Datu

Pronounced DA-too. The chief of a barangay in sixteenth-century Philippine society. He settled disputes, led in war, and received obligation directly from the people below him, as a person rather than as the holder of an office.

That last point is the one this course keeps returning to. Authority ran through the man, not through a rule that would still exist if he died. Combined with hereditary rank and obligation that travelled through kinship, it is exactly the kind of structure a colonial administration can plug into instead of replacing, and Spain did precisely that: the datu class was converted by decree into the principalía.

Raw material, in this course’s phrasing, rather than cause. Hundreds of competing chiefs are not a national system for moving money upward. Somebody had to build that, and the building has a date.

Source: William Henry Scott, Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society, Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1994, free to borrow on the Internet Archive. The conversion of the datu class into a colonial rank is documented in Philip II’s royal order of 11 June 1594, via Blair and Robertson, The Philippine Islands, 1493 to 1898.

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