5 - Asian Manufactured Goods in the Spanish Pacific: Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries

Summary

Introduction

Following the Portuguese in the expansion to Asia, the Spanish sent an expedition in search of a westward sea route to the Spice Islands, which, after sailing across both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, reached the island of Cebú in the Philippines in 1521. Its location was of strategic importance, bordered by the Philippine Sea on the east, the South China Sea on the west, the Luzon Strait on the north, and the Celebes Sea on the south. By the time Philip II ascended the throne in 1556, Spain had established a vast colonial empire in the New World that encompassed the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru (fig. 5.1). Nine years later, in 1565, an army led by Miguel López de Legazpi conquered Cebú and founded the first Spanish settlement in the Philippines. In the same year, the Spanish discovered an eastward route across the Pacific to New Spain. Regular crossings began in 1571 when Legazpi moved the colonial capital northwards to the island of Luzon. The founding of Manila, four years after Emperor Longqing of China lifted a decree banning all maritime trade, gave the Spanish a foothold in the profitable Southeast Asian trading networks. This provided the opportunity to acquire a variety of valuable goods from Chinese and Japanese merchants who came there to trade. Already in 1567, Legazpi informed the king that the Chinese and Japanese brought every year “silks, woolens, bells, porcelains, perfumes, iron, tin, colored cotton cloths, and other small wares” to the islands of Luzon and Mindoro. The Spanish rapidly transformed the new capital into a flourishing trading and trans-shipment port that connected China, Japan, and the New World.

Studies of the economic history of the early modern Spanish Philippines have shown that large quantities of Asian manufactured goods were transported by the so-called Manila galleon that crossed the Pacific annually from Manila to the port of Acapulco in New Spain. This galleon trade, however, was primarily based on the exchange of Chinese silk for New World silver. On the other hand, economic historians of the Spanish colonies in the New World have shown that New Spain, positioned at the crossroads of the Spanish transpacific and transatlantic trade routes, not only facilitated the circulation of the imported Asian goods within the viceroyalties, but also enabled their re-export to the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and the motherland, Spain.