The Tamesis
May 28, 2026
Manila ——History reminds people in a cruel way of the dangers of complacency and self-destruction. Nations rise and fall—contrary to biographies of so-called great statesmen and self-aggrandizing myths of national greatness—primarily by the ability (or lack thereof) to adapt to new challenges and maximize and maintain existing advantages.
In The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000), University of Chicago historian Kenneth Pomeranz advanced a revolutionary argument that broke with decades of Whig triumphalism.
Pomeranz believed that the reason why the West became the originator of the modern industrial revolution was not so much the victory of the so-called superior European Enlightenment values, but rather the acquisition of strategic resources crucial for mass production.
On the one hand, colonial exploitation provided Western empires with unprecedented access to, inter alia, slave labor, precious metals, large tracts of land, and cash crops, thereby facilitating the expansion of increasingly complex financial sectors, modern bureaucracies, and metropolitan standing armies.
At the same time, another decisive factor was access to coal, which largely explains why Britain, rather than other equally (if not more developed) European and Asian countries, was structurally privileged to give birth to the first modern industry. Throughout the 19th century, Wales remained at the center of global capitalism, largely due to its vast coal reserves.
The rapid expansion of coal mines turned the small country into a vital source of energy for factories and homes across the UK. Wales also supplied the Royal Navy with “thermal coal” – a more efficient, smokier version – that underpinned the world’s largest empire. Just over a century later, Wales was transformed into what economist Paul Collier described as a “backward” community. Even though coal remains an important source of energy to this day, the decisive collapse of the British coal mining industry is largely due to the Thatcher regime’s smog neglect and market fundamentalist policies, which brutally suppressed miners’ strikes and privatized the energy sector to the exclusion of traditional suppliers. In the space of a generation, Wales has gone from being the “Saudi Arabia of Europe” to a development disaster: gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is now around 25% below the UK average.
In many ways, Wales reminds us of our own Philippines, which for centuries served as a global entrepot – linking the Americas to Asia via the galleon trade and later becoming a major exporter of sugar and other staple commodities.
By the early 20th century, we had one of the highest literacy rates in Asia; among the best universities in the world; and a respectable GDP per capita. Even after the devastation of World War II, the Philippines managed to become one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, so Tokyo decided to establish the Asian Development Bank in Manila instead of Seoul or Tehran, which were also booming at the time. However, the second half of the 20th century was the Philippines’ “lost decades,” as cronyism destroyed our institutions and blind neoliberal policies destroyed what was left of our industrial base.
Today, the sad circus in our Senate is a perfect microcosm of the root cause of Philippine development failure: a dispossessed elite dominated by mostly mediocre, self-serving politicians with little real regard for the national interest. A handful of “good guys” have been marginalized by a coalition of demagogues and, most regrettably, traditional politicians, with the current Senate President representing a strange fusion of these two forces.
The great Singaporean statesman Lee Kuan Yew once rightly pointed out the sociology of our political elite: “The people at the top, the elite mulattos, have the same attitude towards the local peasants as the mulattos on the Latin American haciendas towards their peons. They are two different societies: those at the top live in extreme luxury and comfort, while the peasants eke out a living, and in the Philippines live a hard life.”
During his visits in the 1990s, he privately discussed with then-President Fidel Ramos a potential solution, a transition to a parliamentary system that transcended the vagaries of populism in presidential politics. After experiencing one “worst Senate ever” after another over the past decade, I think we should seriously consider moving beyond the so-called “august Senate,” which has clearly lost its way.
