Alipin

Pronounced a-LI-pin. The third of the three broad ranks of sixteenth-century Philippine society: dependents bound by debt and obligation. Some lived in their own houses and farmed their own land while owing labour. Some lived in the master’s household.

The usual English rendering is “slave,” and Scott spent real effort arguing that the translation is wrong. Alipin covers a spectrum of debt dependency with degrees, with routes out, and with a legal texture the English word flattens completely. Reading the sixteenth century through a nineteenth-century Atlantic word produces a society that did not exist.

The share of the population involved is commonly given as somewhere between a fifth and a third. That range circulates in summaries rather than resting on a count anybody took, so it is used here as an order of magnitude and never as a statistic.

Source: William Henry Scott, Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society, Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1994, free to borrow on the Internet Archive. Scott argues directly against the “slave” translation. The 20 to 33 percent range is flagged as disputed in this course’s history research map, where the page reference in Scott is recorded as still outstanding.

First used in: 1.1 · Before anyone called it the Philippines