The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #156062   Message #3682534
Posted By: Lighter
04-Dec-14 - 01:48 PM
Thread Name: Oh! What a Lovely War! - BBC Radio 2
Subject: RE: Oh! What a Lovely War! - BBC Radio 2
Teribus, the Philippine-American War began in 1899, not 1898, and concentration camps were not set up till the very end of 1901. They existed for about five months.

The number of fatalities within the camps can only be estimated. However, historian Glenn Anthony May indicated by reference to parish records that the total must be far closer to 25,000 than to the figure of "~200,000" that you assert. (I'm extrapolating "25,000" rather generously from May's sample.)

The number of "excess deaths," those that could not have been expected on the basis of peacetime mortality rates, was of course lower still.

May taught at the University of the Philippines and had interviewed a number of elderly survivors of the camps. His examination of original Filipino records led him to abandon his original estimate of some 150,000 deaths - an example of how serious scholars are always ready to "revise" historical conclusions in the light of significant new evidence.

See "Glenn A. May, "The 'Zones' of Batangas," Philippines Studies 29 (1981), 89-103.