Political dynasties started emerging after the Philippine Revolution when the First Republic of the Philippines was established. With the decline of Spain's economic power and international prestige in the 19th century, the expansion of British and American influence around the world, and the political current of emergent nationalism among the children of the economically enfranchised bourgeois, the power of the peninsulares', or Spanish-born aristocracy declined propitiously. Following the defeat of the Spanish in the Spanish–American War, the surviving members of the Spanish or Spanish-sanctioned landholding elite and the newly ascendant merchant elite, who were mostly foreign expatriates or of Chinese origin, formed a de facto aristocracy to replace the power vacuum the Spanish had left.