ABOUT THIS BOOK

Policymakers and scholars have come to realize that getting food, water, and services to the millions who live in the world’s few dozen megacities is one of the twenty-first century’s most formidable challenges. As these populations continue to grow, apocalyptic scenarios—sprawling slums plagued by hunger, disease, and social disarray—become increasingly plausible. In Feeding Manila in Peace and War, 1850–1945, Daniel F. Doeppers traces nearly a century in the life of Manila, one of the world’s largest cities, to show how it grew and what sustained it.
Doeppers follows key commodities for the city—rice, produce, fish, fowl, meat, milk, flour, coffee—and their complex interconnections. In the process he considers the changing ecology of the surrounding region as well as the social fabric that weaves together farmers, merchants, transporters, storekeepers, and door-to-door vendors.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Daniel F. Doeppers is a professor emeritus of geography and Southeast Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

REVIEWS

“After forty years’ research in the streets of Manila and archives on three continents, Doeppers has produced a landmark study in the fields of urban history and human geography. Empirically, this book is the first to chart Manila’s rise from a small port to a nascent metropolis, spinning a narrative that ends tragically midst the mass starvation and fiery destruction of World War II. Theoretically, Feeding Manila offers a path-breaking analysis of the urban-rural linkages that sustained this rapid urbanization over the span of a century, illuminating a problem increasingly critical in a world of hungry megacities. Methodologically, Doeppers deftly merges a mass of historical documentation into a taut analytical narrative. In sum, a stunning scholarly achievement.”—Alfred W. McCoy, author of Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“Outstanding, wide-ranging scholarship shines in every chapter. Doeppers crafts a thoughtful, well-reasoned analysis of provisioning Manila and comparable cities. This is a sterling example of how to investigate and analyze such questions, not only for other parts of the Philippines but elsewhere in Southeast Asia and beyond.”—Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, Australian National University

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations
Preface
List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Why Provisionment?

Part I: The Rice Trade
1 The Manila Rice Trade in the Age of Sail
2 Paleotechnic Marvels and Rice Production Disasters, 1876–1905
3 The Manila Rice Trade to 1941
4 Changing Commercial Networks in the Rice Trade

Part II: Ulam: What You Eat with Rice
5 Vegetables, Fruit, and Other “Garden” Produce
6 Fishing and Aquaculture
7 “Generations of Hustlers”: Fowl and Swine in Manila
8 Beef, Cattle Husbandry, and Rinderpest

Part III: Fluids and Fashions
9 Fluids of Life: Water and Milk
10 Foreign Fashions: Flour and Coffee vs. Cocoa

Part IV: Wartime Provisioning and Mass Starvation
11 Subsistence and Starvation in World War II, 1941–45

Epilogue

Appendixes
Notes
Glossary
Bibliographical Note and Consular Reports
Index

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