Asia-Pacific in the Making of the Americas: Toward a Global History

The Spanish Pacific as the West Indies

This history of imperial expansion into the Philippines bears out the contentions of recent scholars seeking to re-conceptualize the Spanish Empire in Asia as an integral part of Spain’s American Empire.  The Philippines, according to these interpretations, were more closely tied to the Americas in Europeans’ geographical imagination, especially in the eyes of Spanish imperial officials who viewed the Philippines as an extension of Mexico. As Robert Richmond Ellis contends in a recent innovative analysis of Spanish-Asian encounters in the late-sixteenth-century Asia, “Both administratively as well as conceptually, Spain regarded the Philippines as the westernmost extension of its vast American empire rather than a discrete Asian colony. Manila, moreover, functioned as the nexus of Asia and the Spanish-American empire since it was the entrepôt linking the commerce of the East… with the Americas.[8] Spanish imperial administration of Manila bears out Ellis’s claim. Spain demarcated the Philippine Islands as within the jurisdiction of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, although Manila did receive its own audiencia (royal appeals court) in 1583. Spaniards subjected native Filipinos to reducción or resettlement into European towns, just as Spaniards did with the natives of Mexico and Peru.[9]

European cartography of the Pacific Ocean, too, supports the re-conceptualization of the Philippines as integral to the Spanish American Empire, while also suggesting China and mainland Asia were the ultimate designs of Spanish imperial expansion across the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish cartographer Juan de Velasco notably included the Pacific, the Philippines, and the eastern Chinese coastline in his 1575 maps of the West Indies while leaving off of his map the East Indies, Portugal’s sphere of influence in the Indian Ocean which Spaniards had successfully bypassed by crossing the Pacific Ocean; the two maps by Velasco were reproduced by Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas in his 1601 chronicle The General History of the Deeds of Spaniards in the Indies.[10] Velasco’s map of “las Yndias del occidentales” (“West Indies”) in particular depicts Spain’s sphere of influence in the Pacific and reveals the extent of imperial ambitions, reaching to the eastern coast of China depicted at the map’s western edge squarely amidst Spain’s, rather than Portugal’s, claims to the Indies.[11]
 
Note the dividing meridian line between the East and West Indies, which Velasco has drawn on the map’s western border: Velasco placed the Pacific Ocean within the West Indies, or Spain’s sphere of influence, while leaving a curiously small portion of the Americas in the East Indies, to represent Portuguese Brazil.
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[8] Robert Richmond Ellis, They Need Nothing: Hispanic-Asian Encounters of the Colonial Period (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 18.  See also Javier Morillo-Alicea’s conceptualization of the Caribbean and Philippines as the “Spanish Imperial Archipelago.”  Morillo-Alicea, “Uncharted Landscapes of ‘Latin America’: The Phllipines in the Spanish Imperial Archipelago,” in Christopher Schmidt-Nowara and John M. Nieto-Phillips, eds., Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations, and Legends (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005).
[9] Reed, Colonial Manila, 15, 25.  For a history of reducción in Peru, Viceroy Francisco de Toledo’s General Resettlement, see Jeremy Ravi Mumford, Vertical Empire: The General Resettlement of Indians in the Colonial Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
[10] Juan López de Velasco, “Descripción de las Indias del Poniente,” and “Descripción de las Yndias del occidentales, in Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos en las islas (Madrid: Emprenta Real, 1601), 3, 73.  John Carter Brown Library, Brown University.  “Del Poniente” means “west” after the Spanish for sunset.
[11] López de Velasco, “Descripción de las Yndias del occidentales,” in de Herreray Tordesillas, Historia general, 3.

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