Situated at the crossroads of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the Spanish Philippines offer historians an intriguing middle ground of connected histories that raises fundamental new questions about conventional ethnic, regional and religious identities. This volume adds a new global perspective to the history of the Philippines by juxtaposing Iberian, Chinese and Islamic perspectives. By navigating various underexplored archival resources, senior and junior scholars from Asia, Europe and the Americas explore the diverse cultural, religious, and economic flows that shaped the early modern Philippine milieu. By zooming in from the global to the local, this book offers eleven fascinating Philippine case studies of early modern globalization.

Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World offers a new interpretation of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippine islands. Drawing on the rich archives of Spain’s Asian empire, Kristie Patricia Flannery reveals that Spanish colonial officials and Catholic missionaries forged alliances with Indigenous Filipinos and Chinese migrant settlers in the Southeast Asian archipelago to wage war against waves of pirates, including massive Chinese pirate fleets, Muslim pirates from the Sulu Zone, and even the British fleet that attacked at the height of the Seven Years’ War. Anti-piracy alliances made Spanish colonial rule resilient to both external shocks and internal revolts that shook the colony to its core. This revisionist study complicates the assumption that empire was imposed on Filipinos with brute force alone. Rather, anti-piracy also shaped the politics of belonging in the colonial Philippines. Real and imagined pirate threats especially influenced the fate and fortunes of Chinese migrants in the islands. They triggered genocidal massacres of the Chinese at some junctures, and at others facilitated Chinese integration into the Catholic nation as loyal vassals. Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World demonstrates that piracy is key to explaining the surprising longevity of Spain’s Asian empire, which, unlike Spanish colonial rule in the Americas, survived the Age of Revolutions and endured almost to the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, it offers important new insight into piracy’s impact on the trajectory of globalization and European imperial expansion in maritime Asia.

Diego Javier Luis tells the story of transpacific Asian movement to and through the Spanish Americas. On arrival in Mexico, diverse Asian peoples became "chinos" subject to the colonial caste system. Tracing Asian resistance and adaptation to New Spanish ideas of race, Luis presents a Pacific-focused narrative of the colonial Americas.

After a strong recovery from the pandemic in 2022, growth moderated in the first half of 2023 due to external headwinds, fiscal underspending, and normalization of pent-up demand. Inflation decelerated from the peak in early 2023 supported by domestic policy tightening despite a recent uptick related to resurgent commodity prices. Growth is projected to rebound in the second half of 2023 and 2024 while inflation is expected to gradually approach the target. Risks to the growth outlook are tilted to the downside, mainly stemming from persistently high inflation, globally and locally, and a highly uncertain global economic and geopolitical environment. Upside risks to the inflation outlook include higher commodity prices and potential second-round effects.

Philippines: Selected Issues

Eighty percent of Filipinos (about 80 million people) identify with the Catholic faith. Visitors to the Philippines might find it surprising that images of Catholic saints, the Child Christ, and the Virgin Mary can be seen in all kinds of public and private spaces throughout this Asian country, such as in restaurants, shopping malls, pasted to walls, painted on buses, and of course, in-home altars. Many of these saints bear Spanish names and their legends almost always date to the period of Spanish colonialism. Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines under Early Spanish Rule explores why, in spite of their fraught history with Spanish colonialism (which ended in 1898), Filipinos have staunchly held on to the faith in their saints. This is the first scholarly study to focus on the dynamic life of saints and their devotees in the Spanish Philippines, from the sixteenth through the early part of the eighteenth century. The book offers an in-depth analysis of the origins and development of the beliefs and rituals surrounding some of the most popular saints in the Philippines, namely, Santo Niño de Cebu, Our Lady of Caysasay, Our Lady of La Naval, and Our Lady of Antipolo. Christina Lee recovers the voices of colonized Philippine subjects as well as those of Spaniards who, through the veneration of miraculous saints, projected and relieved their grievances, anxieties, and histories of communal suffering. Based on critical readings of primary sources, the book traces how individuals and their communities often refashioned iconographic devotions to the Holy Child and to the Virgin Mary by introducing non-Catholic elements derived from pre-Hispanic, animistic, and Chinese traditions. Ultimately, the book reveals how Philippine natives, Chinese migrants, and Spaniards reshaped the imported devotions as expressions of dissidence, resistance, and survival.