Polo y servicio

Compulsory labour owed to the Spanish colonial state by men of working age: originally forty days a year for males aged sixteen to sixty, reduced to fifteen days in 1884. Shipyards, roads, fortifications, whatever the colony required.

The cost was not only the days. Labour was taken during the seasons a household’s own fields needed it, from an economy where a missed planting is not recoverable. Rizal put forced shipyard labour and conscription near the top of his causal list when he explained, in 1890, what had actually happened to productive effort in the islands.

It is one of the four parts of the machine Lesson 1.2 assembles, and it was one of the specific things the Propaganda Movement demanded be abolished.

Source: The forty-day obligation and the 1884 reduction are standard and the reduction is the checkable hook; the surrounding detail is flagged in this course’s research base as resting on encyclopedic summaries pending Phelan (1959). Rizal’s treatment is in Sobre la indolencia de los filipinos, La Solidaridad, 1890, free at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6885 .

First used in: 1.2 · The office that was paid by the people it governed