3 - Other Agents of Empire in the Spanish Pacific World (1755)

Summary

Abstract

The South Asian man Don Thomé Gaspar de León migrated to Manila from India in the first half of the eighteenth century and became one of the city's most successful merchants. De León's “Account of the Merits and Services” is a kind of early modern curriculum vitae that documents his services to the Spanish empire, which included spying on Spain's rival European powers in maritime Asia. This primary source highlights Manila's connections to other polities and port cities in this region. It also reveals how Spanish colonial rule depended on the support of Asian migrants while also taking steps to limit their mobility and privileges, and provides insight into why a man like De León chose to be a loyal servant of the distant Spanish Crown.

Keywords: Manila, trade, espionage, loyalty, race

Thomé Gaspar de León was one of the many migrants who settled in Manila in the eighteenth century. He was born into the Paravar community in or close to Cuddalore in southern India in 1711. His parents were elite Catholic descendants of the fishermen who had converted to Catholicism in the early sixteenth century and subsequently developed close relationships with the Portuguese. De León began his maritime career on ships that plied the coasts of southwestern India in the service of the Portuguese empire before he traveled to the Philippines in his early twenties. We can regard De León as an exceptional historical figure because he became one of Manila's wealthiest merchants in his lifetime, building a personal fortune in the intra-Asian trade. “An Account of the Merits and Services of Captain Don Thomé Gaspar de León”—one of several primary sources that hold information about De León's life that survive in imperial archives—reveals Manila's unique character as a center of Spanish imperial power and as a hub in the long-distance trading networks that spanned maritime Asia, which contributed to the growth of the city's large, multiethnic population. It also highlights the Spanish colonial government's anxiety about Manila's non-Spanish residents, and its efforts to assert control over this heterogenous group.

De León would have hired an agent to present this professionally printed account of his merits and services to the king of Spain and his advisory Council of the Indies in Madrid in 1755.