Global Trade in the Sixteenth Century
The Spanish explorer Miguel de Legazpi’s 1565 trans-Pacific crossing from Mexico to Asia forged new travel and trade links between Spain and China, heralding the rise of a global trade in Spanish silver. In an era of European exploration and discovery that as historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam argues—define[d] a new sense of the limits of the inhabited world, in good measure because it [was] in a fundamental way an age of travel and discovery,” the establishment of the Manila Galleon trade route, from Manila in the Spanish Philippines to Acapulco in Mexico, meant that every continent except Australia was then connected in a transoceanic network of trade and migration.[1] Sustaining the lucrative galleon trade from 1565 to the collapse of Spain’s American empire in the early nineteenth century, silver bullion flowing from the mines of the Americas—from Zacatecas in northern Mexico and from Potosi in the Andes—became the currency of exchange for a global trade.[2]
In the late sixteenth century, Spanish Manila lay at the center of these new connections forge across continents by travel, discovery, and trade. The city became the hub of a thriving trade between Ming China and Spain. Spaniards traded the silver extracted from mines of the Spanish Empire in Mexico and Peru for Asian commodities like silk, porcelain, ivory, and spices – in abundance in the Chinese Empire, which had trading relationships with kingdoms around the "Eastern and Western Oceans" over a century before [3]. 
The search for new travel and trade routes was often a precursor to imperial conquest. Spanish explorers colonized territories and resources in an effort to secure advantages in, and access to, trading markets; the colonization of the Philippines, for example, secured for Spain a geographically strategic foothold to access markets in China. Synthesizing regional histories of Spanish America and East Asia, with innovative recent scholarship on connections between Spain and China in the late sixteenth century, along with cartographic sources from Brown University’s libraries and civil and ecclesiastical documentary sources from Manila, suggests several conclusions about Spanish imperial ambitions in the Pacific.
First, the Spanish exploration of the Pacific and conquest of the Philippines grew out contemporary explorations of the peripheries of Mexico, in efforts to secure resources and profits once the wealth of central Mexico had already been parceled out to the encomenderos, the holders of royal grants of tribute labor and most of them companions and allies of the original Cortés expedition to Mexico. With opportunities for further profits in the Mexican core foreclosed, later profiteers sought riches elsewhere, in western and northern Mexico and then across the Pacific Ocean.
Second, Philippine Islands were colonized amidst conflict with the Portuguese for strategic territories in the Pacific with access to Chinese trading markets the major goal of Pacific conquests.
Third, while Manila eventually became a center of largely peaceful commerce between European and the Chinese Empire, in the late sixteenth century it was home to aggressive imperialist factions who proposed (and in one disastrous case attempted to carry out) the conquest of mainland Asia and the conversion of its peoples to Christianity. Thus in the heady days of the empire—before debts, trade deficits, and declining power within Europe would curb Spanish imperial ambitions—early Spanish Manila served as a staging ground for the territorial and spiritual conquest of Asia.
________________________
[1] Subrahmanyam’s description of the early modern world comes from his "Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia, "Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997), 737. For the rise of global transoceanic trade in the sixteenth century, see Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the twenty-First Century, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).
[2] C.R. Boxer, "Plata es sangre: Sidelights on the Drain of Spanish-American Silver in the Far East, 1550-1700." Philippine Studies 18, no. 3 (1970): 457-475; Carlos Marichal, "The Spanish-American Silver Peso: Export Commodity and Global Money of the Ancient Regime." in Steven Topik, et al., eds., From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500-2000 (Durham, NC: Duke University press, 2006).
[3] Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1994).
[4] The now familiar term “spiritual conquest” comes from the title and frameworks of Robert Ricard’s classic The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523-1572, Lesley Byrd Simpson, trans. (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1966), a translation of the original French version published in 1933.
________________________
[1] Subrahmanyam’s description of the early modern world comes from his "Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia, "Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997), 737. For the rise of global transoceanic trade in the sixteenth century, see Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the twenty-First Century, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).
[2] C.R. Boxer, "Plata es sangre: Sidelights on the Drain of Spanish-American Silver in the Far East, 1550-1700." Philippine Studies 18, no. 3 (1970): 457-475; Carlos Marichal, "The Spanish-American Silver Peso: Export Commodity and Global Money of the Ancient Regime." in Steven Topik, et al., eds., From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500-2000 (Durham, NC: Duke University press, 2006).
[3] Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1994).
[4] The now familiar term “spiritual conquest” comes from the title and frameworks of Robert Ricard’s classic The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523-1572, Lesley Byrd Simpson, trans. (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1966), a translation of the original French version published in 1933.
