The Spanish Pacific, 1521-1815: A Reader of Primary Sources

The Spanish Pacific designates the space Spain colonized or aspired to rule in Asia between 1521 - with the arrival of Ferdinand Magellan - and 1815 - the end of the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route. It encompasses what we identify today as the Philippines and the Marianas, but also Spanish America, China, Japan, and other parts of Asia that in the Spanish imagination were extensions of its Latin American colonies. This reader provides a selection of documents relevant to the encounters and entanglements that arose in the Spanish Pacific among Europeans, Spanish Americans, and Asians while highlighting the role of natives, mestizos, and women. A-first-of-its-kind, each of the documents in this collection was selected, translated into English, and edited by a different scholar in the field of early modern Spanish Pacific studies, who also provided commentary and bibliography.

Christina Hyo-Jung Lee is Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. Her latest book, Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines under Early Spanish Rule (Oxford University Press, 2021) is the first scholarly study to focus on the dynamic life of saints and their devotees in the Spanish Philippines, from the sixteenth through the early part of the eighteenth century. Ricardo Padrón is Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia who studies the literature and culture of the early modern Hispanic world, particularly questions of empire, space, and cartography. His recently published monograph, The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West (University of Chicago Press, 2020) examines the place of Pacific and Asia in the Spanish concept of ＂the Indies.＂