For the International Journal of Maritime History Dec. 2001
Dennis O. Flynn, Arturo Giráldez and James Sobredo (eds.). European Entry into the Pacific: Spain and the Acapulco-Manila Galleons. "The Pacific World: Lands, Peoples and History of the Pacific, 1500-1900," Vol. 4; Aldershot, Hampshire, and Burlington, VT: Variorum Press of Ashgate Publishing [www.ashgate.com], 2001. xliii + 392 pp., maps, illustrations, tables, chapter notes, select bibliography to the introduction. US$127.95, cloth; ISBN 0-75460-152-8.
These fourteen previously-published articles treat aspects of Spanish exploration and colonization in the Pacific region and specifically the commerce that developed between the Philippines, China, and New Spain from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. They represent a high level of scholarship and appear in their original language (eleven in English, two in Spanish and one in French) and form, including original pagination. James Sobredo's skilful introduction demonstrates how, collectively, these articles reveal the coherence of the Pacific's commercial history and Spain's often contradictory, yet persistent efforts to integrate the Philippines into its larger imperial designs. Several of these insightful chapters challenge the more well-known literature on the Manila Galleons.
Two introductory articles place the Manila trade in the larger context of Pacific history. Donald Brand (1967) reviews Magellan's voyage across the Pacific in 1521 and subsequent Spanish efforts through the eighteenth century to establish a base in the Philippines and establish trading routes to New Spain. Brand argues that the extent of Spanish discoveries has been minimized by the lack of publicity for their shiplogs and charts, but concludes that "Spain was the greatest exploring and scientific nation in the Pacific region during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries" (p. 40). Berthold Laufer (1907) then addresses the relation of the Chinese to the Philippines. Chinese-Philippine trade was already important before the Spaniards' arrived. Manila came to be essentially an intermediary between China and New Spain and Laufer reviews both the development of this trade and the recurrent friction between Chinese and Spaniards.
A second part focuses on the beginnings of the Manila Galleon trade, offering a valuable supplement to William Lytle Schurz' classic Manila Galleon (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1939). A minor flaw in the work is the frequent incorrect identification of Schurz as "Lyle W. Schurz." The first of two articles by William Henry Scott (1992) describes contact between the Mediterranean world and the Far East even before Magellan's voyage, while a second (1985) provides detail on "Spanish-Moro Relations in the Sixteenth Century," discussing trade relations between the Islamic Philippines and China. Scott makes a strong case for the profit motive taking precedence over whatever anti-Muslim sentiment the Spaniards harboured in the sixteenth century. M. N. Pearson (1968) then explains that Philippine trade also thrived with other Southeast Asian countries in addition to China and Japan. Although there were some outposts of Spanish presence in other southeast Asian ports, he attributed the lack of a Spanish colonial presence there to the Spaniards' limited initiative and even more to the Seville merchant monopoly's limitations on the Asian-Pacific portion of Spanish trade. The Manila-Acapulco trade declined after the first third of the seventeenth century because Seville's Atlantic-based merchants promoted policies explicitly designed to thwart Pacific trade between Mexico and the Philippines. This argument follows those of Pierre Chaunu, but it ignores the major role of smuggling by the seventeenth century throughout Spain's empire. A chapter by M. T. Paske-Smith (1914) confirms the continued importance of trade between Manila and other Asian countries despite Seville's restrictive trade policies. Paske-Smith details the trade between Japan and the Philippines before and during the Spanish occupation.
A third part turns to the impact of the galleons through the seventeenth century. With attention both to theory and evidence, it includes Charles Boxer's (1970) classic "Sidelights on the Drain of Spanish-American Silver in the Far East, 1550-1700," which places the trade in a global perspective, and an article by Pierre Chaunu (1951) on the decline of the silk trade from Manila in the seventeenth century. An article by Hang-sheng Chuan (1975), however, challenges Chaunu's tax-based research and demonstrates the continued vitality of the Chinese silk trade with Spanish America. Meanwhile, Alvaro Jara (1979) adds weight to Boxer's recognition of smuggling as a major factor in the drain of American silver to the Far East in an article emphasizing the continued trade between Spanish America and the Far East from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The final article in this part, by the general editors of the series, Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez (1995), offers a global context for the rising importance of the Manila galleons. They do this by observing the world supply and demand for silver, which was pouring into China by the late sixteenth century because its value there was twice that in the rest of the world, leading to substantial increases in mining in both Spanish America and Japan.
Three diverse articles conclude the volume: Maria Lourdes Díaz-Trechuelo (1966) on the eighteenth-century Philippine economy, John McMaster (1959) on the flight of Mexican pesos to Asia, and Benito Legarda's (1955) survey of the Manila Galleon trade from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Legarda's piece stands as a conclusion for the entire volume. While drawing much from Schurz, he pointed to unfavourable consequences, direct and indirect, of the galleon trade, including a failure to develop Manila's full commercial potential as an entrepôt, neglect of Philippine agriculture and industry, creation of a monopolistically-minded merchant class, encouragement of widespread corruption and law evasion, unproductive use of resources, and domination of retail and credit operations by foreigners. Legarda nevertheless recognized that Spain avoided the "horrors of the colonial plantation system and of slavery, the public benefit derived from the good works of the obras pías; and the intangible advantage accruing to the Philippines from membership in a great political entity like the Spanish empire" (pp. 362-63).
This work not only makes more available some rather obscurely-published articles on Pacific commercial history, but it also suggests some serious reevaluation of the traditional view of the relative unimportance of the Philippine trade to Spanish American history. A number of these articles offer convincing evidence to the contrary, including the Philippines as a major profit centre that helped finance the Spanish Empire in the seventeenth century and by the eighteenth century contributed to the growing independence of Mexico and Peru from the Seville-Cádiz trade monopoly. As the editor, concludes, "Having been a primary link between the Americas and Asia during four centuries . . . it is essential to conceptualize Manila as the linchpin for Pacific Rim exchanges from 1571 until nearly 1815. For this reason, the Philippines Islands have played a crucial role in both Pacific and world history. Their conventional treatment as a mere extension of New Spain distorts world history, as much as it distorts the histories of Mexico and the Philippines themselves" (p. xxxviii).
Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr.
Texas Christian University
Forth Worth, Texas, USA
Review Editor
International Journal of Maritime History
Memorial University of Newfoundland
Sir Wilfred Grenfell College Campus
Corner Brook, Newfoundland, CANADA A2H 6P9