02:15 pm • Keynote 3: Shifting the entrepôt paradigm: Local Agents and Indigenous Voices in the Making of Manila’s Global Connections, ca. 16th-18th Century

Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it.
Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far
and high into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.
"The Old Poets of China" by Mary Oliver

2:15 pm–3:30 pm
KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Shifting the Entrepôt Paradigm: Local Agents and Indigenous Voices in the Making of Manila’s Global Connections, ca. 16th-18th Century

Dr. Birgit Tremml-Werner, Linnaeus University, Sweden

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.