The Making of a Myth

For close to fifty years, the accepted wisdom on land tenure in the colonial Philippines derives from a book written by John Leddy Phelan. Phelan claims that the Spanish regime radically transformed the nature of land tenure in the archipelago by substituting the European concept of private ownershipfor the pre-Hispanic arrangement, which emphasized communal ownership. He tells us further that one result of the change was a concentration of land in the hands of an indigenous elite. Phelan's thesis has been widely adopted by historians of the Philippines. This article argues that much of Phelan's formulation is myth

Agriculture · Archaeology · Archipelago · Colonialism · Elite · Indigenous · Land tenure · Mythology · Political science · Politics · Project commissioning · Publishing · Sociology · Classics · History · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Ecology

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