An Archipelago Between Two Empires

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Few countries changed colonial hands as abruptly as the Philippines did in 1898. Spain had ruled the archipelago for more than three centuries, since Miguel Lopez de Legazpi founded the first permanent Spanish settlement in the 1560s, governing it for most of that time not directly from Madrid but through the Spanish colonial administration in Mexico City, a reminder that the Philippines' Spanish name, honoring King Philip II, arrived by way of a different Spanish empire across the Pacific entirely. The Spanish-American War ended that in a single year: Spain ceded the islands to the United States in the Treaty of Paris, and a new colonial administration, an ocean away from the old one, began almost overnight. The Philippine-American War that followed was fought by Filipinos who had just finished fighting Spain for their own independence and now faced a second colonial power claiming the same territory. American rule lasted until 1946, interrupted by Japanese occupation during the Second World War, and independence finally arrived on 4 July 1946, a date the United States deliberately chose to echo its own.