This volume illuminates the demographic history of the Spanish Philippines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in the process, challenges the long-held assumption that the Spanish colonial rule had only a limited demographic impact on the Philippines. Newson asserts that the Filipino suffered a significant decline in the early colonial period, and argues that the sparse population of the islands meant that Old World diseases could not become endemic in pre-Spanish times. She also shows that the initial conquest of the Philippines was far bloodier than has often been supposed and that subsequent Spanish demands for tribute, labour, and land brought socio-economic transformations and depopulation that were prolonged beyond the early conquest years. With notes, bibliography and index.