So in maritime Southeast Asia, I've heard that relatively advanced empires like the Srivijaya Empire and Majapahit Empire were founded, and they were able to found cities, built monuments, etc. However, the Philippines mainly consisted of very small polities consisting of not that many people, and even within those polities, control was decentralized. Is there any idea why an advanced civilization did not develop in the pre-colonial Philippines, unlike other areas of maritime southeast Asia? Was it just a coincidence, or did it have anything to do with geography or trade patterns?
There are a couple problems with this question. For one, no one can really discuss what might have happened since we don't know about what didn't happen. Secondly, the premise is off in my opinion. I don't like using the term "advanced civilization" because it implies development is on an arrow, towards some sort of ultimate goal. This is not the case. I don't consider civilizations to be more advanced than others, and I think you can find a lot of agreement in the anthropology community. Lastly, the Philippines had many centralized large kingdoms, it's just that Filipino history is often ignored in larger discourse on Asia, something I always try to change. Maynila was of course a centralized city-state. But there were larger kingdoms, such as the Sultanate of Sulu, which covered the area from Sulu in the far southern Philippines, up to Palawan and then onto Borneo. Maguindanao is another large kingdom, covering a large part of the island Mindanao. The Philippines in general were heavily involved in trade. Maynila was known in Melaka, for example, and in fact Melaka was where traders from Luzon were first encountered by Europeans. "Luzon" itself is just a Portuguese spelling of Lusong, a Tagalog word. There were mercenaries or merchants from the islands as far onto the mainland as what is now modern Myanmar as an example of the peoples’ reach. This is not a very long answer, but it's really just an answer for a mistaken premise.
Hey there,
Just to let you know, your question is fine, and we're letting it stand. However, you should be aware that questions framed as 'Why didn't X do Y' relatively often don't get an answer that meets our standards (in our experience as moderators). There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, it often can be difficult to prove the counterfactual: historians know much more about what happened than what might have happened. Secondly, 'why didn't X do Y' questions are sometimes phrased in an ahistorical way. It's worth remembering that people in the past couldn't see into the future, and they generally didn't have all the information we now have about their situations; things that look obvious now didn't necessarily look that way at the time.
If you end up not getting a response after a day or two, consider asking a new question focusing instead on why what happened did happen (rather than why what didn't happen didn't happen) - this kind of question is more likely to get a response in our experience. Hope this helps!