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 H. Lee is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. She has written extensively about religion and race in the making of the Spanish identity in the early modern period. Her book publications include The Anxiety of Sameness in Early Modern Spain (Manchester UP, 2015), Reading and Writing Subjects in Medieval and Golden Age Spain, with José Luis Gastañaga (Juan de la Cuesta, 2016), Western Visions of the Far East in a Transpacific Age (Routledge, 2012), and the critical edition of Lope de Vega’s Los mártires de Japón (Juan de la Cuesta, 2006). Her current book project analyzes forms of dissent in globalized forms of Catholicism in the Spanish Philippines. Ricardo Padrón is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature and Empire in Early Modern Spain (U of Chicago P, 2004), and The Indies of the Setting Sun: The Pacific and Asia in the Spanish Geopolitical Imagination, 1513-1610 (U of Chicago P, forthcoming).