is that money can buy a spot
further up in the line. In America itself there are checks and balances
that sort of work to some extent, but in the Philippines the “practice”
government of the first decades the big players got almost all of the action
and built their advantage into the system in a way that caused problems
later. Traces of those problems show up in the coinage.
In 1935 the Philippines stopped being an occupied
colony with a toy government and became a “Commonwealth.” There
was a big party in Manila to
celebrate the occasion of the signing of various papers marking the
start of a proposed 10 year transition to full independence. The
same guys were in power though, and the USA military was still all over
the place.
The change of status was commemorated with a pair
of peso coins and a 50 centavo in 1936. A large number of these coins
were dumped in the ocean ahead of the Japanese invasion, making nice specimens
rather expensive and hard to find. These coins, pairing a living
Philippine leader with a significant living foreigner, established a tradition
of coins with such juxtapositions.
Regular Commonwealth coinage began in 1937.
The people-with-hammers types of the obverse remained, on the reverse the
American shield was replaced by a newly designed Philippine emblem.
There was no regular issue peso. The coinage separates out in terms
of availability.
Pre-war coins are not so common and are hard to
find in uncirculated, those of 1944 and 1945 are common in uncirculated.
The reason? Simple. The pre-war
coins disappeared during the Japanese occupation, replaced with the
well known paper “Japanese Invasion Money.” The Japanese found
and melted a lot of the little silver 10 & 20 centavos. The Americans
dumped all of the stuff in the treasury vaults into the sea. The
1 & 5 centavos coins became worthless. Adds up to difficult collecting,
though it can be done. The 1944 and 1945 coins on the other hand,
are, or were until recently, available in uncirculated by the roll.
The end of the war came just in time, from the Philippine
point of view, for the fulfilment of the promised independence on the promised
schedule. As before in the changeover to commonwealth status, there
was not a great deal of change on the ground. The American presence
was still pervasive, though a gradual diminution began which continued
through the end of the 20th century until today, when the American hand
is mostly unofficial and administratively nil.
The first coins of the new republic were the MacArthur
commemoratives of 1947, another case of a live foreign guy on a coin.
The MacArthur coins used to be very common and very cheap, but the prices
have increased significantly in the last few years.
No other coins were struck until 1958, at which
time a series of base metal minors was put on the street. The designs,
amazingly (to me at least), are the same old people-with-hammers.
American influence, perhaps, with America’s long-lived coin types as
models. Or maybe they just liked those types. The coins are
common, especially the 1958 date, but as is so often the case, immediate
availability of a given date of a given denomination might be iffy and
might require some searching. Four silver commemorative coins of
this period (1961 to 1967) are common and easy to find.
Ferdinand Marcos was elected president in 1965.
He was a guy who attracted different and strong opinions, though I think
that there is close to a general consensus that he lost it at the end,
sending his goons to kill one of his political oponents as soon as the
guy got off the plane and all. And of course, his public career started
with a murder too, in 1935, of which he was first convicted and later cleared.
In between there are versions of what happened, but he was in the public
eye quite a bit. You can collect a number of different banknotes
of various eras with his signature. In 1965 he was elected president,
more or less fair and square.
Marcos started out his rule doing a lot of apparently
popular things. He tightened up the bureaucracy and finances, encouraged
foreign investment, built infrastructure, also sending troops to fight
with the Americans in Vietnam and prosecuting a war against ongoing guerilla
struggles by communists and Muslims (Moros) in the Philippines itself.
Part of Marcos’s vision, if you will, was the
promotion of Philippine “authenticity.” Starting in 1967 the
official language of the Philippines was changed from English to Tagalog,
and the coinage changed as well. This was not actually a coinage
reform, just a change of spelling. Nevertheless, the types changed
completely, the modules as well. At more or less the same time the
link between the peso/piso and the dollar was cut. The new style
circulation coins are cheap in the catalog, and “should” be easily
available. As types they certainly are, but as is so often the case
with modern coins, some dates, for no apparent reason, are very hard to
find. This probably has more to do with the import habits of dealers
than any intrinsic scarcity. Most “worthless” coins, which is
what Philippines minors are, will only get into the hands of dealers, and
hence those of collectors, if the dealer, or a friend or relative, brings
back a roll or a few from some trip undertaken for some
other reason. I, for example, do not get on a plane, go somewhere,
and bring back significant weight of the local money, possibly breaking
the local export law, so that I can sell a few coins to the date collectors
for fifty cents each. No one else does either. So date stocks
are rarely comprehensive amongst the world coin dealers. And, to
the best of my knowledge, there is no one actually resident in the Philippines
who is supplying the modern Philippine coins to the collectors of the world.
Driving home the supply-demand conundrum (which
DIDN’T come first) was the experiment with the Franklin Mint during the
1970s. The mint, and many
countries, tried marketing proof sets, commemoratives, etc. and they
all eventually decided that the game was not worth the candle. One
of those countries was the Philippines. Today a few of those Franklin
products are fairly common. 1975 and 1979 proof sets comes to mind.
They turn up over and over in the boxes of FM proof sets that someone hauls
out of their closet to bring to someone like me. Others, though,
are quite hard to find. Matte coins, for instance.
Marcos was relected in 1969, fair and square, more
or less. His first project was an overhaul of the 1935 constitution.
The constitutional convention, which featured a bribery scandal, was a
document that gave his office greatly increased power and allowed him to
run for a third time. Very conveniently, a series of bombings in
Manila, plausibly attributed to communists, gave Marcos an excuse to impose
martial law in 1972. The law stayed martial for nine years.
Along with repression of the opposition and maintenance
of public order Marcos then set out a number of programs of social and
financial reform under the rubric “New Society.” The vision was
sort of corporate-statist, the model was sort of Italian fascist.
Rich and poor people were supposed to work together for the good of the
country. Some large holdings of “underused” land and industrial
plant were seized and earmarked for distribution to the needy. However,
what actually happened was what seems to happen every time these confiscation
schemes are tried. Corruption immediately becomes apparent, connected
people get the stuff, the poor remain, as always, with us. So in
Marcos’ Philippines. Some of the old oligarchs (the Aquinos, for
example) became outs. Others made their deals and stayed on the inside.
Elections in the late 70s were “problematic.”
As martial law dragged on a proliferation of commemorative
coins occurred. The coins were made in copper-nickel, silver, and
gold. Some of those coins are quite common. 1970 Marcos-Pope
Paul springs to mind. Even the gold version is relatively common.
There are others. But some of those 1970s coins are somewhat tough
as types, let alone such exotica as the 1977 25 piso KM217 in Franklin
Mint uncirculated, mintage 324, and priced at $30.00. Obviously a
very popular coin.
That is the “problem” with modern Philippines
coins. Only a few have market draw, usually for reasons that have
nothing to do with the Philippines. Marcos-Reagon. People like
those coins. Pope John Paul. They like those coins too.
The others, in the typical display case at the typical show... yawners.
The gold coins, when they are seen, first question anyone asks is “how
much above bullion.” Answer, usually, too much.
Martial law was lifted in 1981 when the pope refused
to visit unless that was done. In the 1980s Marcos’ regime started
to fall apart. Lots of money disapeared from the treasury, incompetent
family members were given important government posts, Marcos himself was
sick, unrest grew. The assassination of “out” oligarch and former
senator Benigno Aquino in 1983 put the reputation of the Marcos government
in the dumpster. Elections held in 1986 resulted a dispute over who
won, followed by massive street demostrations. The army defected,
and Corazon Aquino, widow of assassinated Benigno, became president.
The instability generated by the events of the 20th
century continue to play out today, with the president involved in various
electoral and corruption scandals.
They seem to have pretty much forgotten about commemorative
coins. The modern circulation stuff is so low value no one has it
to sell to collectors. Well, actually I have a bit of it. Piso
as I write is worth a bit less than 2 USA cents. I have a 5 sentimos
dated 2002 (date not listed in the catalog). I have them in circulated
condition! Tells you something about the economy in the Philippines.
Let's quickly run through the always interesting
and popular leprosarium coinage. Leprosy used to be a highly feared
infection. Still is, sort of, though now we have treatments and it
is known to be not so highly infectious. But until the advent of
antibiotics after World War II there were no good treatments. Nerve
damage and scar tissue development tended to produce extreme ugliness in
victims and people got horrified and chased lepers away. Charitable
people gathered them together in isolated communities where they were taken
care of. The general idea was to keep them completely separated from uninfected
people, thus the thought of separate tokens for the leper camps, sorry,
colonies.
In the Philippines they set up a remote island,
Culion, as a home for lepers, and starting in 1913 a number of tokens were
made for use there. There are a total of 19 pieces in the series.
The 1913 coins are all aluminum. The half centavo is the most common,
and is usually found in uncirculated. The others are scarce to rare,
and are usually found worn and corroded. 1920 coins are scarce.
The 1922 peso with straight wings is reasonably common, a variety with
curved rings is rare. The 1925 peso is the most common of the series
in circulated condition. Further issues of 1927 and 1930 are scarce.