28 - Iberian Conceptions of the Pacific

Summary

During the last decade of the twentieth century, Arif Dirlik took aim at the term ‘Spanish Lake’ for providing a historical shorthand to characterizing Euro-American conceptualization and penetration of the Pacific Ocean between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. Historically, according to Dirlik, the Pacific has been regarded as a succession of ‘lakes’ (or periods of hegemony) spanning a Spanish Lake (for the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries), a British Lake (for the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries), and lastly an American Lake (spanning the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries).¹ In his rendition Dirlik was inspired by the geographer Oskar Spate’s conception of the Pacific Ocean as a ‘European artifact’.² Without seeking to denigrate the contributions of Asian and Pacific Islanders to this ocean, Spate argued that the Pacific became, for better or worse, integrated into human consciousness through European economic and cartographic imagination.Spate was one of the first to write extensively on the process of convergence in his trilogy The Pacific since Magellan.³ In his first volume, entitled The Spanish Lake, Spate borrowed and popularized a concept first introduced by the American historian William Schurz almost a century ago.⁴ Schurz, in preparation for his monograph on the Manila Galleon trade, provided an outline of the hegemony, more imaginary than real, that Castile exercised over the Pacific.⁵ John Gascoigne has recently recast Spate’s renditions in a less ethnocentric world historical framework by maintaining that the Pacific Ocean was last in the two global processes of divergence and convergence. It was one of the last areas to be settled by human beings and it was the last area to be fully integrated in the convergent process of globalization.⁶