> Spain just didn't invest in administering their territories and didn't develop them b/c there was little reason to. The wealth that could be potentially made would be concentrated into a few chosen subjects of the Crown, the Crown, and the Church.

That has a few parallels with what would be called crony capitalism today, extracting resources and exploiting labour…not really to improve the economy in the homeland let alone the colonies, but more to pay off the Crown and the Church, and anyone they saw as their favourites.

I wonder if that's also why a lot of former Spanish colonies (including the Philippines!) tend to become pretty corrupt and sometimes have dictatorships and kleptocracies where leaders resort to similar kinds of cronyism.

Little, if anything. Like with our other colonisers the average Filipinos think little of the Japanese as a colonial force here. At most we get taught a little about what their contributions and a list of a few of the big events that happened while they were here, but that's generally it.

If we do think about them, we tend to be more positive or apologising for colonial rule because we think they brought good things or at least weren't that bad. There are exceptions who know a bit more about the Japanese/WW2 period including the atrocities, but even they probably are neutral to at most positive about Japan today. Filipinos don't usually hold grudges against colonial powers (but can hold them against native/local opposition for years).

>One interesting part of Spanish history that isn't as widely known as it should be is the Reconquista

I thought it was one of the better known parts? It's kind of what laid the template for the conservative, royal-absolutist and very Catholic Spain that followed, mostly little changed until the 1800s upheavals.

> Spain spent hundreds of years recovering her land from the Muslim invaders until they were completely expelled from the country

They must have been surprised or shocked to find more Muslims on the other side of the world, in the early Philippines, in Manila and Mindanao. The Spanish conquest there then really does seem to just be a Reconquista continuation if so.

>if the goal was mainly trade the Spanish could have made use of Manila similar to how the Portuguese and Dutch used Malacca and Batavia during the 17th century: as trade hubs and chokepoints to control, dominate, or divert existing trade routes - without caring too much about conquering the hinterland and converting the native population

I would argue with Manila the Spanish actually kind of did both. I suppose the "conquering and converting" was the bigger and more lasting impact of course, but I thought that in some small way the galleon trade did sort of "control, dominate, or divert existing trade routes" that existed before the Spanish period.

For example, pre-Spain the Philippine kingdoms used to trade a lot more with the Malay and other Southeast Asian regions, even as far as India (and Arab regions) I guess—in addition to the existing China trade; but after Spain came in, the South/Southeast Asian trade mostly disappeared or at least is not heard of as much, compared to the new connection with Mexico/the Americas and the expanding Chinese connection, partly due to Chinese who wanted Mexican silver.

But for sure conquering and converting was always somehow much bigger for the Spanish. Somehow I feel it might be why the Filipinos got so much more culturally changed than their neighbours in SEA—but not so much physically, as few Spaniards actually went all the way there to settle, except for friars, and barring those cases that raped or otherwise knocked up native women, they wouldn't generally be able to have offspring.

Now I wonder if this low priority on trade has not had adverse consequences for the modern Philippines after independence from Spain, though the American colonial period after 1898 is another complicating factor.

Wonder if it could ever be said with any certainty that the under-focus on trade by the Spanish colonisers has in any way (direct or not) resulted in why even recently, the Philippine economy has historically had trouble growing fast or sustaining growth anytime it does grow fast, unlike more successful East Asian (and even some Southeast Asian) economies.

Silver, too. I wonder how much they ultimately took out of their American colonies over the 300 years or so they were there.

In many ways the economic profile of Spanish rule, at least in the Americas, does seem to revolve much more on direct extraction than trading with local populations.

>based on my very limited knowledge of the Spanish conquest of the Philippines, I would suspect that this fits better with the “American” pattern than the “Indian” or “Indonesian.”

Well, the strange thing is that the Spanish conquest of the Philippines also doesn't quite fit the "standard American" pattern either, apart from the major goal of Christianising the natives. But economically it seems at least more trade oriented than the mostly extraction-based (Latin) American economy, largely also because the Spanish found little to extract directly in the Philippines themselves: less spices than nearby Indonesia (under Portuguese then Dutch control) and less gold or silver than in Mexico or South America. (Which is not to say they didn't extract what they could here. Filipino natives wore and traded a lot of gold and maybe also silver, it wasn't a lot, but a lot of it was in danger of being melted down for reuse as Church relics and things, for example. And they extracted labour, if that counts; most of it was technically not slavery, but the working conditions were still bad and pay was often unreliable or low.) On the other hand, demographically the Philippines as the Spanish found them does seem to fit more like the average American profile, outside at least of the big empires like the Incans or Aztecs, like what you said here:

>Population levels were lower (although this was not the case everywhere) and native societies enjoyed a lower level of economic and technical development

I actually think Philippine populations in the 1600s or so, from what we can tell, might even have declined because of Spanish colonial labour extraction taking its toll, rather than the genocidal effect of the early American conquests. Some scholars have looked into this, like Linda Newson.

But going back to the trade thing, I don't know if this is reaching to say, but, if we disregard the religious and general military/territorial part of the conquest, the economic part of the Spanish conquest, in the Philippines specifically, did seem to be based more around trading than most people know or think: using Manila as a galleon port and a base for trading with China was the main one. And yet even with this, if this is a major difference between their Asian/Philippine economic approach as compared to the American one, overall the perception is still that Spain in general is not seen as prioritising trade to the degree other European empires did. I guess while the other empires were aggressive at economic expansion throughout Asia, the Spanish were content to stop with the galleons for the most part.

>Spanish colonial trade was generally subject to stricter and more limited monopolies, and did not create wealthy merchant elites to the same extent as in England and the Dutch Republic.

One thing I did notice is the Spanish were very late to create what was basically a "Spanish East India Company", the Royal Company of the Philippines established in the 1780s, nearly 200 years after the English and Dutch created their better known East India Companies. And even then it didn't last very long and was rarely profitable. By the 1830s it was gone again.

Also someone said in another repost of this thread that some merchants in Spain itself, to the extent they were ever influential, actually opposed competition coming in from Asia and from the Philippines generally, maybe they got all they could need more locally or closer to home?