The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West by Ricardo Padrón

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West by Ricardo Padrón Kristie Patricia Flannery (bio) The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West ricardo padrón University of Chicago Press, 2020 352 pp. Voyages of discovery and conquest radically reconfigured how Europeans imagined their world in the sixteenth century. In The Indies of the Setting Sun, Ricardo Padrón explores the spatial imaginaries of elite Spaniards in the period bookended by Balboa's "discovery" of the Pacific Ocean in 1513 in present-day Panama and the 1606 Spanish conquest of the Moluccas. The book's central argument is that Spaniards "mapped America and Asia into a shared transpacific space" (23). Padrón persuades us that their attempts "to keep America and Asia together" was not a marginal effort; "it was the dominant tradition" (23). Sixteenth-century Spaniards knitted Asia and America together in varied ways. Their visions of Amerasian continuity included representations of an immense Amer-Asia landmass with an unbroken coastline that stretched from Mexico to China. Others saw America and Asia as separated by an easily navigable, "contained" Pacific Ocean, or linked by shared climates and the common characteristics that these seemingly produced in humans and their governments, rendering them ripe for conquest. The forgotten history of Spanish world-building that Padrón recovers poses a powerful challenge to the "invention of America" myth. Long dominating the historiography of discovery, this narrative purports that Renaissance Spaniards came to regard [End Page 936] America as a new and separate part of the world, utterly distinct from the old world of Europe and Asia. A lot is at stake when it comes to cartography. Mapping the Indies of the East and the Indies of the West as deeply connected places mattered in the sixteenth century. This view of the world "fuelled the exploration of what we call North America, the continued effort to master Pacific navigation, and the colonization of the Philippines" (23). It inspired Spanish dreams of military and spiritual conquest in China and Japan and ultimately facilitated the establishment and protection of the galleon trade, whose instrumental role in globalization has been well studied. And maps still matter now. In the book's introduction, Padrón explains that maps are so foundational to academic disciplines that "the invention of America" myth has defined and constrained how scholars across fields have studied the history and culture of the Hispanic world. The paradigm of American insularity contributed to the development of an interdisciplinary colonial Latin American studies that largely ignored colonial Latin Asia and the Spanish transpacific. Padrón promises that our field will be enriched when we expand these foundational maps to recognize and analyze the meanings and implications of "Amerasian continuity." The Pacific turn sails full steam ahead. Padrón deserves praise for liberating the study of conceptions of space and place on a metascale from the study of conventional maps or drawings of the earth's surface. Although such maps figure prominently in this book, they by no means dominate Padrón's analysis of how "the link between Spanish America and Asia … registered in the consciousness of Spanish American elites" (27). Padrón, a literary scholar, mines sixteenth-century printed books including travelogues and official histories of Spanish conquests that speak to notions of Amerasian continuity across the Pacific. Thanks to the digital revolution, many of these primary sources are available to read online. The authors of this body of cartographic literature were all elite Spanish men: navigators, missionaries, and official Crown cosmographers and historians. Some of them endured long and dangerous sea-crossings across the great Pacific Ocean and visited the places they wrote about, whereas others never left Europe and developed geographical knowledge by way of diverse informants. One thing that plural visions of a Spanish transpacific had in common was that they strategically served imperial ends. "To make Spain's claims to authority over East [End Page 937] and Southeast Asia look convincing, the Spanish Indies had to appear as a continuous, unbroken expanse stretching from the line of demarcation...