As one might expect of the world’s largest ocean, piracy in the Pacific is both ancient and complex. Focusing on the Philippines’ experience with maritime predation after Magellan, but especially in the eighteenth century, Kristie Flannery carves out a space and constructs a narrative that makes sense of chaos. Whereas piracy in the Mediterranean and by extension the Atlantic was described according to classical discourse, old categories proved an uneasy fit in Pacific waters, especially on the western side of this vast ocean, awash in myriad island cultures. Nevertheless, Flannery shows how the Mediterranean obsession with crusade and jihad sprouted in new form in the southwest Philippines and elsewhere even as older raiding traditions based in Japan and the South China Sea got reformulated as something familiar despite their seeming religious neutrality.
Spurred in part by Catholic missionaries, Filipinos of all sorts joined in the fight against piracy in all its forms, creating in effect a ‘loyal’ core. To be clear, piracy consisted in pillage and kidnapping for ransom at or by descent from the sea. Many coastal Filipinos suffered from or engaged in this cyclical activity. Corsairing or privateering was the same except with official sanction from a sovereign, who received a cut of the proceeds. To the victims, especially captives longing for freedom, it all looked and felt about the same. Flannery explains how diverse ethnic groups subjected to these attacks mobilised and thus ‘made’ the ‘Spanish Pacific world’.
This finely crafted and crisply written book consists of five chapters plus introduction and epilogue. The core argument centres on the eighteenth century, reinterpreting the 1762 British capture of Manila as a piratical ‘corporate raid’ and culminating with the Spanish Bourbon crown’s abandonment of Chinese expulsion policies in around 1780 following a violent purge.
Alleged piracy in the waters around the vast Philippine archipelago was rife from the first days of Spanish contact c.1520, perhaps reaching its peak in the early seventeenth century, so why privilege the eighteenth century? In part because the sources are richest for this century and in part because most have not been subjected to serious critical inquiry. Flannery does this, effectively showing that the ‘piratical’ push came to shove in the later eighteenth century as Spain faced off against Britain, France and the Netherlands at new scales and thus ‘the Spanish empire’ had greater need of allies than ever before.
Internal allies, or faithful subjects, were, as Flannery emphasises throughout, key. Rebels mattered, too, and outside attackers spurred them on (though they rarely acted as hoped). The British invasion of 1762 was something like the eighteenth-century equivalent of Henry Morgan’s 1670–1 raid on Panama, a test of loyalty and a major geopolitical turning point. But Flannery’s take is special in that she brings out the view from within, or rather, the disparate and often incommensurable views (plural) from within. This conflict and aftermath form the book’s core.
A tour-de-force introduction is followed by a chapter on the Spanish showdown with so-called moro (Muslim) pirates in the Philippine southwest, peaking in the 1750s. Chapter 2 explores the dilemmas faced by all sides when Chinese settlers proved both necessary and worrisome for a remote colonial enclave: necessary for skills and trade connections and worrisome because their loyalties appeared uncertain. As we know, the results were periodically murderous.
Chapter 3 treats the 1762 British invasion from the local perspective (or multiple local perspectives), cast as a ‘pirate occupation’ that exposed longstanding stress points and social fractures; results: conspiracy and rebellion. Chapter 4 drives home the emerging theme of loyalism amid diversity in the aftermath of British invasion, and Chapter 5 follows with a burst of merciless expulsion of the Chinese in the 1770s.
A core theme throughout is not just loyalism in the abstract but rather the emergence of various Filipino subjecthoods tested by foreign aggression and jostled by imperial prejudice. This theme puts Flannery’s work in conversation with studies of Indigenous rebellion and loyalism in Spanish America in this period, especially in Andean South America. What complicates the narrative, among other things, is the borderless ‘watery world’ these Filipino subjects inhabited and the many imperial crosswinds they faced. It is not an easy story to tell.
As the book’s title suggests, piracy is a malleable but still convincing throughline in that the Philippines – as Spain’s royal advisors, officials, settlers, priests, and ultimately its myriad subjects imagined them – were forged in the heat of maritime violence and reprisal. Manila was born in ‘blood and fire’, to steal from Eduardo Galeano, and, as Flannery amply shows, a siege mentality persisted across the archipelago for at least two centuries, with pirates as both genuine menace and convenient scapegoat.
What Flannery adds to her core ‘revisionist’ story is thoughtful dialogue with the nationalist mythmaking of more recent times. She asks readers to sidestep worship of independence martyr José Rizal and instead to look behind the curtain of the colonial record. (Reading Rizal’s own works might be a start, as he loved to send up the filibuster.) Like all ‘mythistory’ (to steal this time from William McNeill), recent historical projects, including some public displays, have been selective, simplified and emotionally appealing.
Thanks to Flannery, one can appreciate the good intentions behind these projects while acknowledging that they tend to hide rather too much about the past; they in effect document a fluid, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t present, or its anxieties. The past is flattened into an action-packed cartoon. In sum, this is an essential addition to the growing history of world piracy but also to the increasingly sophisticated and contested history of the Philippines. I should add again that the book is beautifully written, and it is illustrated with first-rate maps.
