Manila is not Havana!!

1762 - 1764. British learn the hard way:

Military occupation of the Philippines is one long and hard recipe for disaster.

Filipinos did not respond to conquest by cooperating with their conquerors...



Adapted from this source: Author Fred Anderson's The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War. 2005.


Pages 225 - 227.


"Roughly a month after Havana surrendered, British forces on the far side of the world embarked on the last great enterprise of the war: the seizure of Manila.

The British under Lieutenant Colonel William Draper of the Seventy - ninth Regiment, reinforced with "one artillery company, two companies of French deserters, and several hundred Asian recruits ... established batteries before the walls of Manila, and in just under two weeks' time succeeded in making a breach large enough to rush through and take the city by storm.

"What the exuberant Britons did not know about the Philippine adventure, however, was in some ways the most important of all.

"Unlike the planters of Guadeloupe, Cuba, and the other islands Britain had seized in the West Indies, the people of the Philippines did not respond to conquest by cooperating with their conquerors, but by mounting an insurrection that effectively confined the British to Manila and its immediate surroundings.

"By the time Britain finally returned the capital to Spanish sovereignty on May 31, 1764, the East India Company had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds beyond what it and initially realized in plunder, in trying to hold on to a colony whose inhabitants preferred killing their occupiers to trading with them.

"The lesson of Manila was a simple and powerful one, but a British public transfixed by the glories of imperial victory did not grasp its significance.

"Armed force could conquer lands and peoples, but only voluntary cooperation could maintain imperial control.

"Wherever the conquered withheld their consent, the empire's sway could not exceed the range if its guns..."

Humm ... some mighty interesting points here, huh??!! :)