Manila Galleon Research Articles

Forced Migration in the Spanish Pacific World: From Mexico to the Philippines, 1765–1811 by Eva Maria Mehl

Reviewed by: Forced Migration in the Spanish Pacific World: From Mexico to the Philippines, 1765–1811 by Eva Maria Mehl Eberhard Crailsheim EVA MARIA MEHL Forced Migration in the Spanish Pacific World: From Mexico to the Philippines, 1765–1811 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 310 pages. The Spanish Jesuit Vicente Alemany, a keen observer of the república of Manila in his 1760s sequel to Francisco de Quevedo's picaresque novel El Buscón, portrayed all Europeans in Manila in a sarcastic but faithful way as "deserters, cabin boys, spanked [convicts], marcados, barbers, minions of the law, and more of this kind," while the americanos were all "vulgar people from the flea market [thieves] and from prison," the worst of whom were selected to serve in the militia and the marina (Andanzas del Buscón don Pablos por México y Filipinas, ed. Celsa Carmen García Valdés [Eunsa, 1998], 92–93). Forced Migration in the Spanish Pacific World sheds light on the lives of these people who had to cross the Pacific Ocean, mostly against their will. It follows their trajectories from rural villages in New Spain to the remotest presidios of Mindanao. The author, Eva Maria Mehl, is associate professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and has specialized on colonial Mexico and the Spanish Philippines. Under her maiden name, St. Clair Segurado, she [End Page 261] has published on the history of the Jesuits in China and their expulsion from Mexico in 1767. Forced Migration in the Spanish Pacific World is based on her dissertation, which she defended in 2011 at the University of California Davis. The Manila galleon and the transpacific connection it enabled are fascinating phenomena that have led a large number of scholars to focus on the interchange between Acapulco and Manila. Many historians of the early modern period emphasize the importance of reading the Pacific as a bridge rather than a barrier and understanding both sides of the ocean as a space of common agency. Traditionally, their main attention was set on the material exchange, yet in recent years the cultural and human exchanges have become attractive objects of study too. Especially, the subject of forced migration—in both directions—has aroused much interest on the part of scholars such as Tatjana Seijas and Stephanie Mawson. Eva Maria Mehl also makes a strong case for the idea of an interconnected and intertwined transpacific world. Two decades after María Fernanda García de los Arcos's remarkable study, Forzados y reclutas: Los criollos novohispanos en Asia (1756–1808) (Potrerillos, 1996), Mehl tackles the subject of forced migration to the Philippines with an innovative view on human dynamics at the fringes of the Spanish empire. Transcending former studies, her book discusses the "larger significance that the deportation of recruits and vagrants had in the implementation of imperial policy in New Spain and the Philippines" (13). Mehl identified 3,999 individuals who were sent to the Philippines via Acapulco as part of the defensive scheme of the Spanish empire. Facing a number of military challenges, the Philippine colonial government was in urgent need of these reinforcements and employed them as workers or soldiers. Yet, the governors in Manila continually complained about these individuals as they appeared to be worthless for any employment, being either unfit for service, sick, uncontrollable, or not up to the standard of "whiteness" of the time. By analyzing the reasons behind this predicament, Mehl offers a look not only at the lives of these individuals, their families, and their social context, but also at the institutional history of the Spanish empire at the height of Bourbon reforms. She thereby connects late–eighteenth-century ideas of Enlightenment in the Spanish empire neatly with Michel Foucault's analysis of discipline and punishment in early-modern Europe. Mehl provides a picture of the socioeconomic insecurities and dynamics [End Page 262] of New Spain and displays the complex machinery behind the recruiting parties, the levies, and the transportation process to Manila. To develop the argument, the book starts with an overview of the intertwined transpacific history since 1571, focusing on the connection via the Manila galleon and the flow of people across the...

Views Across the Pacific: The Galleon Trade and Its Traces in Oregon

From 1565 to 1815, Manila galleons such as the Santo Cristo de Burgos — the ship now thought to be the seventeenth century “Beeswax Wreck” that sank or ran aground near Nehalem Spit in Oregon — followed a 12,000-mile route from the Philippines through the stormy North Pacific, sometimes passing parallel to what is now the north Oregon coast, before reaching their destination in Acapulco, Mexico. The galleons were a central part of Spain's complex international commerce system, transporting people and Asian goods around the world. In this article, Cameron La Follette and Douglas Deur discuss the Spanish empire and the Manila galleon trade; tempestuous seas and hazardous weather conditions that likely led to the ship's demise; oral traditions of the Native peoples who encountered the shipwreck and its survivors; and the Euro-American interpretations of that oral tradition that fueled treasure-hunters' speculations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Views Across the Pacific: The Galleon Trade and Its Traces in Oregon

From 1565 to 1815, Manila galleons such as the Santo Cristo de Burgos — the ship now thought to be the seventeenth century “Beeswax Wreck” that sank or ran aground near Nehalem Spit in Oregon — followed a 12,000-mile route from the Philippines through the stormy North Pacific, sometimes passing parallel to what is now the north Oregon coast, before reaching their destination in Acapulco, Mexico. The galleons were a central part of Spain's complex international commerce system, transporting people and Asian goods around the world. In this article, Cameron La Follette and Douglas Deur discuss the Spanish empire and the Manila galleon trade; tempestuous seas and hazardous weather conditions that likely led to the ship's demise; oral traditions of the Native peoples who encountered the shipwreck and its survivors; and the Euro-American interpretations of that oral tradition that fueled treasure-hunters' speculations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Galleon Cargo: Accounts in the Colonial Archives

Much of the debris that has washed up on the shores of the northern Oregon coast for centuries were mainstays of Spanish trade carried as cargo across the world on Manila galleons. Both Native people and Euro-Americans have recovered large beeswax chunks, lending to the lore of the “Beeswax Wreck,” as well as Chinese blue-and-white porcelain fragments. In this article, Cameron La Follette and Douglas Deur describe research findings about cargo on the Santo Cristo de Burgos and similar Manila galleons, including the San Francisco Xavier of 1705, the previous favored candidate for the Oregon wreck. La Follette and Deur located probable matches for the shippers' identities of four shipper's marks found on Oregon beeswax chunks. According to La Follette and Deur, “in addition to trade goods, the Santo Cristo de Burgos carried a cargo of liquid mercury,” which was essential for refining silver ore from South American mines used to make coins that fueled the Spanish empire and the Manila trade itself. The article contains a partial cargo list for the 1693 Santo Cristo de Burgos voyage and a special digital appendix with the full cargo manifest for the 1701 San Francisco Xavier.

Oregon's Manila Galleon

Oregon's Manila Galleon

Oregon's Manila Galleon

Oregon's Manila Galleon

The Age of Trade. The Manila Galleons and the Dawn of the Global Economy, written by Arturo Giraldez

The Age of Trade. The Manila Galleons and the Dawn of the Global Economy, written by Arturo Giraldez

The Manila Galleon, Macao and international maritime and commercial relations, 1500–1700

Formal and informal trade were key elements in the establishment of global connections. Using data collected from Portuguese and Spanish archives, as well as the secondary literature, this article examines the early modern Southeast Asian Iberian communities of Macao and Manila, their weakness and resilience. Far from the centres of political decision-making they relied on their own resources and abilities to manage maritime connections with China, Japan and Spanish America through the voyages of the ‘Macao Ship’ and the ‘Manila Galleon’. The rarely mentioned intervention of the Macanese traders in the Manila Galleon route constitutes a central part of this research.

Comercio y atlantización del Pacífico mexicano y sudamericano: La crisis del lago indiano y del Galeón de Manila, 1750-1821

El ensayo tiene por objetivo identificar los factores que contribuyeron a la crisis y desaparición de un sistema comercial que se desarrolló por el Pacífico colonial entre 1580 y 1750. Se identifican tres razones; todas ellas ocurridas en el periodo comprendido desde 1750 hasta 1821. La primera examina la aparición a la escena de las compañías comerciales peninsulares por el Pacífico novohispano que comienzan a competir comercialmente con el Galeón de Manila. La segunda razón trata sobre el cierre del mercado de Perú al comercio de bienes extranjeros procedentes de Acapulco, a través de la inauguración de la vía por el Cabo de Hornos (1740) para el tráfico de navíos de registro procedentes de Europa. La tercera examina el comercio de los ingleses entre Jamaica, Panamá y el puerto mexicano de San Blas durante las primeras décadas del siglo XIX

Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians

This monograph offers much more than the focus of its title on its little-known—and hence possibly suspect as marginal—subjects might be taken to imply. Out of fragments of the stories of 598 identifiable individuals, out of some 8,100 Asians (and more than a few globally traveled Africans) reaching central Mexico as slaves aboard the returning vessels of the famous Manila galleons from Manila in the Philippines between roughly the 1560s and the 1660s, Seijas has spun sophisticated insight into the laws and politics of Iberian (primarily Spanish, but indirectly also Portuguese) domains in both the Pacific and the Atlantic worlds, the laws, politics, and cultures of Spain’s República de Indios, in the Philippines as well as in New Spain, and the beginnings of racialization of the Hispanic New World. The book’s subtitle alludes to the transcending conclusion: these Asians (except for the Africans arriving from Mozambique via Goa, the Indonesian archipelago, or Macau, who remained negros) were chinos integrated into the Spanish monarchs’ overseas realms as “natives,” protected under the Patronato Real as royal subjects and hence not legally subject to enslavement.The contradictions of the legal ambiguities created by “natives” enslaved in Asia (and beyond) and their theoretical, and often contested, liberty in America generated much of the documentation—petitions, investigations, judgments—that supports the book. Seijas handles these technical materials like a lawyer, and that’s a very good thing, since seventeenth-century Spain was a tangle of plural jurisdictions, royal decrees and fueros, canon law, Inquisitorial jurisdictions, and municipal regulations that she navigates with all the assurance of the pilots of those Manila galleons, framing the records in terms of the relevant jurisprudence, sensing the legal options not pursued, and considering possible circumstances behind the issues but not presentable in courts of law as evidence. She thus turns the very problematics of case records into rich and revealing sources for history. In this review, a single example will suffice to illustrate a necessarily simplified summary of a complex argument: the Tagalog and Visaya of Spain’s Philippines were “Indios” with precisely the same legal indemnities as Nahua in New Spain or Quechua in Peru, but in Mexico as chinos they were treated as enslaveable along with Muslims from the Mughal Empire captured in “just wars” and natives of China or Japan of no less unassailable status as property through their acquisition by purchase.The story climaxes with resolution of these dramas in the 1672 decree making the chinos unambiguously full-blooded “Indians,” leaving them to their further assimilation into the native communities of rural central Mexico and into the emerging castas of its cities. The decree thus left their former captive shipmates, of African origin, as the only legally enslaveable residents of the realm, and Seijas concludes suggestively by remarking on the contemporaneity of this decree with what she sees as parallel racialization of slavery in the English Americas. Among the numerous and revealing arguments that Seijas weaves from these and other legal threads are the ways in which chinos’ persistent filing of legal challenges to their enslavement might have opened the minds of the judges and other officials who made law in the Americas, the concentration of the chinos in urban domestic service and their (and other “Indios’”) harsh treatment in the textile-manufacturing obrajes rather than in rural labor, a leitmotif of contrasts with the status and conditions of the Africans enslaved in the region, and the gritty personal and social dynamics revealed in the proceedings of the Inquisition.Significant broader issues of method and conceptualization emerge in exemplary form as well. The ways Seijas has framed her arguments develop organically from the documentation at hand, resisting awkward alternative approaches—for example, to attempt to force a “social history” of aggregate categories from the small sample available to her. She historicizes the judges as well as the plaintiffs, so that we have the politics and contradictions and inevitable ironies of attempting to create order out of the inherent disorder of human life rather than a mystified implacable law. She writes about people enslaving and enforcing and engineering and evading captivity rather than trying to force humanity in all its variety into a single abstract institutionalized “slavery.” The book, finally, is a model of historicization rather than drifting into the faux sociology that too often still prevails in your reviewer’s own field of early African history, as well as in the American counterpart that proceeds under the unnecessarily qualified label of “ethnohistory.”The reader, and not only an outsider like your reviewer, comes away from this book with wide-ranging and engaging insight into the Iberian world of the seventeenth century, from Madrid to Mexico City to Manila and even Mozambique. Small packages of persona from the past sometimes open up to reveal welcome historical gifts, and this book is one of those happy occasions.

Flaunting It: How the Galleon Trade Made Manila, circa 1571–1800

Manila was designated by Spain as the colonial capital of the Philippine archipelago in 1571. From being a small Muslim settlement, the city was swiftly transformed by the trans-Pacific galleon trade to Acapulco. Manila emerged as one of the greatest and wealthiest entrepots in Southeast Asia, rivaling the Dutch city of Batavia in Indonesia and dominating commerce with America and Europe in both silk and spices. Manila became a magnet to trading ships from China, Japan, Maluku, Malacca, Siam, Cambodia, and Borneo, which arrived laden with an astonishing abundance of luxurious goods. The trade flows of silver and precious Asian merchandise—the bales of Chinese silks, the porcelain, Indian textiles, spices, local wax, honey, and forest products—and the shifting and hybrid populations that supplied labor and diverse expertise lent the city its own special character and texture. Drawing on a range of primary sources—from secular and missionary accounts to architecture and artistic works, including paintings and objects, this essay explores the much less well-studied social and cultural effects of global trade on local contexts, and considers whether Manila was any different from other early modern port cities in the Atlantic and Asian worlds. I discuss a variety of fundamental areas—sartorial fashions and bodily scents, culinary tastes, and architectural innovations—in which imported goods and their consumption affected everyday sensibilities in Manila and beyond.

Emancipación, mestizaje y matlazahuatl: Factores de la desaparición de la diáspora asiática novohispana en el siglo XVIII

From the last third of the eighteenth century, thousands of immigrants from South, South East and East Asia arrived in New Spain aboard the Manila Galleon. Collectively dubbed with the generic term “chinos,” these individuals had a notable impact in New Spanish society. However, during the eighteenth century, this Asian presence gradually diluted to the point that, in the early nineteenth century, the term “chino” additionally designated people of Amerindian and African descent. This produced the erroneous notion that the demographic influx from Asia in New Spain was insignificant. This article confronts this idea by analyzing the main factors that contributed to the “Africanization” of the Asian diaspora in the viceroyalty: the abolition of slavery and the ensuing drop in the transpacific migratory flow; the intensification of the process of miscegenation from 1650; and asymmetrical resistance to malaria and yellow fever among the Asian diaspora

The Age of Trade: The Manila Galleons and the Dawn of the Global Economy, written by Arturo Giraldez

The Age of Trade: The Manila Galleons and the Dawn of the Global Economy, written by Arturo Giraldez

La moneda circulante en la Capitanía General de Filipinas (siglos XVI al XVIII)

The Captaincy General of the Philippines, dependent since its inception in the sixteenth century to the Viceroyalty of New Spain territory included the Spanish possessions in Asia and Oceania. The Philippines and especially its capital, Manila, was the most important nexus of the trade of the Hispanic world with China and other countries in Asia and the Pacific Rim. The Manila Galleon trade provided the desired silver to the Asian markets, allowed the establishment and longevity Hispanic presence in the Philippines and gave the necessary currency to these islands and to the other Spanish territories in the area.

Review: The Age of Trade: The Manila Galleon and the Dawn of the Global Economy

Review: The Age of Trade: The Manila Galleon and the Dawn of the Global Economy

Inns, mules, and hardtack for the voyage: the local economy of the Manila Galleon in Mexico

This article argues that, in Mexico, the Manila Galleon fostered local manufacturing, promoted regional trade networks, and enabled Indians and people of mixed ancestry to participate in a monetized economy along with Spanish colonists. Several activities related to the ships’ annual embarkment at Acapulco illustrate this economic impact, including the delivery of provisions like hardtack, the transportation of merchandise, and the administration of services to travelers

By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia by Barry Cunliffe, and: Hinterlands and Commodities: Place, Space, Time and the Political Economic Development of Asia over the Long Eighteenth Century ed. by Tsukaya Mizushima, George Souza, and Dennis Flynn, and: Merchant Communities in Asia, 1600–1800 ed. by Lin Yu-Ju and Madeline Zelin, and: The Age of Trade: The Manila

By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia by Barry Cunliffe, and: Hinterlands and Commodities: Place, Space, Time and the Political Economic Development of Asia over the Long Eighteenth Century ed. by Tsukaya Mizushima, George Souza, and Dennis Flynn, and: Merchant Communities in Asia, 1600–1800 ed. by Lin Yu-Ju and Madeline Zelin, and: The Age of Trade: The Manila

Las fundaciones piadosas en correspondencias de riesgo a premio de mar en la Casa de la Santa Misericordia de Manila en el transcurso del siglo XVIII = The pious foundation in maritime loans of Manila’s Casa de la Santa Misericordia in the Seventeenth...

This paper examines the material conditions of the Hermandad de la Santa Misericordia, the nature of its foundations and the special features of the maritime loans that the corporation held to the neighbours of Manila who searched for monetary resources to ship goods in the Manila Galleon, to finance commercial enterprises or to buy merchandises in the Asiatic ports.

Crossing Mexico (1620–1621): Franciscan Nuns and Their Journey to the Philippines

In 1620, almost a hundred years after the Virgin of Guadalupe is said to have appeared to Juan Diego on the Hill of Tepeyac, a small group of Spanish nuns paid a visit to the chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Like many others before and after them they stopped at the shrine on their way to Mexico City. The Franciscan nuns were traveling from Toledo to Manila and were about to cross Mexico to board the yearly Manila Galleon at the port of Acapulco.

The age of trade: the Manila Galleons and the dawn of the global economy

Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter One: Philippines before the Spaniards Monsoons, Islands, and the Rim of Fire Native Peoples on the Shores Barangays and the of Commerce after 1405 Mountain Peoples Gold of the Visayas and the Harvest of Cowries Mediterranean Connection and the Long Post-1400 Trade Boom China and the Islands before Spain Chapter Two: Origins of Spanish Settlement in the Philippines Manila and the Origins of World Trade Atlantic Silver in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries China and the Global Market in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Discovery of the Sea: Iberians and Spices Military Revolution and the 35 Percent of the World Portuguese and the Vasco da Gama Era Ferdinand Spanish Expeditions to the Spice Islands Miguel Lopez de Legazpi Spaniards in Luzon Exploration of Luzon Chapter Three: Spanish Settlement in the Philippines First Decades of the Colony and The China Enterprise Settling Down in the Philippines Magellan Exchange and the Islands A New Agricultural Regime Reorganizing the Territory Colony's Finances Native Contributions to the Colonial Economy Situado Role of Manila in the New Territorial Arrangements Indirect Rule: Principalia Colonial Administration Chapter Four: Seventeenth Century Little Ice Age End of the Silver Cycle Eighty Years' War with the Netherlands Philippines and the War with the Dutch Moro Wars Japan and the Friars Portuguese in Manila European Companies Armenian Diaspora New Christians' Mercantile Diaspora End of the Century Chapter Five: Galleons Line Voyage Officers and Sailors Acapulco Chapter Six: Economy of the Line China and Silver in the Modern Era Textiles and the Galleons Galleon Line Regulations A Royal Inspector's Visit Chinese Merchants: Sangleys Chinese Rebellion of 1603 Rebellion of 1640 Chapter Seven: Eighteenth Century and the Galleon Line A New Ecological Regime Mexican Silver Cycle Tea and Opium Cycle War of Jenkins' Ear and the Manila Galleon Seven Years' War in the Philippines Chinese in Eighteenth-Century Philippines Reforms in the Philippines Moro Wars in the Eighteenth Century Changes in Spanish Imperial Policy End of the Galleon Trade End of the Line Notes Bibliography Index About the Author