| Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines Subjects: Philippines -- Population -- History; Philippines -- Colonization -- History; Disease -- Philippines -- History; Spain -- Foreign relations -- Philippines -- History; Philippines -- Foreign relations -- Philippines -- History; Scholars have long assumed that Spanish colonial rule had only a limited demographic impact on the Philippines. Filipinos, they believed, had acquired immunity to Old World diseases prior to Spanish arrival; conquest was thought to have been more benign than what took place in the Americas because of more enlightened colonial policies introduced by Philip II. Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines illuminates the demographic history of the Spanish Philippines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, in the process, challenges these assumptions. |