Sitting in the Ring of Fire astride several tectonic plates, the Philippines is one of the most disaster-afflicted countries in the world. Yet despite the yearly ravages of typhoons, the Manila elite never bear the brunt of catastrophe. This is not an accident.

Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz analyzes the historical interplay of class and human relationships with the natural environment to show how privilege developed with and through nature across the Spanish imperial, American colonial, and postcolonial histories of the Philippines, with a particular focus on the elite domestic home in Manila.

Elite Environment explores not only how the formation of the modern Philippine elite class was grounded in the natural environment but also how the natural environment sculpted this local elite’s globalized subjectivity. Starting from the perspective of nature instead of the human, this book offers an alternative historical account of Philippine national elite fashioning, revising our central understanding of class subjectivity in the Southeast Asian island tropics and how it came to be carved into nature in Manila.