While 1880 is remembered in the Philippines for a great earthquake that struck Manila and 1882 for a highly destructive typhoon that caused untold damage, the everyday disasters that happen all too often across the archipelago are soon forgotten. The interest is in the ‘big’ event, and historiography rarely focuses on less spectacular occurrences. 1881 was one such year when ‘nothing really much’ happened. And yet, a closer examination of the archival record reveals 12 months of earthquake, volcanic eruption, typhoon, storm, flood, and fire that afflicted people across the archipelago. These everyday calamities are historically such an integral part of Filipinos’ lives that they have shaped both their histories and their customs. More than the severity of the event, it is the frequency with which people have had to deal with calamity as an everyday event that has engendered socio-economic adaptation and cultural change. By examining the full range of disasters that people in the Philippines faced in 1881, this article examines the significant impact that geophysical and meteorological forces have had in influencing the daily lives of Filipinos in the past as they continue to do so in the present.

The peoples who inhabit the states that lie in the direct paths of typhoons in the Western North Pacific share a common history of repeated dislocation, destruction, and death that delimits a zone of comparative enquiry and historiographical interest. The track left by typhoons across ocean and land perfectly outline the dimensions of a more transnational historical region encompassing the Philippines, Vietnam, China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the island states of Micronesia. The peoples of these lands are bound together by a common experience of risk. Wind and water together offer a radical alternative historiography to state-centred master narratives that are revealed by pursuing issues and questions that transcend the spatial and temporal boundaries of any one state or region.

Robert Putnam's influential article ‘Bowling alone: America's declining social capital’ puts forward a number of possible factors to explain the decline of civil society in the USA. Many of these same forces are also at work in America's erstwhile colony in Asia, the Philippines, where almost the opposite outcome is true if one can measure such things as social capital by the activity of formal and informal associations and networks devoted to mutual assistance. Unlike Americans, however, Filipinos are exposed to a much higher degree of everyday risk. This article traces the evolution of mutual benefit associations and networks and suggests that it is in precisely those geographical regions most exposed to personal misfortune and community danger that they proliferate most readily.

The social construction of hazard is a matter of considerable moment to those engaged in disaster preparedness, management and relief. All too often, insufficient recognition is accorded to the manner in which people's actions are influenced by their cultural interpretation of what they are experiencing. Behaviours that appear inappropriate or illogical to external agency or relief workers may be entirely consistent and rational actions when understood in the context of the operating schema of the individuals experiencing such phenomena.

“The horse of these islands has arrived at such a state of degeneration,” concludes a report to the Governor-general of the Philippines in 1883, “that it is useless to think of its rejuvenation, it being much easier and more convenient to create a new breed with the importation of mares and Stallions from Spain” (Raza de Caballeria de Filipinas 1883). The debate over the colonial government's attempt to improve equine bloodlines through a selected breeding program with Arab stallions in the 1880s reveals much about changing Spanish attitudes toward nature in tropical regions. Although colonialism had endured in the Philippines since 1565, it was only in the nineteenth century that Europeans began to see themselves as maladapted to settlement in the islands. The tropics were increasingly regarded as a hostile and deleterious environment, and prolonged exposure to a hot and moist climate was blamed for the poor health of individuals and a progressive degeneration of race. Yet far from having to await the advances in bacteriology and parasitology of a new century (Anderson 1995), Spaniards displayed a growing conviction as to the efficacy of their own ability to control the natural world through an understanding of the processes of acclimatization.

With few exceptions, commentators agree that bandits were a major socio-economic phenomenon of the nineteenth-century Philippines. Historians and contemporary observers are united in lamenting the deplorable state to which the countryside was reduced by their depredations. Bandits infested the roads and rivers, ravaged fields and farms, sacked towns, pillaged churches and set light to houses in an orgy of murder, robbery and rapine in which there was “hardly an evil deed that their rash boldness [did] not perform”. Modern historiography has usually been content to interpret such crimes as either being indicative of social tensions within a society or as representing “a basic social activity with its own internal logic and historical development”. Only superficial attention has been paid to the environment within which these crimes were committed, historians merely noting that such and such an offence was committed in an urban or rural setting.

The basic administrative unit in the Spanish Philippines was the pueblo or municipal township. The pueblo encompassed both settled and unsettled districts within its geographical boundaries. The town centre Known as the población was the largest single residential zone within the municipality but was surrounded by smaller satellite communities. Beyond these areas of settlement were the sparsely populated regions of swamp, forest, plain or mountain. Size varied enormously both in geographical extent and population density from a few hundred families clustered in a single village or barangay in frontier areas to many tens of thousands of persons spread over a number of settlements in the lowland provinces of Luzon and the central Visayas.2 The administrative boundaries of one pueblo, however, bordered upon another so that all areas under Spanish suzerainty fell within one or other of these municipalities.

“This consuming cancer”, wrote Governor-General Camba of gambling in the preamble to an edict dated 7 March 1838, “that destroys the fortune of many families, encourages sloth, hinders the sources of public wealth, perverts good faith, corrupts the people's morals and leads them to degradation and misery. Unfortunately the vice has spread prolifically in this rich soil”. Spanish authorities held gambling to be both morally reprehensible and economically detrimental, yet official recognition was extended to an activity that could not be eradicated and from which the colonial state derived considerable financial benefit. The definition of criminality in respect to gambling, therefore, became dependent on the inability of the state to enforce its own regulations and the exigencies of financial demands. This article will examine the popularity of cockfighting and other forms of gambling in the Philippines, the extent of official ambivalence towards these sports, and the motives behind colonial policy. In the process, Gusfield's concept of the “moral passage”, whereby once tolerated behaviour is redefined as deviant and treated as criminal, will be shown to have application in reverse. Gambling was progressively legalized during the late 18th and 19th centuries as the state profited from such activities.