The study is not without imperfections. It has a few slips in historical facts, analysis and date. The Manila Acapulco trade was terminated in 1815 as a direct consequence of the War of Independence in Mexico. The man responsible for the creation of the Royal Compañia de Filipinas was Bourbon King Carlos III and not Josè Basco y Vargas. The year 1789, not 1785, was the temporary opening of Manila to Asian Commerce. Like many clusters of principalìa in Luzon and in the Visayas, the principalìa, to which the founding patriarch of the Lopez family - Don Basilio - belonged was slowly being integrated into the European - Asian patterns of trade by the English and American commercial houses. By the 1880s, the South China Morning Post reported: "the Philippines is an Anglo-Chinese colony flying a Spanish flag.' In the process of jarring out the Philippine colony of its relative isolation, Great Britain applied tremendous pressure on the Madrid government, to open Manila and the outlying ports. A few typographical errors has been encountered in the draft manuscript. I hope the editor has attentively corrected them. One valuable secondary work, which is missing in the biography, is Filemon Aguilar's Clash of Spirits: History of Power and Sugar Planting Hegemony on a Visayan Island. I can only surmise that it was too late for the author to include the work, since it made its appearance only in late 1998. There are some trivial details, which could be buried perhaps in the footnotes. Traditional historians may regret the author's indifference to an exhaustive explanatory footnotes but this inattentiveness to the convention of historical scholarship and other minor flaws do not diminish the value and importance of the study to students of business history.

The book is enlivened with sharp reproductions of photos, of which there are 64 pages in black & white, helping illustrate the author's points. It has a good index, highly selected list of works in the bibliography and useful appendices. For a fine, elegant and insightful scholarly endeavor, which is a product of valiant two years' effort coupled with much reflection and painstaking research, the author deserves our accolade. We will be rich, if we put the two volume work on our bookshelves, still richer if we read Raul Rodrigo's opus from page 1 to page 270.