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Piracy and the making of the Spanish Pacific world

Flannery, Kristie Patricia
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Flannery, Kristie Patricia
Abstract
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.
Keywords
piracy, Spain, Philippines, colonialism, Spanish Asian Empire, Age of Revolutions, imperialism, Seven Years' War, Sulu Zone
Date
2024
Type
Book
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Book
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ACU Department
Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences
Faculty of Education and Arts
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Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences
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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14802/9541
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https://www.pennpress.org/9781512825749/piracy-and-the-making-of-the-spanish-pacific-world/
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Copyright © 2024 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.