Introduction

Summary

The Spanish Pacific: A Web of Connections

The primary sources included in this volume are meant to supplement the selection available in our original anthology, The Spanish Pacific, 1521–1815: A Reader of Primary Sources, but in preparing this volume, we have not assumed any familiarity on the part of the reader with that publication. If anything, this very introduction may be the best place for the reader to start, since it has been designed to situate the sources provided herein within the field of Spanish Pacific studies, as the editors understand it. It begins by defining what we mean by the Spanish Pacific, and then discusses current scholarship on the topic before outlining the contents of the anthology itself. A generous bibliography of work on the Spanish Pacific published since 2016 has been added to our introduction. We hope these materials will be useful to newcomers and seasoned specialists alike.

In the first volume of our publication, we conceptualized the early modern Spanish Pacific as the space located in Southeast and East Asia that the Spanish Crown and her subjects imagined as a transpacific extension of Spain's empire in the Americas, a region that included the Philippines and the Marianas, where Spain effectively established itself as a colonial power, but also parts of China, Japan, and the Moluccas that Spain mapped as part of the hemisphere assigned to it by the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. Yet we also proposed that the Spanish Pacific could be understood in other ways, not as a geographically bounded space, but as a “web of connections” that emanated from the crucial contact zone which was the Spanish Philippines to a host of varied and distant locations in Asia and Spanish America. While the first concept recuperates the forgotten geographical imaginary of certain early modern actors, the second, loosely inspired by contemporary social scientific and historiographical models, allows one to cut across the mutually exclusive, well-bounded territories of imperial and national cartographies. Here, we elaborate upon this second definition by suggesting that the Spanish Pacific can be understood as a social space constituted in and through a variety of spatial practices, including navigation, commerce, labor, migration, colonization, translation, and evangelization, which generated connections of all kinds between Asia, the Americas, and Europe.