The Spanish Pacific, 1521-1815, Volume 2
A Reader of Primary Sources
Editors Christina Lee and Ricardo Padrón have published a new volume of primary sources for the study of the Spanish Pacific World. The volume emphasizes the vastness of the early modern Spanish Pacific. The collection’s sixteen sources, all translated into English, capture diverse voices and experiences from Manila, Japan, and New Spain (Mexico). Each source is accompanied by a short essay that provides valuable context and expert analysis. My chapter includes a translation of Thomé Gaspar de León’s petition to the Spanish king for commercial and other privileges in Spain’s Asian empire. The South Asian migrant was an extremely successful merchant in the middle of the eighteenth century.
This volume is an ideal resource for use in Global History, Latin American Studies, and Asian Studies courses and classrooms.
The book!
Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World is now available to order in hardback and for kindle.
Reach out if you are teaching this book - I would be happy to visit your classroom and talk about pirates and empire in the early modern world.
The Spanish Pacific - a guide to the literature
Hot off the (digital) press!
My new article “The Spanish Pacific” in Ben Vinson’s Oxford Bibliographies in Latin American Studies offers a detailed overview of important scholarship in this interdisciplinary field, highlighting traditional and emerging themes and questions in this vibrant space. Contact Oxford Bibliographies for a free trial to this valuable resource for serious researchers and the generally curious.
DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780199766581-0290
Colonial Latin Asia?
My new article is out in the latest volume of the CLAR. This provocation invites readers to consider incorporating the colonial Philippines into colonial Latin American studies, and argues that recent scholarship on the Spanish empire in Asia offers valuable insights and perspectives on how we think about the empire in the Americas.
Kristie Patricia Flannery (2023) Colonial Latin Asia? The case for incorporating the Philippines and the Spanish Pacific into colonial Latin American studies, Colonial Latin American Review, 32:2, 235-242, DOI: 10.1080/10609164.2023.2205233
Can the Devil Cross the Deep Blue Sea? Imagining the Spanish Pacific and Vast Early America from Below
My article in the William and Mary Quarterly "Can the Devil Cross the Deep Blue Sea? Imagining the Spanish Pacific and Vast Early America from Below," has been awarded several prizes this year, including the FEEGI (Forum on Early Modern Empires and Global Interaction’s) best article prize, the Mexico Section of LASA’s best article prize, and the Cappon prize for the best article in the Quarterly. I’m happy that the article on the creation of real and imagined connections across the Spanish Pacific world in the late eighteenth century appeals to a broad audience, across Area Studies divides.
A whirlwind second half of 2022!
An overdue run down on all the things that kept me busy in the best way.
I co-organized the Oceans as Archives conference that took place in Amsterdam in early July. This was a wonderful, provocative, energizing three-day conference brought together interdisciplinary scholars, artists, and activists from multiple countries to share and showcase new work and ideas in the Blue Humanities exploring oceans as archives and method. My key collaborators Mikki Stelder, Renisa Mawani, and I are now working on producing an edited volume to share this work with larger audiences and continue to conversation. Thinking with the sea has led me to think and write about interspecies interactions and animal agency in colonial contexts. In Amsterdam, I presented my new work-in-progress on the sixteenth-century miracle of the crab and its transpacific and global afterlives. I also had the chance to share this work at the Australian National University’s Environmental Exchanges Seminar Series in October. I look forward to developing this into an article for publication in 2023.
Setting new personal records for miles traveled in a year, I set off to London in September to take part in the Philippines Studies conference at SOAS. This meeting focused on the British invasion and occupation of Manila and its local and global legacies - which is also a key focus of my forthcoming book. I got the chance to reconnect with friends and favorite scholars from Manila, Mexico, and Europe, and meet others who I’ve long admired from the academic sidelines. This was another conference that wove art into the program. Christina Juan coordinated a walking tour that recovered and pondered the lost biography of Pedro Manuel, who was an assistant and friend of the famed cartographer Alexander Dalrymple.
I also traveled to New Orleans to join the Colonial Latin American Review’s thirty-year anniversary seminar. I was one of a lucky cohort of early career scholars invited to participate in this small meeting hosted by Tulane to discuss new directions of research in the field, ‘the future of the past.’ Of course, I preached about the Pacific turn and vast colonial Latin America, and some of my thoughts on colonial Latin Asia will be published in the summer issue of CLAR this (northern hemisphere) summer. We had a vibrant conversation, and the future of the field and its twists and turns is a bright one. It was nice to drop into Texas overnight to visit my dearly missed friends while I was briefly back in the USA.
The year ended with the Marine Worlds of the Long Eighteenth Century seminar (the 18th David Nichol Smith Seminar for Eighteenth-Century Studies) that I co-organized and hosted in Melbourne with my ACU colleagues Killian Quigley and Kate Fullagar. We were excited to learn about great new work in literature, history, art history, and religion that eighteenth-century experts are developing in Australia, New Zealand, and our larger world region. Thanks to ACU’s generous support of this event, we were able to offer travel bursaries to local and international Ph.D. students. The meeting emphasized the value in thinking about the eighteenth century from the Pacific and the ways in which this enriches our global field.
Good news on the book front. My first monograph, Piracy and Empire in the Spanish Pacific. made it through peer review with Penn Press. The first half of 2022 was focused on transforming the dissertation into a manuscript. Now I’m wrapping up the final revisions in the next few weeks. I’m grateful that colleagues at Monash University’s Global Encounters & First Nations Peoples Project team invited me to talk about my book in November. I can’t wait to hold it in my hands and see it in yours.
I was also fortunate to win several research grants last year. I’m part of the large Australian and international team that secured an Australian Government Linkage Grant worth almost $800,000 AUD. Our team which includes historians, maritime archeologists, literary scholars, and curators will use Australian collections (which include salvaged shipwrecks) to write new histories of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in Western Australia and the Indian Ocean world, and recover histories of encounters in these spaces. I’m also part of a smaller team that won a grant through The Australia–Germany Joint Research Cooperation Scheme, which is supported by Universities Australia and DAAD (The Australia–Germany Joint Research Cooperation Scheme). Our two-year project, Child Slaveries in the Early Modern World: Gender, Trauma, and Trafficking in Transcultural Perspective (1500-1800), is a collaboration with together my IHSS colleagues Professor Susan Broomhall and Dr. Jessica O'Leary with Bonn Center for Slavery and Dependency Studies historians Professor Claudia Jarzebowski, and Ph.D. students Joseph Biggerstaff and Lisa Phongsavath.
I also won a Humanities Travelling Fellowship from the Australian Academy for the Humanities which will help me do archival research in 2023. At the very end of the year, I learned that the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study awarded me a five-month visiting research fellowship that I will take up in early 2024.
Vast Early HispanoAmerica
“Can the Devil Cross the Deep Blue Sea? Imagining the Spanish Pacific and Vast Early America from Below,” my new article features in the latest volume of the William and Mary Quarterly. I am very happy to have this article in this publication - the leading journal in early American history, the perfect place to analyze how a Spanish-speaking early American who was born in Mexico and was forcibly migrated across the Pacific conceived of America and its furthest reaches and limits.
New Histories of the Colonial Philippines
It was great to have the opportunity to participate in the 19th Philippine-Spanish Friendship Day conference held over two days earlier this month. The meeting reminded me that one of the advantages of conferences in the age of the pandemic is that meeting online-only allows experts to zoom in from anywhere in the world. I appreciated the opportunity to share my new research that explores how early moderns imagined the Spanish Pacific as an imperial space, elucidating the way that subalterns shaped the development of the Pacific as an idea. The UP Diliman History Department is leading the charge in exciting new research on colonialism in the Philippines. Ros Costello’s paper on the huge Tagalog revolt that broke out in Luzon in the middle of the eighteenth century was a highlight. Dr Costello showed us how rich the Tagalog sources are for the revolt, which have been looked over by previous historians. Analyzing Tagalog primary sources revealed politics over land and colonial land laws that underpinned this rebellion.
Hanging with Adam
It was fun to have the chance to meet Adam Liaw and chat with him about spices and the global Spanish empire. The interview features as part of Adam’s new five-episode Audible podcast exploring How Taste Changed the World. It’s a flavor-driven romp through world history with input from foodies, historians, and biologists.
“Peer review done right” Guest post on Uncommon Sense
Check out this blog post that I wrote for the OMOHUNDRO Institute of Early American History and Culture, reflecting on the process of landing an article for the William & Mary Quarterly, including navigating peer review.
Grant News!
I’m happy to share that I’m a lucky winner of a Publication Subsidy from the Australian Academy of the Humanities. This grant will help to cover the (surprisingly high!) costs of procuring professional maps and paying for the rights to reproduce images that will appear in my forthcoming first book "Fighting Pirates, Forging Empire: Anti-Piracy and Spanish Colonial Rule in the Pacific."
Most early-career historians don’t give much thought to the costs of publishing their first book with an academic press (which is usually a better version of their dissertation) until they are deep in the weeds of it. A shout out to my wonderful editor at UPenn Press, Bob Lockhart, and my smart & generous ACU colleague Sarah Bendall who talked me through the costs and developing a budget.
The price tag for buying an image to reproduce varies wildly depending on who is selling. Some libraries and archives don’t charge any fees, while others charge several hundred dollars a pop. And things like whether the image will be reproduced in colour or if it will appear on the front cover of your book can also have an impact on the price you will pay for the right to use it.
Professor Kathryn M. Rudy’s article demystifies the real costs of getting a scholarly monograph to market in her article in The Times Higher Ed supplement.
Memories of colonialism are embedded in urban space…
Memories of empire are embedded in urban space
Ateneo de Manila University organized a fantastic, month-long history festival inviting leading scholars to reflect on 500 years of Asian-Iberian encounters. Last night I had the opportunity to join the conversation as part of a panel focused on the city.
Danny Gerona shared his research on the establishment of the first Spanish cities in the Philippines in the seventeenth century. Ros Costello presented her new book project that traces urban reform campaigns in Manila in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gary Devilles gave a fascinating talk exploring water, language, and place in Manila. All of this new scholarship highlights the global dimensions of the city in the Philippines. Cebu was founded because of its ideal location to launch conquests of the Spice Islands. Sanitization campaigns in Manila reproduced water, lighting, and street-widening projects in Madrid and Barcelona, and were developed by a generation of technocrats who worked in colonial Hong Kong and Jakarta.
My presentation reflected on Manila’s anti-colonial public histories. In 2020, communities confronted the connections between monuments that venerate historical figures who performed or championed violence ( dispossession, enslavement, genocide) against Black and indigenous populations and the ongoing violence against these peoples today. In the United States, bronze conquistadors including Christopher Columbus and Juan de Oñate were dismantled by activists and local government officials. Statues of confederates and Anglo slave traders were also vandalized and removed.
Oñate must fall!
What do we do with these torn-down monuments? Do we melt them down? Do they belong in a museum, properly contextualized by explanatory panels and docents? And what kind of monuments, if any, should replace them?
I make the case that Manila’s decolonized public histories of the Spanish empire in the Philippines can serve as a model for other cities to learn from, and be inspired by.
The entire session is available to stream via youtube. I chime in at the 30 minute mark. Future sessions will be steamed live via the Contacts & Continuities facebook page.
Further Reading
I’m a big fan of Ana Maria Araujo’s work on the politics of monuments and memory. Her writing engaging and accessible and does a great job explaining why and how the history and legacies of slavery and colonialism matter today. Arajo’s monograph Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past was published by Bloomsbury in 2020. Her edited volume, Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space (2012), is also brilliant.
We need more studies of monuments in Manila and the Philippines. I liked Robert Mason and Lauren Istvandity’s article on the conversion of the Spanish Fort Santiago into the Rizal Shrine. Ian Morely’s research provides valuable insight into how the US colonial government in the Philippines influenced anti-Spanish public histories (Cities and Nationhood: American Imperialism and Urban Design in the Philippines, 1898-1916, University of Hawaii Press, 2018), yet it makes the mistake of dismissing Filipino agency in campaigns to venerate José Rizal.