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The Link That Kept the Philippines Spanish: Mexican Merchant Interests and the Manila Trade, 1571-1815*
FROM 1571 to 1815 a unique commercial relationship between New Spain and the Philippines was essential to maintaining the Philippines as Spain's only colony in Asia. In spite of considerable cost to the crown and the opposition of metropolitan commercial interests, the Manila galleons sailed between Acapulco and Manila every year for two and a half centuries (except when they were shipwrecked or captured by the Dutch or English).1 Manila served as a "direct trade link between America and Asia"; the founding of this outpost of the Spanish empire in I57I ushered in a new era of world trade.2 The history of imperial expansion into Asia and its effects on Europe has received considerable scholarly attention3 Social scientists have also begun to examine the impact of trade within Asia during the early modern period.4 However, studies of the development of world trade have tended to relegate Spain's American colonies to the passive role of producing the silver that fueled the commerce.5 Here I address that bias by showing how the interests of New Spain, especially those of Mexican merchants and colonial officials, were central to maintaining the trade with the Philippines that sustained the Asian colony as part of the Spanish empire. In making my argument about the nature of the colonial system that structured relations among Spain, New Spain, and the Philippines, I reject the Wallersteinian view that this triangular relationship was determined by the dynamics of an emerging European world system. Instead I argue that Spain and its colonies were affected by the logic-cultural as well as economic-of the Chinese world system, in which the Pacific trade played a part.6
A UNIQUE INTERCOLONIAL RELATIONSHIP
From the beginning, Spanish colonization of the Philippines was a Mexican enterprise. The adelantado Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, who laid claim to the Philippines in the name of Spain in Manila in I565, sailed (from either Barra de Navidad or Acapulco) in a ship built in Mexico and manned by Mexicans.7 When a colonial government was established in the islands, it was subordinated to the viceroy of New Spain. The Philippines was also dependent both on trade with New Spain and, more important,...