There are a few books about the Philippine colonial experienc that I consider influential in changing how I view Filipino history for that period. For a historian, these books are a milestone because they cause a shift in one’s thinking, if not a paradigm shift at how a history is to be interpreted. Of course history is all about interpretation, for no one even the best of        historians out there can never recreate the events that they are writing about. Let’s look at these books. Barangay (1997, AUP) by the late W.H. Scott, described pre-colonial society on the eve of Spanish colonization as a vibrant, complex culture that equaled similar cultures that the West encountered in their expansion to the east during the 15th century. Scotty was a scholar par excellence who was begrudgingly snubbed by ‘nationalist’ historians because he was an American, an Episcopalian missionary, a Chinese expert, and endowed with wickedly  acerbic humor. He was a good friend and mentor who spent many a good cups of coffee at my campus home in UP Diliman. He taught me to always question my sources and look for something that said the contrary. All this he pronounced as he sat crossed legged and sipped the spilled coffee from its saucer. The barangay was not only a complex organization of roles and statuses between chiefs, nobles, commoners and indentured servants (called slaves by Spanish historians) but also was an amorphous political organization that can ally tactically with competitors against potential enemies. When Spanish, led by Magellan, first arrived in the Philippines, the locals dismissed them as another barangay albeit with better armaments who could be useful in neutralizing competing barangays. The Spanish were not strange sight to the early Bisayans for they knew about the trade centers of Moluccas and beyond, that Europeans have been coveting for. Indeed when Magellan was killed by a rival barangay chief, it was another thirty years before Spain sent an expedition to the Philippines again. Thus began three hundred years of accommodation and resistance between the Spanish and the natives.