Contact us on (02) 8445 2300
For all customer service and order enquiries

Woodslane Online Catalogues

9781501790706 Academic Inspection Copy

Vagrants and Outcasts

Chinese Laboring Classes, Criminality, and the Spanish Colonial State in the Philippines, 1831-1898
Description
Author
Biography
Google
Preview
Vagrants and Outcasts examines the Chinese working-class in the nineteenth-century Philippines, detailing how a core class in the colonial economy became categorized as social undesirables-vagrants, insolvents, beggars, pickpockets, drunkards, homeless, idlers and unemployed individuals-who threatened the Spanish colony's political and financial stability. In a collective history reconstructed from more than 5,000 criminal cases culled from Philippine and Spanish archives, Jely A. Galang reveals how particular state policies contributed to the precarious condition of Chinese workers. The Spanish colonial state utilized the law, police, court system, and punitive measures to define, control, and sentence putative offenders. These workers-turned-offenders, on the other hand, creatively employed various covert and overt ways to circumvent the state's judicial apparatus. Vagrants and Outcasts offers a new perspective on individuals whose lives are rarely revealed in the historical narrative. It also engages in wider debates concerning how vast populations of social outcasts in the past were created, defined, ostracized, criminalized, and subsequently punished by those in authority because of their insecure condition of unemployment, material deprivation, and sinking status.
Jely A. Galang is Professor of History at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman and Editor-in-Chief of the Chinese Studies Journal.
Google Preview content