Southeast Asia and the Quincentennial Commemoration of the First Circumnavigation of the World

Date and Time

0815 am, 18 March 2021 0915 am – 0945 am (No Q&A session)

Profile

Rene R. Escalante, PhD is the Executive Director of the National Quincentennial Committee, which aims to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the "Victory at Mactan (27 April 2021) and...of the Philippine part in the first circumnavigation of the world." 

The ‘Portuguese’ Encounter with the Malay-Indonesian World of the 16th Century

Date and Time

08:15 am, 19 March 2021

Abstract

The encounter of the Portuguese with the Malay Indonesian world of the 16^th century was characterized by the complementarity of both the “white” or European Portuguese and the “black” Portuguese or those who were of overwhelmingly local Asian descent. While the former provided the model for Portugueseness, it was the latter who succeeded in blending it with local cultures that were crucial to the success of the Portuguese enterprise.  The ability of the black Portuguese to understand local perceptions of meaningful unities of bodies of water—what in the Philippines is captured in the indigenous term “sabang”—enabled the Portuguese to establish thriving international hybrid entrepots at Melaka on the Malay Peninsula, at Makassar on the southwest peninsula of Sulawesi (Celebes) and at Larantuka in eastern Indonesia in the 16^th and into the 17^th centuries.

Profile

Leonard Y. Andaya, PhD is Professor of Southeast Asian Historyat the University of Hawai' at Manoa. He has written on the early modern history of Malaysia, Indonesia, the southern Philippines, and southern Thailand. He is the co-author of "A History of Early Modern Southeast Asia, 1400–1830"  (2015)

Shifting the Entrepot Paradigm: Local Agents and Indigenous Voices in the Making of Manila's Global Connections, ca. 16th to 18th Century

Time and Date

02:00 pm, 20 March 2021

Abstract

In recent decades, a rich body of scholarship has demonstrated that Manila was more than just a trans-shipment port. Studies on far-reaching intra-Asian, Austronesian, and trans-Pacific connections have posed a challenge to narratives of both galleon-centricity and irrational colonial governance. Yet, there continues to exist an overemphasis on actors and processes reaching the Philippines from abroad, while both indigenous agency and colonial policies are rendered secondary to the course of events. However, from the sixteenth century onwards, a long list of ‘connectors’ including among many others ‘mestizo de sangley’-interpreters, provincial parish priests, colonial officials, indigenous chiefs, localized foreign residents, indigenous allies, beatas, and Spanish women, were at the heart of local and global projects. Zooming in on such local agents opens up new vistas for a nuanced global history of a connected archipelago

Profile

Birgit Tremml-Werner is a lecturer at Linnaeus University in Sweden. She has a Mag. phil. and Dr. phil. degrees in History (with a minor in Japanese Studies) from the University of Vienna. She is the author of Spain, China, and Japan in Manila, 1571-1644: Local Comparisons, Global Connections (2015).