Philippines - The Digital Philatelist

The Philippines, officially the Republic of the Philippines, is an archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. Situated in the western Pacific Ocean, it consists of about 7,641 islands that are broadly categorized under three main geographical divisions from north to south: Luzon, Visayas, Mindanao. Negritos, some of the archipelago’s earliest inhabitants, were followed by successive waves of Austronesian peoples.

The arrival of Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese explorer leading a fleet for Spain, marked the beginning of Spanish colonization. In 1543, Spanish explorer Ruy López de Villalobos named the archipelago Las Islas Filipinas in honor of Philip II of Spain. Spanish settlement, beginning in 1565, led to the Philippines becoming part of the Spanish Empire for more than 300 years under the Captaincy General of the Philippines.

In 1896 the Philippine Revolution began, which then became entwined with the 1898 Spanish–American War. Spain ceded the territory to the United States, while Filipino rebels declared the First Philippine Republic. The ensuing Philippine–American War ended with the United States establishing control over the territory.

From 1935 to 1938, under the United States control, the Commonwealth of the Philippines was the administrative body that governed the Philippines aside from a period of exile in the Second World War from 1942 to 1945 when it was subjected to Japanese occupation. During this period, the Second Philippine Republic, under Jose P. Laurel, was established as a puppet state.

Following liberation, the Philippines became independent in 1946. Since then, the unitary sovereign state has often had a tumultuous experience with democracy, which included the overthrow of a dictatorship by the People Power Revolution.