Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Bibliography of Recent Work in Early Modern Spanish Pacific Studies
- 1 “Indescribable Misery” (Mis)translated : A Letter from Manila’s Chinese Merchants to the Spanish King (1598)
- 2 The First Biography of a Filipino: The Life of Miguel Ayatumo (1673)
- 3 Other Agents of Empire in the Spanish Pacific World (1755)
- 4 A Chinese Ethnography of Spanish Manila (1812)
- 5 On the Legal Grounds of the Conquest of the Philippines (1568)
- 6 A Catholic Conceptualization of the Pacific Ocean : The Mental Geography of Giambattista Lucarelli on His Journey from Mexico to China (1578)
- 7 From Manila to Madrid via Portuguese India : Travels and Plans for the Conquest of Malacca by the Soldier Alonso Rodríguez (1582–84)
- 8 Frustrated at the Door : Alessandro Valignano Evaluates the Jesuits’ China Mission (1588)
- 9 A Spanish Utopian Island in Japan (1599)
- 10 Two Friars Protest the Restriction on Missionaries Traveling to Japan (1604?–5)
- 11 A Layman’s Account of Japanese Christianity (1619)
- 12 The Sound and the Fury : A Vigorous Admonition from the King of Spain to the Audiencia of Manila (1620)
- 13 The Deportation of Free Black People from Seventeenth-Century Manila (1636–37, 1652)
- 14 The Deportation of Free Black People from Seventeenth-Century Manila (1636–37, 1652)
- 15 Race, Gender, and Colonial Rule in an Illustrated Eighteenth-Century Manuscript on Mexico and the Philippines (1763)
- 16 Censoring Tagalog Texts at the Tribunal of the Inquisition in New Spain (1772)
- Index
12 - The Sound and the Fury : A Vigorous Admonition from the King of Spain to the Audiencia of Manila (1620)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 December 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Bibliography of Recent Work in Early Modern Spanish Pacific Studies
- 1 “Indescribable Misery” (Mis)translated : A Letter from Manila’s Chinese Merchants to the Spanish King (1598)
- 2 The First Biography of a Filipino: The Life of Miguel Ayatumo (1673)
- 3 Other Agents of Empire in the Spanish Pacific World (1755)
- 4 A Chinese Ethnography of Spanish Manila (1812)
- 5 On the Legal Grounds of the Conquest of the Philippines (1568)
- 6 A Catholic Conceptualization of the Pacific Ocean : The Mental Geography of Giambattista Lucarelli on His Journey from Mexico to China (1578)
- 7 From Manila to Madrid via Portuguese India : Travels and Plans for the Conquest of Malacca by the Soldier Alonso Rodríguez (1582–84)
- 8 Frustrated at the Door : Alessandro Valignano Evaluates the Jesuits’ China Mission (1588)
- 9 A Spanish Utopian Island in Japan (1599)
- 10 Two Friars Protest the Restriction on Missionaries Traveling to Japan (1604?–5)
- 11 A Layman’s Account of Japanese Christianity (1619)
- 12 The Sound and the Fury : A Vigorous Admonition from the King of Spain to the Audiencia of Manila (1620)
- 13 The Deportation of Free Black People from Seventeenth-Century Manila (1636–37, 1652)
- 14 The Deportation of Free Black People from Seventeenth-Century Manila (1636–37, 1652)
- 15 Race, Gender, and Colonial Rule in an Illustrated Eighteenth-Century Manuscript on Mexico and the Philippines (1763)
- 16 Censoring Tagalog Texts at the Tribunal of the Inquisition in New Spain (1772)
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This document is the main part of a letter sent to the officers of the Audiencia of Manila in 1620. It addresses the accumulated abscess of the colony's financial situation and the abyssal contrast between private lucre and public expenses. Its particular interest lies in the efficiency and vigor of its exposition: the undisclosed administrator of the Council of the Indies, which was presided over at the time by Fernando Carrillo (1617–22), unsurprisingly the former president of the Council of the Treasury (1609–17), seems to explode with anger, denouncing the wrongdoings and unfaithfulness of the Spanish community and more particularly of the royal officers of the Philippines.
Keywords: Alonso Fajardo, transpacific trade, Philippines, colonial Philippines, Spanish government in the Philippines
The question of the intense trade between Asia and the New World through the establishment of the Manila galleon transpacific route is certainly one of the most discussed in Philippine historiography. The problem of the Philippines’ deficit is equally central to the appreciation of the first configuration of Spanish colonialism in Asia and was already the subject of many debates and quantifications during the seventeenth century.
Consequently, the articulation between these connected issues— namely, the contrast between enormous private profits, which relied on the importation of a silver cargo close to 2 million pesos a year at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and an annual public shortfall of around 230,000 pesos, seems to be an essential study. To what extent could this paradoxical situation have weighed on the relationships between the Council of the Indies and the local administrators of the Philippines? Here is an inescapable question to the understanding of the contrasted signification of the Spanish presence in the Philippines, in the global context of the Hispanic empire.
It was in the early 1590s, under the administration of Governor Gómez Pérez Dasmarinas (1589–93), that the colony opened its long cycle of deficits, due to the increase of military expenses, whether to prevent external threats (English and Japanese, among others) or to pre pare offensive projects (the conquest of Mindanao, Moluccas, projects regarding China).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Spanish Pacific, 1521-1815A Reader of Primary Sources, pp. 189 - 200Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2024