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).