The Search for Spices and Souls: Catholic Missions as Colonial State in the Philippines

• Author: Dean Dulay
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140211066222
• Published date: 01 October 2022
• Date: 01 October 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2022, Vol. 55(12) 2050–2085

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140211066222

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The Search for Spices

and Souls: Catholic

Missions as Colonial

State in the Philippines

Dean Dulay

1



Abstract

A growing literature posits that colonial Christian missions brought schooling

to the colonies, improving human capital in ways that persist to this day. But in

some places, they did much more. This paper argues that colonial Catholic

missions in the Philippines functioned as state-builders, establishing law and

order and building fiscal and infrastructural capacities in territories they

controlled. The mission-as-state was the result of a bargain between the

Catholic missions and the Spanish colonial government: missionaries con-

verted the population and engaged in state-building, whereas the colonial

government reaped t he benefits of state expansion while staying in the capital.

Exposure to these Catholic missions-as-state then led to long-run improve-

ments in state capacity and development. I find that municipalities that had a

Catholic mission have higher levels of state capacity and development today.

A variety of mechanisms—religious competition, education, urbanization, and

structural transformation—explain these results.

Keywords

historical political economy, state capacity, economic development, religion,

Philippines

1

Singapore Management University, Singapore

Corresponding Author:

Dean Dulay, Department of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University, 90 Stamford

Road, Level 4, Singapore 178903, Singapore.

Email: deandulay@smu.edu.sg

Introduction

A rapidly growing literature in both political science and economics has

established the pivotal role of Christian missions during the period of col-

onization, and the implications of missionary exposure on long-run political

and economic outcomes (Lankina & Getachew, 2012;Valencia Caicedo,

2018;Waldinger, 2017;Woodberry, 2012). In doing so, it has begun to re-

shape our understanding of fundamental aspects of colonial institutions, since

missionary activity was a central element of most colonial enterprises. While

this extant literature varies in its geographical scope—from Spanish priests in

Latin America to British ministers in India—its conceptualization of missions

has remained relatively uniform. This literature posits that the long-run effects

of missions are a consequence of culture and human capital. Missions are seen

as organizations independent of the colonial government, whose religious

convictions led them to increase human capital in the colonies, leading to

long-term increases in human capital, and subsequently to increases in the

political and economic outcomes that human capital purportedly facilitates,

such as higher levels of income and greater democracy in the present day.

Though insightful, these theories leave fundamental questions unexplained:

(1) How did missions engage in state-building and relate with the colonial

government? and (2) How did the mission-state nexus affect long-run political

and economic development?

As an institution that operated within the larger milieu of colonial ex-

pansion, Christian missions operated in conjunction with, and with the help of,

the colonial government. Yet the state, and hence how missions engaged with

it, is conspicuously absent from the extant literature on the long-run effects of

missions. This omission is doubly curious when we consider the intimate

relationship between the Church and the state in the colonizer countries

themselves, and the historical work that has documented how this relationship

has borne out in the colonized countries.

This paper addresses this gap by proposing an argument that delineates the

relationship between the secular colonial government and missionaries, with

an application to the relationship between Catholic missions and the colonial

Spanish government in the Philippines. I argue that, because of (i) resource

scarcity in the periphery of the colonized country and (ii) opportunities for

wealth accumulation in the country’s capital, Catholic missions substituted for

the Spanish colonial state and functioned as state-builders—establishing law

and order, providing goods and services, and building administrative and

political capacities in the territories they controlled. Resource scarcity—the

lack of labor, spices, gold, and other such inputs—lowered the benefits to

state-building in the periphery for Spanish colonizers. In addition, the

abundant opportunities for wealth accumulation in the capital further lowered

the relative costs of colonial territorial expansion. Under these conditions, the

Dulay 2051

colonial government opted to stay in the capital, to accumulate wealth, and

thus outsourced state-building in the periphery to the Catholic missionaries.

This mode of colonial expansion represented a mutually beneficial bargain

between the colonial government and the missionaries. The Catholic mis-

sionaries could convert the natives if they established governance structures in

the periphery, while the agents of the colonial government could reap the

economic benefits of missionary governance through tax revenues and forced

labor that were brought back to the capital. In short, Catholic missions proxied

for the colonial state, and the presence of a colonial mission implied the

presence of the state itself. The particulars of the relationship between

missions and the state in the Philippines suggest that the scope conditions

underlying this bargaining model include (i) divergent incentives for territorial

expansion between missions and the colonial government and (ii) a relatively

balanced power distribution between both groups, such that one cannot accrue

benefits without the compliance of the other.

The state-building activities of Catholic missions had long-run implica-

tions for development and state capacity. A growing literature links historical

exposure to the state with contemporary economic development (Broms,

2017;Lee, 2019). As extensions of the state, this relationship holds for

exposure to Catholic missions as well. An empirical implication of the theory

is that areas with a Catholic mission have higher levels of contemporary state

capacity and economic development than areas without a Catholic mission.

The Philippines is an appropriate context by which to evaluate the ar-

gument. The structural conditions of the islands present a particularly ap-

pealing case to test the argument’s implications. First, the Philippines’

distance from Spain implied that the colonial government apparatus was not

strong enough, bureaucratically and militarily, to expand into the periphery of

the country. Second, the low population density and relative resource scarcity

of the islands implied lower returns to expansion for the extractive Spanish

government. Third, its location and pre-existing trade relations with East Asia

led to commercial profits by engaging in trade. These structural conditions

made economic accumulation through expansion too costly for the soldiers

and bureaucrats of the Spanish empire. They preferred to stay in the capital

and make money from international trade. On the other hand, despite lower

economic returns, Catholic missions were driven toward converting the local

population in the periphery and were therefore still willing to engage in

territorial expansion and state-building. Finally, these divergent incentives

coupled with the Catholic missionaries’state-building gave the missionaries

bargaining power: they knew that the colonial government would not be

willing to replace them in the periphery given the economic losses the

government would accrue from doing so.

To evaluate the long-run effect of missionary governance, I leverage a

novel data set that uses a variety of archival and contemporary sources. To

2052 Comparative Political Studies 55(12)