Examinations of the Atlantic world have preoccupied scholarship of the early modern period (c. 1540-1789), but a group of works since the late 2000s have started to investigate the Pacific at length. One of the fixtures of the period was the Manila Galleon that ran between Acapulco and Manila, starting in 1565 and in continuous operation until the nineteenth century. And the latter port is the focus of Birgit Tremml-Werner’s book, an important contribution to the expanding historiography of the Pacific. Her book explores a Spanish outpost in Southeast Asia, an instable region populated by European and Asian tensions. In this milieu, Manila was an entrepôt that connected India, China, and Japan with the viceroyalties in the Americas, especially with its direct link to New Spain. In her monograph, Tremml-Werner seeks to understand the presence of Spain, China, and Japan within Manila, the capital of the Spanish East Indies since 1571, an establishment that she used as the chronological start of her book. The author’s endpoint is 1644, the end of the Ming Dynasty in China, an occurrence preceded by the extirpation of Catholics from Japan and the dismantling of the Iberian Union (1580-1640) which initiated the Portuguese Restoration War (1640-68), a conflict with ramifications throughout the Iberian world.
The author is interested primarily in exploring governance in Manila, the manner in which each of these kingdoms envisioned their sovereignty in this city, whose inhabitants included Spaniards, Japanese, as well as a noticeable Chinese community, largely from Fujian. Tremml-Werner analyses the extent of Manila’s influence on the maritime policies and geopolitical strategies of these three early modern superpowers in Southeast Asia. By examining what she labelled local and universal tensions, a modification of the centre-periphery model of exchange, she argues that the contentious relationships between China, Spain, and Japan made Manila into a distinct Eurasian port city, a result, in her estimation, of a triangular trade involving merchants, among the “low ranking actors”, to use her coinage, that contributed principally to this maritime network. Her reconfigured triangular trade has Manila as the epicentre linking Fujian, the Kyushu region in southern Japan, and Acapulco, an adaptation of its counterpart in the Atlantic (Europe to Africa; Africa to the Americas; the Americas to Europe). All persons and goods, according to Tremml-Werner’s model, passed through Manila. The resulting book is a beautiful synthesis using rich and disparate sources bolstered by several historiographies in many languages. As a polyglot, the author commands an impressive grasp of English, German, Japanese, Chinese, French, and Spanish allowing a rare opportunity to examine Manila and its evolving relations with Japan, China, and Spain. She draws on archival research pursued principally at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, while Chinese and Japanese sources tend to be compiled in edited collections, the norm for that area of historical study according to the author.
But this book has a number of troubling omissions. For instance, her conceptualization of the triangular trade underplayed the important route between Macau and Nagasaki, the latter also in Kyushu Province, a terminus in the network of her making. Including the Macau-Nagasaki connection would have greatly strengthened her model of triangular trade in Asia compared to that found in her book. Another issue is the lack of archival work at collections relevant to Manila. One is the absence of sources from Portuguese archives, such as the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino in Lisbon, since the period of her study overlaps with the Iberian Union wherein Portugal was subsumed into the Spanish Monarchy. To use Portuguese archives would allow the author greater insight into Manila’s place in Southeast Asia amid the immense Portuguese presence in Japan, China, the Moluccan Islands, and occasionally Malacca, places in constant contact with Manila.
A second set of archives overlooked by Tremml-Wener are those in the Philippines. It seems amiss that the author did not, as discerned by this reader, conduct research at any Filipino archives, despite writing a monograph about Manila. Since “low ranking actors” are so important to Tremml-Werner’s argument, one would think that their insights whether in Tagalog or Fujian Chinese would be immensely useful to draw upon in the writing of this monograph. If such sources are non-existent, then the author must account for this silence in the archives. Although the absence of Filipino language sources—apart from the other nineteen recognized languages of the Philippines—seems glaring, Tremml-Werner does draw from Emma Blair and James Robertson’s fifty-five volume collection of documents translated from Spanish and Filipino into English, an anthology of writings related to the history of the Philippines prior to the Spanish-American War of 1898. One can only assume that the author drew from the Filipino content found in Blair and Robertson’s compendium due to Tremml-Werner’s opaque manner of citing this collection.
The extensive discussion about sources ties into a broader criticism of this book since it is overly reliant on the available and abundant historiographies about Spain, China, and Japan in Southeast Asia. Tremml-Werner’s usage of secondary literature is so excessive that her assembled archival and printed sources received only a superficial gloss when compared to her oversaturation of the reader with scholarly interventions. As a result, the voices of historical actors are lost, the “low ranking actors” who could speak about life in colonial Manila. This overreliance on the historiography causes another immense problem since Manila disappears from large sections of the book. Instead, there are extended discussions about the maritime policies and politics involving Spain, China, and Japan. While important, these examinations could have been expedited in favour of investigating Manila at greater length, the intended focus of this book. These excursions into the waves of historiography is distracting and draw the reader away from the Philippines. What ensues is the loss of Tremml-Werner’s argument amid the calisthenics of learnedness that frequently perplexes this reader.
These issues aside, Tremml-Werner has provided scholars of the early modern world, especially those interested in the Pacific, the Philippines, and the trilateral relations between Japan, China, and Spain, a unique glance at where these currents converge in Manila. As a centre frequently overlooked, Manila and the Philippines has received a novel investigation into its place amid transoceanic networks of people and goods amid European expansion. For this reason, and others mentioned previously, Tremml-Werner’s book should be placed on the reading lists of anyone interested in global history generally and especially for scholars of the early modern period.
