Spanish Manila Research Articles

Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies ed. by Yuan Shu et al.

Reviewed by: Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies ed. by Yuan Shu et al. Yiwen Liu (bio) Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies, edited by Yuan Shu, Otto Heim, and Kendall Johnson. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019. Ix + 295 pp. $72.00. Hardback. ISBN 978-988-8455-77-5. While transpacific studies has primarily focused on the cultural-historical and socio-political relationship between Asia and North America, ensuing scholarship—like Catherine Ceniza Choy and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu's Gendering the Trans-Pacific World (2017), Josephine Lee's Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture (2019), and Rachel C. Lee's The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature (2014)—has gradually expanded the field by including works of Pacific Islanders to further critique the ongoing aftermath of multiple colonialisms in the transpacific world. The volume Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies, edited by Yuan Shu, Otto Heim, and Kendall Johnson, continues this expansion of the field by emphasizing frameworks and contexts from inter-Asia cultural studies, decoloniality (via Walter Mignolo), and Oceania (via Epeli Hau'ofa). Born out of an international conference held in Hong Kong in 2011, this collection has twelve contributors from various academic fields, including English, Asia Pacific studies, history, Indigenous literary studies, and cultural studies. One major purpose of this interdisciplinary collection, as the editor, Yuan Shu, writes in the introduction, is to investigate "how to move beyond a simple negation of American exceptionalism and how to engage the Asia Pacific and Pacific islands in a productive way that would generate … new systems of knowledge production and dissemination" (1). Put differently, the editors find it inadequate to focus critique solely on US militarism itself; instead, this collection complicates our understanding of global power dynamics by foregrounding alternative relations in transpacific regions and enriching our imagination of a future oceanic community through Indigenous epistemologies. [End Page 512] The collection broadens transpacific studies through coverage of the non-hegemonic connections, flows, and memories across the Asia Pacific. Early scholarship in transpacific studies, such as Hoskins and Nguyen's Transpacific Studies (2014), was devoted to decentering nation-states by focusing on the movements of people, materials, and cultures, yet much of its discussion was primarily in response to the ways in which major powers (i.e., the United States, China, and Japan) have shaped the transpacific. While this was a crucial step for an emerging field, scholars have long been aware of the absent attention to the lateral relationships among minor places in the Asia Pacific. This collection answers this call partially by integrating Asian American studies and inter-Asia cultural studies. Viet Thanh Nguyen's chapter, "Memories of Murder: The Other Korean War (in Viet Nam)," for instance, analyzes how Korean cultural representations remember and forget Korea's involvement in the Vietnam War—a reinvestigation of America's military project from perspectives within Asia. While demonstrating that US imperialism is the originator of the unjust wars across Asia, Nguyen's chapter reminds us that contemporary memory politics in South Korea is inseparable from the country's sub-imperial position during and after the Vietnam War. Speaking to the collection's overall advocacy of reconceptualizing the notion of transpacific relations, Nguyen writes that "the oceanic is not only the space between the United States and elsewhere, but between Korea and its own elsewhere in Viet Nam" (192). The collection further expands transpacific studies by drawing attention to Latin America. Evelyn Hu-DeHart's chapter, entitled "Spanish Manila: A Transpacific Maritime Enterprise and America's First Chinatown," traces Latin America's long history in making the transpacific world by revealing that the history of commerce (sixteenth–nineteenth centuries) between Spanish colonized Mexico and south China is an indispensable but often neglected part of the later establishment of the US empire. Repositioning Manila's first Chinatown in the triangulation of Spanish Latin America, Chinese feudal regime, and Anglo North America, Hu-DeHart's chapter inspires scholars of borderlands, like myself, to nuance the roles played by port cities in the negotiation and transformation between multiple empires. This chapter is representative of the collection's consistent practice of decolonizing...

Dionisio Capulong and the elite in early Spanish Manila (c. 1570–1620)

AbstractWhen the Spaniards came to settle Manila in 1571 Dionisio Capulong was a young boy. His father was one of the rulers in the region and all were scions of the Muslim royal family of Brunei. The father astutely complied—to a certain extent—with the colonising Spaniards. His son subsequently pursued an ambivalent career alternately working for and rebelling against the Spanish colonisers. Ultimately he became a landowner in the Spanish mode. This is his story. Even from only Spanish reports one can discern great astuteness and opportunism, which enabled the elite to keep local supremacy. Tracing the career of Dionisio Capulong sheds light on the elite in pre-Spanish Manila and environs as well as on Manila's earliest Spanish years.

Dominican and Jesuit Formal Education in the First Years of Spanish Manila (c. 1571–1621)

In the sixteenth‐century explorations of the Far East, the Dominicans and the Jesuits had different attitudes to the indigenous peoples they encountered, while the peoples of China and the Philippines also had very different cultures. In this article I consider three pairs: Dominicans and Jesuits and their approaches to education, their attitudes to China and the Philippines, and to indigenous and non‐indigenous students in the earliest years of Spanish Manila.

Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai: Maritime East Asia in Global History, 1550–1700 ed. by Tonio Andrade and Xing Hang

Reviewed by: Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai: Maritime East Asia in Global History, 1550–1700 ed. by Tonio Andrade and Xing Hang Catherine L. Phipps (bio) Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai: Maritime East Asia in Global History, 1550–1700. Edited by Tonio Andrade and Xing Hang. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 2016. viii, 386 pages. $69.00. Tales of pirates and their exploits naturally make for entertaining reading. To be sure, this book is replete with murder, revenge, sea battles, and stolen treasure. What makes it most exciting, however, is not the accounts of [End Page 430] swashbuckling but the verification that early modern maritime East Asia was a dynamic, complex, and globally connected region. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in particular, are known as a time when East Asian states enforced stringent trade restrictions and curtailed diplomatic relations. Often privileging a state-centered view, the traditional historiography of this era has tended to empty regional waters of Asian seafarers. More recent scholarship that engages ideas about globalization, regional integration, and maritime networks—as well as concerns over contemporary pirates and tensions in the South China Sea—has revealed a greater level of early modern sea-based communication than was previously recognized. Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai further develops the growing appreciation for this region's vitality, exposing how the relative absence of state oversight enabled an "infinitude of interactions" (p. 22). The editors define maritime East Asia as "[s]tretching from the Strait of Malacca to the Sea of Japan and centered upon the East and South China Seas" (p. 1), depicting an area that encompasses people from multiple countries, ethnic groups, and commercial organizations. With contributions by some of the field's leading experts, these essays advance our knowledge of the extent to which people in East Asia competed, cooperated, and stayed informed of one another. These interactions also provided the opportunity for the emergence of transcultural exchanges that brought Europeans, Americans, and Asians into unprecedented levels of contact with one another. Indeed, the trans-Pacific silver trade, which was motivated by China's appetite for silver and involved carriers and suppliers in Japan, Spanish Manila, the Americas, and Europe, formed an early—arguably the earliest—moment of globalization and serves as the foundation for the various exchanges addressed in this book.1 The contributors, as many of them have done in other writings, privilege a global perspective. By bringing them all together in one place (first at a conference and now in these pages), this volume is able to present an impressive and synergistic body of work that is characterized, in both implementation and content, by transnational connections. Seventeen scholars from seven different countries conducted research in a wide range of archives, drawing on sources in languages such as Chinese, Japanese, English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch. The resulting collaboration presents a significant concentration of early modern actors operating in East Asian waters. In addition to those from Europe, China, and Japan, people from Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, the Ryukyu Kingdom, and Siam [End Page 431] also had interests in this maritime zone, whether acting as state or nonstate agents. Beyond examining a complex set of networks and encounters within a common geographical region, these essays possess a more pointed coherence. Although not readily apparent from either the book title or the table of contents, each chapter addresses, to varying degrees, the multigenerational family of the infamous sea lord Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga, 1624–62) and its vast commercial and military organization. That the Zheng family is not immediately emphasized is a smart strategy; for if potential readers disregarded this collection as primarily biographical or of a narrow register, they would miss out on this richly textured synthesis. In laying out the rises and falls of the Zheng family's power, the authors position this history within a multifaceted and often contentious world where ambiguous sovereignties, shifting allegiances, and economic opportunism reigned. Several essays examine the lives of individual members of the Zheng family and the contextual influences that shaped their opportunities and challenges. John E. Wills and Chengheng Lu detail how the pirate Zheng Zhilong (aka Yiguan; Zheng Chenggong's father) rose to commercial and military...

Adaptive Strategies of Parián Chinese: Fictive Kinship and Credit in Seventeenth-Century Manila

Based on a seventeenth-century baptismal book of the Parian, a 1689 list of debts owed to non-Catholic Chinese, and a 1690 membership list for gremios de sangleyes infieles, this article argues that adaptation by the Chinese in Manila to secure themselves and their livelihoods followed two major strategies: (a) fictive kinship in the form of compadrazgo (coparenthood) and padrinazgo (godparenthood), and (b) extending credit. The Chinese used both strategies to create or solidify networks of mutual obligation and aid within their own community and with other residents of Manila. These strategies helped spin webs of interconnection that made colonial society stable and viable. Keywords: chinese • Kinship • credit • Gender • Spanish Manila

The Global and the Local: Problematic Dynamics of the Triangular Trade in Early Modern Manila

Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Spanish Manila became a pivot for intercontinental exchange in silver and silk. When studying early modern Manila, its multilayered character has often been overlooked. Urban and economic developments were not only based on Chinese and Japanese private merchants’ contributions but also imbedded in the complex history of Asia’s global integration and the Castilian Overseas Empire’s involvement in various international affairs. The present article revisits these global and local connections by highlighting the impact of triangular encounters between powerful premodern states on the short-lived global significance of the Manila market.

The Oxford handbook of maritime archaeology

The Oxford Handbook of Maritime Archaeology Edited by A. Catsambis, B. Ford and D. Hamilton Oxford University Press, New York 2011. ISBN: 978-0-19-537517-6. Pp. 1203. UKP95. This part technical handbook, part encyclopaedia aims to capture the breadth of current research in maritime archaeology. It is aimed squarely at students and practitioners, with chapters prepared by selected experts in their fields. As such it is readable to anyone with an interest in the subject of maritime archaeology. Many of the chapters are presented as case studies that demonstrate the application of methodology, techniques and theory to real sites. As George Bass states in his introduction, 'maritime archaeology is still defining itself' (p. 4), with distinct branches of maritime archaeology (the archaeology of people of maritime cultures), nautical archaeology (the archaeology of ships and watercraft), coastal archaeology (the archaeology of people who lived in coastal zones whether the sites are now above water, underwater, or partly submerged), underwater archaeology (the study of any submerged sites e.g. Mexican cenotes, Neolithic sites in European lakes, riverine and lacustrine sites) and more recently the development of aeronautical archaeology (aircraft being 'ships of the air'). The handbook is an amalgam of all of the above, though naturally with a strong focus on the archaeology of shipwrecks. The handbook is divided into seven main sections of I) Introduction, II) The Process, III) Ships and Shipwrecks, IV) Maritime Culture and Life Ashore, V) Beyond the Site, VI) Conclusion and VII) Glossary and Appendix. Part II 'The Process' discusses the definition of ships as 'architecture, function and human space' (Pomey), the formation and interpretation of wreck sites (Martin), interpretation of marine magnetic and acoustic survey data (Quinn, Gearhart), excavation planning and logistics (Underwood), post-excavation reconstruction of ships (Ravn, Bischoff, Englert, Nielsen, Batcharov, Pevny) including virtual reconstruction (Sanders, Monroy, Castro, Furuta) and the role of conservation in maritime archaeology (Hamilton, Wayne Smith). Chapters in Part III 'Ships and Shipwrecks' are generally regional in scope--both broad and specific--providing coverage of the current status of research in the majority of the Earth's oceans. Contributions include shipping and shipwrecks of the ancient Mediterranean (Polzer, Carlson, Rieth) and Red Sea (Blue), Medieval period shipping (Rose), Post-medieval ships and seafaring in the west (Hocker), South Africa (Boshoff), India (Gaur and Vora), East Asian shipbuilding (Sasaki), Australia (Staniforth), Historic period shipping in the Pacific (Van Tilburg), Steamships (Crisman), Caribbean (Leshikar-Denton), Northern Gulf of Mexico (Borgens), South America (Elkin) and the underwater archaeology of World War I and II (Neyland). Van Tilburg offers the major contribution to the maritime archaeology of Oceania in his chapter 'Historic Period Ships of the Pacific Ocean', which focuses mainly on the period of the Spanish Manila galleons to the 20th century. Van Tilburg discusses the significance of Pacific migration and trade using double-hulled voyaging canoes up to and including the historic period, while being cognisant of the 'invisibility' of traditional watercraft to magnetometers and the difficult logistics of working in such vast expanses of ocean (p. 589). Part IV 'Maritime Culture and Life Ashore' is recommended to anyone working with coastal archaeology and communities as it exhibits the need for integration of the concept of the 'maritime cultural landscape' with the mainstream archaeological community (p. 751). Contributions on 'The Maritime Cultural Landscape' (Westerdahl), 'Coastal Archaeology' (Ford), 'Submerged Prehistory in the North Sea' (Firth), 'Ancient Harbours in the Mediterranean' (Oleson and Hohlfelder), 'Shipyard Archaeology' (Moser), 'Ship Abandonment' (Richards) and 'Maritime Communities and Traditions' (Ransley) encompass cultural landscapes, archaeology, ethnography, prehistoric submerged landscapes, linguistics, economics and spiritual sites. …

Chinese Merchants, Silver Galleons, and Ethnic Violence in Spanish Manila, 1603-1686

Between 1565 and 1815, silver-laden galleons made their way across the Pacific almost annually, carrying pieces-of-eight from the port of Acapulco and into the southern Chinese province of Fujian via the port of Manila, returning with raw and finished silk for Spanish American markets. With the arrival of the first galleons, Manila’s Chinese community began to grow dramatically. By 1603 there were an estimated 30,000 Chinese and only a few hundred Spanish settlers. Manila may have been a Spanish possession, but for all practical purposes it was a Chinese town, inhabited not only by Chinese merchants but also by a skilled contingent of workers and artisans who kept the colony afloat. The Sangleyes, as the Manila Chinese were referred to in Spanish, were confined to a walled Chinese ghetto, known as the Parian, and banned from living in the fortified Spanish castle-town of Intramuros. In 1603, 1639, and again in 1686, Chinese uprisings rocked Manila. It is estimated that a total of over 40,000 Chinese migrants were massacred as a result of these revolts. Primary sources describe the existing tension between both Spaniards and Chinese: the exorbitant taxation and residential segregation of the Sangleyes; Spanish fears of being outnumbered and overrun in their own colony. This paper attempts to make sense of these events by taking the revolt of 1603 as a point of departure, followed by a brief discussion of the underlying causes of ethnic violence in Spanish Manila. It then explores the background of Manila’s economic and social structures in order to analyze the Sangley uprisings of the seventeenth century within the context of colonial Manila’s role as the multiracial entrepot of the trans-Pacific galleon economy. It was in 1603 that the governor of Fujian, under imperial decree, dispatched the assistant magistrate of the port of Haicheng ?? to meet with the chieftain of the so-called Spanish “barbarians” (or xiao xiyang ???). He sailed with a retinue of over a hundred men, and once he met with the governor of Manila, proceeded to inquire about a legendary mountain made of gold allegedly adjacent to Manila Bay, rumors of which had reached as far as the emperor.

An observation made in 1602 of an aurora in North America

The earliest known record of an aurora sighting in North America was made by Jesuit missionaries in New Brunswick, Canada, in the year 1611. Here, we wish to report an earlier record made in 1602 by the Notary Public of the Spanish Manila Galleon “San Antonio de Padua” while sailing near the coast of California. We also include a brief account of the circumstances and peculiar concurrence of events leading to the 1602 sighting.

The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish Manila: 1580–1640

Catarina de San Juan was a slave woman who was brought to the Philippines in the 1610s on her way to Mexico, where she became a beata of great renown. Her experiences in the slave markets of Cochin and Manila suggest that Portuguese traders played a key role as the primary suppliers of Asian slaves to the Philippines. This paper argues that Portuguese slavers made a significant contribution to the Manila economy by providing an important labour force that helped build and maintain the colony from 1580 to 1640, the years of Iberian Union or, from the Portuguese perspective, the “Spanish Captivity”. One-crown rule gave Portuguese traders free trade access to Manila, allowing them to meet the city's demand for this important commodity. The slave trade's volume and profits testify to its social and economic significance and suggests that the Portuguese helped sustain the Philippines, even as they faced the logistical difficulties and legal barriers evident in Catarina's story. This paper shows that the forced migration of individuals like Catarina was a notable outcome of “Spain's Asian presence”—less significant in economic terms than the transfer of silver and textiles, but no less important in human terms.