19th century Philippines
A01=Jely A. Galang
administrative control
agricultural development
Author_Jely A. Galang
British and American firms
Category=NHF
Category=NHTQ
Chinese diaspora
Chinese migration
colonial census
colonial demographics
colonial economic exploitation
colonial policing
colonial studies
contract labor
coolies
crimes of poverty
economic marginalization
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
financial instability
foreign commercial enterprises
forthcoming
frontier settlement
Fujian province
Guangdong province
historical narrative gaps
homelessness
indentured labor
international trade expansion
labor force composition
labor history
labor migration
marginalized populations
poverty
racial discrimination
social exclusion
social stratification
social undesirables
Spanish colonial period
Spanish colonial state
Spanish Empire
subaltern history
unemployment
vagrancy laws
working-class history
Product details
- ISBN 9781501790690
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Dec 2026
- Publisher: Cornell University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
