The Making of the Modern Philippines

A serious, well-researched survey of the Philippines, noted its manifold weaknesses and set them against what has been achieved in neighbouring countries. His is a welcome guide for the general reader to a country whose excesses are often difficult to fathom. -- Simon Scott Plummer * The Spectator * Bowring’s reliable and lucid new book draws on his experience as a journalist in the region. -- Michael Dillon * History Today * Provides insight into what Filipinos think about their country. -- Alan Robles * South China Morning Post * [Bowring] is the perfect chronicler of what Filipinos have done right and wrong … It is a much-needed wake-up call from someone with no agenda. -- Ruel S. De Vera * The Philippine Daily Inquirer * The Philippines merits both more attention and more understanding and The Making of the Modern Philippines is both a good place to start and a useful crib-sheet for those who had been following along but whose memory needs brushing up. -- Peter Gordon * Asian Review of Books * A book that the world should be reading to better understand the political tidal waves [in the Philippines]. -- John Berthelsen * Asia Sentinel * In The Making of the Modern Philippines, Phillip Bowring is acutely aware of the many contradictions that define the Philippines. Only someone who has lived and loved the region – a genuine “Asia hand,” as it were - can give us this fraught portrait of my country. * Patricio N. Abinales, Professor of Asian Studies, University of Hawaii-Manoa, USA * Bowring’s book on the Philippine narrative is a pot of history and current events, compressing the past and dissecting the present. It is the book Filipino youths, bombarded with revisionism, must read to understand the schizophrenic nature of their country’s ghosts with the Spanish, the Americans, and the Japanese. They will be able to see the landscape of the Left and the Right, the Church and the Oligarchs that stirred politics into the everyday lives of the people that were once proud of leading the pack of Southeast Asian nations. Just by the woven accounts of the past thirty-five years since the fall of a dictatorship, Bowring was able to us what went so wrong and what is left of the hopes a country had stood for. * Criselda Yabes, Writer and Journalist, The Philippines * This extraordinarily wide-ranging, yet accessible, account illuminates the intersections between the Philippines’ Malayic roots and connections, its obdurate colonial inheritances, and its contemporary geopolitical predicaments. Bowring works concertedly through the country’s complex, diverse past(s), painting a vivid picture of how today’s Philippines came to be – and what it could become. * Liana Chua, Tunku Abdul Rahman Assistant Professor in Malay World Studies, University of Cambridge, UK * The Philippines has long seemed something of an enigma to outsiders -- 2,000 disparate islands, ruled as a single political entity for more than 500 years. An indigenous Malay archipelago, but seeming more Spanish than Asian. And a former American colony with a U.S.-style constitution and political system, but a country marred by feudalism, violence and dictatorship. In The Making of the Modern Philippines, journalist and historian Philip Bowring makes sense of the riddle of the Philippines. In a lively narrative that begins in pre-colonial times and continues through colonization and occupation to the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship and the rule of its authoritarian President Rodrigo Duterte, Bowring shows us how the country's modern dark impulses are rooted in its past. This timely book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand this strategically vital country and its 100 million people, whose destiny could have outsized impact on Asia and the future stability of the region.