Iloilo and its trade when Loney came

Abstract

ILOILO, at the time of Nicholas Loney's arrival, was not really a "forgotten dot of the universe," as he thought it was. Of all the Philippine provinces, it was the biggest in population and one of the most developed by Philippine standards. It had more people than the then province of Manila. The census of 1855 gave the population of Iloilo at 527,570 while Manila had only 276,059. Third placer was Pangasinan with 272,427. Nor was Iloilo the biggest only in population. It was also the "largest in agricultural production, the most active in manufacturing, and one of the best instructed among the provinces.”

With an area of 532,397 hectares, Iloilo covered (as it still does) the southeastern portion of Panay, the whole of Guimaras, and numerous other islands and islets between Panay and Negros. Since the time of Spanish contact, Iloilo had been relatively more developed and more thickly populated than the neighboring provinces. For example, in 1845, the whole island of Negros had a population of only 55,896. Of this number, only 17,953 lived in the western part which later became Negros Occidental and the rest lived in what is now Negros Oriental.