This article presents two modes of export-oriented sugar hacienda production in the late-nineteenth-century Spanish Philippines. The Hacienda de Calamba epitomised a large-scale estate under a religious corporation; it was an enclave economy reliant on local capital and technology. In contrast, Negros showcased a range of haciendas of varying sizes in a frontier setting involving different ethnicities and supported by capital and technology mediated directly by foreign merchant houses. In both locations sugar planters opposed the colonial state, but whereas leaseholders in Calamba, led by Rizal's family, became intentionally political in their resistance, in Negros planters engaged in a persistent and calibrated evasion of the state.