Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World (Penn Press 2024)

*Book under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press

The Philippines was forged in a sea of piracy. My first book examines the coalitions that Spanish colonial officials and militant missionaries negotiated with indigenous Filipinos and Chinese mestizos to fight against three waves of sea-robbers: the Chinese ‘piratical empires’ of the seventeenth century, the slave-raiding ‘Moro’ pirates from the Islamic southern Philippines that grew powerful in the early eighteenth century, and the British ‘pirates’ that invaded Manila in 1762. The book reveals how the politics of Catholic anti-piracy made Spain’s Asian empire resilient to crises including the British invasion. Piracy also influenced colonial dynamics of social inclusion. Shifting piracy threats defined which indigenous and migrant communities were integrated into the empire as vassals — an early modern mode of citizenship — and which groups were subject to segregation, expulsion, and even mass executions. This project offers a critical reinterpretation of colonial Philippines history by challenging the notion that the Spanish ruled the islands for centuries with brute force alone. It also makes a significant contribution to the emerging literature on maritime Asia by deepening our understanding of how maritime violence shaped the trajectories of globalization and of European imperial expansion in this world region.