The history of the Philippines

The Philippines is an archipelago of more than 7,000 islands on the western edge of the Pacific. Its first peoples, Negrito hunter-gatherers and later Austronesian seafarers, built a world of river and coastal chiefdoms that traded with China, the Malay world and India, while Islam took root in the south. Spain conquered most of the islands from 1565 and ruled them for more than three centuries, giving the country its name, its Catholic majority and its first unified government. A revolution against Spain in 1896 was overtaken by American colonisation, Japanese occupation in the Second World War brought immense suffering, and independence came in 1946. Since then the republic has lived through dictatorship, popular uprisings, long insurgencies and a powerful tradition of political dynasties.

Stone tools and a butchered rhinoceros found in Kalinga, northern Luzon, show that hominins reached the islands around 700,000 years ago. Bones from Callao Cave on Luzon belong to a distinct archaic species, Homo luzonensis, and the oldest modern human remains, from the Tabon Caves on Palawan, are roughly 47,000 years old. The first lasting inhabitants were the ancestors of today's Negrito peoples, such as the Aeta, who arrived by land bridges and short sea crossings during the Ice Age.

From around 3000 BCE, Austronesian-speaking farmers and sailors spread southwards from Taiwan, bringing rice, pottery and outrigger boats. Their descendants form the great majority of Filipinos today and were part of the same migration that later carried Austronesian peoples across the Pacific and to Madagascar. Jade from Taiwan was worked into ornaments in the islands and traded around the South China Sea, linking the archipelago to the Sa Huỳnh culture of Vietnam. In the Cordillera of northern Luzon, the Ifugao carved spectacular rice terraces, whose age is still debated by archaeologists.

By the first millennium CE, communities were organised into barangays, kin-based settlements led by a datu and divided into nobles, freemen and dependants. The larger river-mouth settlements grew into trading states. The Laguna Copperplate Inscription of 900 CE, written in Old Malay in the Kawi script, records the cancellation of a debt and names Tondo, on Manila Bay, showing contacts with Java and the Indianised courts of the region. Chinese records describe Butuan in Mindanao sending tribute missions in the eleventh century, and Ma-i, probably on Mindoro or in Laguna, trading with Song merchants. Cebu and the Visayan polities traded and raided widely.

Influences from Hinduism and Buddhism reached the islands through the Srivijaya and Majapahit worlds, leaving words, titles and gold work, though the islands were never ruled from Java. Under the Ming dynasty, several local rulers sent missions to China, and a king of Sulu died on such a visit in 1417. Islam spread from the fourteenth century through traders and missionaries from the Malay world, creating the Sultanate of Sulu in the fifteenth century and the Sultanate of Maguindanao in the sixteenth. By the 1500s the Sultanate of Brunei had close ties with Manila, whose Muslim ruler Rajah Sulayman was linked to the Bruneian royal house. Many communities used the Baybayin script.

The expedition of Ferdinand Magellan, sailing for Spain, reached the islands in March 1521. Magellan made allies in Cebu and baptised its ruler, but was killed at Mactan in April 1521 fighting the warriors of the chief Lapulapu, now honoured as a national hero. A later expedition named the islands Las Islas Filipinas after the future Philip II of Spain. Lasting conquest began when Miguel López de Legazpi sailed from Mexico and founded a settlement at Cebu in 1565. In 1571 he took Maynila from Rajah Sulayman and made Manila the capital.

The islands became the westernmost outpost of the Spanish Empire, governed until 1821 through the Viceroyalty of New Spain in Mexico. For 250 years the Manila galleons carried Chinese silk and porcelain across the Pacific to Acapulco and brought back American silver, making Manila one of the first hubs of a truly global trade. A large Chinese merchant community grew up outside the walls of Intramuros and suffered several massacres, the first in 1603.

Spain ruled through a thin layer of officials and, above all, the Catholic religious orders, which converted most lowland peoples to Christianity, gathered them into towns around churches and became great landowners. The University of Santo Tomas was founded in Manila in 1611. Forced labour and tribute provoked frequent revolts, among them Diego Silang's uprising in Ilocos in 1762 and 1763, led after his assassination by his widow Gabriela. The Muslim sultanates of Mindanao and Sulu resisted conquest for more than three centuries in the long Moro wars, and many upland peoples of the Cordillera also stayed outside Spanish control. The Dutch attacked repeatedly in the seventeenth century, and during the Seven Years' War British troops occupied Manila from 1762 to 1764.

The opening of Manila to foreign trade and of the Suez Canal in 1869 brought sugar, tobacco and abaca exports, a wealthier mestizo and native elite, and young Filipinos studying in Europe. The execution of three Filipino priests, known as Gomburza, after a mutiny at Cavite in 1872 became a turning point. The ilustrados of the Propaganda Movement, above all José Rizal, whose novel Noli Me Tángere appeared in 1887, called for reform and equal rights. In 1892 Andrés Bonifacio founded the Katipunan, a secret society seeking independence, and in August 1896 it launched the Philippine Revolution. Spain executed Rizal in Manila on 30 December 1896. Leadership passed to Emilio Aguinaldo, who had Bonifacio executed in 1897 and accepted exile in Hong Kong under the truce of Biak-na-Bato.

When war broke out between Spain and the United States in 1898, an American fleet destroyed the Spanish squadron in Manila Bay, and Aguinaldo returned to declare independence at Kawit on 12 June 1898. In the Treaty of Paris, however, Spain ceded the islands to the United States for 20 million dollars. The First Philippine Republic, proclaimed at Malolos in January 1899, fought the Americans from February 1899. The war was brutal: US forces burned villages and herded civilians into camps, and at least 200,000 Filipino civilians died, mostly from famine and disease. Aguinaldo was captured in 1901 and Theodore Roosevelt declared the war over in 1902, though resistance continued, especially among the Moros, whose villagers were massacred at Bud Dajo in 1906.

American rule introduced public schools taught in English, an elected Philippine Assembly in 1907 and a growing Filipino share of government, while American firms and the landowning elite dominated the economy. The Jones Act of 1916 promised eventual independence, and the Tydings–McDuffie Act of 1934 created a self-governing Commonwealth in 1935 under President Manuel Quezon, with full independence scheduled for 1946.

Hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Empire of Japan struck the Philippines. American and Filipino forces surrendered on Bataan in April 1942 and Corregidor in May, and thousands of prisoners died on the Bataan Death March. Japan set up a nominally independent republic under José P. Laurel in 1943, but guerrilla movements, including the communist-led Hukbalahap, fought on across the islands. General Douglas MacArthur's forces landed on Leyte in October 1944. The battle for Manila in February and March 1945 destroyed most of the city and killed around 100,000 civilians, many massacred by Japanese troops. More than half a million Filipinos died during World War II.

The Republic of the Philippines became independent on 4 July 1946, though agreements kept large American military bases and trade privileges in place. The Huk rebellion in central Luzon was defeated in the early 1950s, partly through land and army reforms under President Ramon Magsaysay. The Philippines aligned firmly with the West in the Cold War, sending troops to the Korean War and a non-combat contingent to the Vietnam War, and in 1962 it laid claim to Sabah, a dispute with Malaysia that remains unresolved.

Ferdinand Marcos was elected president in 1965 and re-elected in 1969. Citing communist and Muslim insurgencies, he declared martial law in September 1972, closed Congress and the press, and ruled by decree. The Maoist New People's Army, founded in 1969, grew in the countryside, and the Moro National Liberation Front waged war in Mindanao. Under martial law, thousands of opponents were killed, tortured or imprisoned, while Marcos, his wife Imelda and their associates amassed a fortune estimated in billions of dollars. Martial law was formally lifted in 1981. The assassination of the opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr on his return to Manila in 1983 turned the middle classes and the Catholic Church against the regime. When Marcos claimed victory over Aquino's widow, Corazon, in a fraud-marred snap election, a military revolt and vast crowds on Manila's EDSA avenue forced him into exile in February 1986.

Corazon Aquino restored democratic institutions under a new constitution in 1987 and survived several coup attempts. In 1991 the Senate rejected a new bases treaty, and the American bases at Clark and Subic closed after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo. Fidel Ramos brought economic recovery and signed a peace agreement with the Moro National Liberation Front in 1996. His successor Joseph Estrada was removed by a second popular uprising in 2001 amid corruption charges, and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo's presidency was clouded by allegations of electoral fraud. Typhoon Haiyan killed more than 6,000 people in 2013. Under Benigno Aquino III, the government reached a peace deal with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in 2014, and in 2016 an arbitral tribunal in The Hague ruled against China's claims in the South China Sea, which Beijing rejected.

Rodrigo Duterte, president from 2016 to 2022, waged a war on drugs in which thousands of suspects were killed by police and vigilantes, drew closer to China, and saw Islamic State-aligned militants besiege the city of Marawi in 2017. The autonomous region of Bangsamoro was created in 2019. In 2022 Ferdinand Marcos Jr, known as Bongbong, won the presidency by a landslide with Duterte's daughter Sara as vice-president. He restored closer ties with the United States amid repeated confrontations with Chinese vessels in disputed waters. The alliance with the Dutertes collapsed, and in March 2025 Rodrigo Duterte was arrested in Manila on a warrant from the International Criminal Court over the drug war killings. The 2025 midterm elections gave Marcos mixed results, and in January 2026 an impeachment complaint was filed against him that included accusations over a corruption scandal in flood-control projects. In 2026 the Philippines chaired ASEAN, hosting the first summit attended by Timor-Leste as a full member.