The Spanish Pacific, 1521-1815, Volume 2: A Reader of Primary Sources

This second collection of primary sources in English translation ranges across a gamut of places and moments in the early modern Spanish Pacific. It may be used in conjunction with Volume 1 or on its own. While its focus continues to be on the encounters and entanglements that arose in the Spanish Pacific, it more strongly emphasizes the challenges faced by secular and ecclesiastical authorities in their attempts to control a distant colony and reshape its culture, from the complex forms of identify formation in the diverse world of the colonial Philippines to the complexities of inter-imperial rivalry in East and Southeast Asia as a whole. As with Volume 1, each document is introduced by a specialist in the field and includes a list of suggestions for further reading. An introductory essay surveys current work in the field of early modern Spanish Pacific studies and provides a lengthy bibliography.

About the Author

Christina Hyo-Jung Lee is Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. Her latest book, Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines under Early Spanish Rule (Oxford University Press, 2021) 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. Ricardo Padrón is Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia who studies the literature and culture of the early modern Hispanic world, particularly questions of empire, space, and cartography. His recently published monograph, The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West (University of Chicago Press, 2020) examines the place of Pacific and Asia in the Spanish concept of “the Indies.”