Seven thousand islands took a Spanish prince’s sixteenth-century name
The Philippines spreads about 7,641 western Pacific islands across roughly 300,000 square kilometres between the South China Sea, Philippine Sea, and Celebes Sea. Ruy López de Villalobos labeled Leyte and Samar “Felipinas” in 1542 for the future Philip II.
Callao Cave’s Homo luzonensis (50,000–67,000 years) and traces of hominins back to about 709,000 years deepen the timeline. Negrito peoples preceded Austronesian waves; animism, Hindu-Buddhist influence, and Islam shaped island polities before Spanish rule. Austronesians sailing from Taiwan around 2200 BC settled the Batanes, where they raised stone forts called ijangs, and northern Luzon; lingling-o jade ornaments from about 2000 BC were carved in Luzon from Taiwanese stone.
The oldest surviving document is the Laguna Copperplate Inscription of 900 AD, in Old Malay using early Kawi letters. Trade with China opened under the late Tang and grew under the Song, bringing Fujianese merchants who settled and intermarried, while Majapahit carried Indian words and rites in the fourteenth century. Datus led barangays in a society of nobles, freemen and debt-bondsmen, and larger alliances answered to a rajah or sultan in states such as Tondo, Butuan, Sulu and Maynila.
Magellan claimed the islands for Spain in 1521, and Miguel López de Legazpi began lasting colonisation after arriving from New Spain in 1565. Manila became capital of the Spanish East Indies in 1571 and the western terminus of galleons built in Cavite and Bicol, and until 1821 the colony answered to Mexico City rather than Madrid. Spain spent heavily fighting revolts, Moro raids, the Dutch and a British occupation of Manila.
The 1899 Malolos Republic briefly claimed República Filipina; American authorities said “Philippine Islands” until the Republic of the Philippines stuck. An emerging, newly industrializing economy is shifting from farms toward services and manufacturing amid high biodiversity. Maritime borders touch Taiwan, Japan, Palau, Indonesia, and Malaysia across busy seas.
Source: Philippines
