Through a number of significant case studies, this volume examines changing Iberian dynamics in the Pacific, bridging the gaps between English and Spanish speaking scholarship to highlight understudied actors and debates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book shifts the predominant emphasis on Anglo-American studies and the historical neglect of Iberian endeavors in this ocean by focusing on several episodes that illuminate Spanish engagement in the Pacific. It describes Spain’s treatment of this sea from its discovery to the end of the overseas empire in 1899, becoming the first book to place its analytical focus in the heart of the islands rather than the Pacific Rim. In tracing shifting Spanish positions and policies, the book cautions against making generalities about the distinct histories of Pacific islands and their Indigenous populations, uncovering a much more heterogeneous world than previous research may convey. Exploring Iberian Counterpoints in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Pacific is the perfect resource for students and researchers of the Iberian world, Hispanic studies, and the Pacific Ocean in early modern and modern eras.

"Through a number of significant case studies, this volume examines changing Iberian dynamics in the Pacific, bridging the gaps between English and Spanish speaking scholarship to highlight understudied actors and debates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Exploring Iberian Counterpoints in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Pacific is the perfect resource for students and researchers of the Iberian world, Hispanic studies, and the Pacific Ocean in early modern and modern eras"--

Blending global scope with local depth, this book throws new light on important themes. Spanning four centuries and vast space, it combines the history of ideas with particular histories of encounters between European voyagers and Indigenous people in Oceania (Island Southeast Asia, New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands).

An exploration of the deportation of Mexican military recruits and vagrants to the Philippines between 1765 and 1811.

This essay deals with the missionary work of the Society of Jesus in today’s Micronesia from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Although the Jesuit missionaries wanted to reach Japan and other Pacific islands, such as the Palau and Caroline archipelagos, the crown encouraged them to stay in the Marianas until 1769 (when the Society of Jesus was expelled from the Philippines) to evangelize the native Chamorros as well as to reinforce the Spanish presence on the fringes of the Pacific empire. In 1859, a group of Jesuit missionaries returned to the Philippines, but they never officially set foot on the Marianas during the nineteenth century. It was not until the twentieth century that they went back to Micronesia, taking charge of the mission on the Northern Marianas along with the Caroline and Marshall Islands, thus returning to one of the cradles of Jesuit martyrdom in Oceania.

Soldier, priest, diplomat, explorer, naval pilot and scientist, Hernando de los Rios Coronel was a fascinating figure who played a pivotal role in Spanish efforts to establish a thriving colony in the Philippines. Telling the story of this extraordinary individual, this book provides an introduction to the early history of the Spanish Philippines.

From the late fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Hispanic Monarchy was one of the largest and most diverse political communities known in history. At its apogee, it stretched from the Castilian plateau to the high peaks of the Andes; from the cosmopolitan cities of Seville, Naples, or Mexico City to Santa Fe and San Francisco; from Brussels to Buenos Aires and from Milan to Manila. During those centuries, Spain left its imprint across vast continents and distant oceans contributing in no minor way to the emergence of our globalised era. This was true not only in an economic sense-the Hispano-American silver peso transported across the Atlantic and the Pacific by the Spanish fleets was arguably the first global currency, thus facilitating the creation of a world economic system-but intellectually and artistically as well. The most extraordinary cultural exchanges took place in practically every corner of the Hispanic world, no matter how distant from the metropolis. At various times a descendant of the Aztec nobility was translating a Baroque play into Nahuatl to the delight of an Amerindian and mixed audience in the market of Tlatelolco; an Andalusian Dominican priest was writing the first Western grammar of the Chinese language in Fuzhou, a Chinese city that enjoyed a trade monopoly with the Spanish Philippines; a Franciscan friar was composing a piece of polyphonic music with lyrics in Quechua to be played in a church decorated with Moorish-style ceilings in a Peruvian valley; or a multi-ethnic team of Amerindian and Spanish naturalists was describing in Latin, Spanish and local vernacular languages thousands of medicinal plants, animals and minerals previously unknown to the West. And, most probably, at the same time that one of those exchanges were happening, the members of the School of Salamanca were laying the foundations of modern international law or formulating some of the first modern theories of price, value and money, Cervantes was writing Don Quixote, Velázquez was painting Las Meninas, or Goya was exposing both the dark and bright sides of the European Enlightenment. Actually, whenever we contemplate the galleries devoted to Velázquez, El Greco, Zurbarán, Murillo or Goya in the Prado Museum in Madrid; when we visit the National Palace in Mexico City, a mission in California, a Jesuit church in Rome or the Intramuros quarter in Manila; or when we hear Spanish being spoken in a myriad of accents in the streets of San Francisco, New Orleans or Manhattan we are experiencing some of the past and present fruits of an always vibrant and still expanding cultural community. As the reader can infer by now, this book is about how Spain and the larger Hispanic world have contributed to world history and in particular to the history of civilisation, not only at the zenith of the Hispanic Monarchy but throughout a much longer span of time.