Sea Control - Sea Control 544 Piracy and the Spanish Pacific with Dr. Kristie Flannery

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

Links: Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World, by Dr. Kristie Flannery, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024.Twitter: @thehistoriann

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Technology. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. Christy Flannery, and we're going to discuss her book, Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World. So, Christy, welcome aboard. Could you tell the audience a little bit more about yourself, please? Hi, Gerald. Thank you for having me on the podcast today. My name is Christy Flannery. I have a PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin. But you might hear from my accent that I'm originally from Australia. I grew up in Sydney and I'm now back living and working in NAM or Melbourne.

And I work at the Australian Catholic University. Well, thank you and welcome. Welcome again. As a reminder, listeners, all opinions today are our own and not reflective of any ends of the institutions with which we may be otherwise associated. So we'll jump right into the book here. How did Spain establish and maintain its holdings in the Philippines? That's really the fundamental question that I set out to answer when I started writing this book, which is based on my doctoral dissertation. The dominant view is that Spain really ruled the Philippines by force. So they used violence to force people to accept empire, systematically putting down any kind of revolt or rebellion against its authority until the end of the 19th century or 1898 when, you know, there was a Spanish, there was a big insurgency and Spain was losing that.

And then there was a Spanish-American war, which, you know, Spain lost and sold the Philippines to the United States of America. so I was looking at maybe offering a slightly more complex analysis of what was going on apart from violence alone and that led me to look through the archives of the Spanish empire in the Philippines and what I found reading through letters and reports written by priests and colonial officials was that piracy was really central to what was going on in the Philippines and I found that the Spanish government ruled the islands for so long by establishing and maintaining alliances against pirates with various indigenous groups and Chinese migrant communities in the Philippines. So if you'll allow me to backtrack a little bit, how did you get into

this topic? How did you discover that this was a thing that you could further explore? I was very interested in colonial history growing up in Australia. I was born and raised in Botany Bay, which is not far from where Captain Cook first landed in Australia and where the British Empire begins in Australia. So I was really interested in thinking, how does colonialism, what does colonialism look like in different places in other parts of the world? And how can we deepen our understanding of what empire is and how it works by looking at empire in other contexts? And I was very interested in Latin American history. I traveled in a lot of Latin american countries and so that led me to go to texas and i really thought i might write a book

about acapulco and looking at this kind of port city in the pacific and thinking about what empire looked like in a port city that was had a large black population that was connected to the ocean and when i went to the archive in the first archive i went to was in mexico i expected to find materials at acapulco but instead i found materials about manila because the philippines were administered as part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. So the governor of – or the Viceroy of Mexico was also governing the Philippines, and so all the materials are there. And I found things like a lot of interesting reports that I felt

hadn't really been looked at, and it opened up a whole new avenue of research for me. So for the listeners, I'll just refer you back to – we literally just published the Sea Control 527, the Wide White Seas with Hampton sites. And Hampton went extensively into the final voyage of Captain Cook and the intro of the book is sort of a long treatise on Cook's legacy and colonialism, in particular, if you're interested in the subject of what exploration and colonialism means for indigenous peoples. But back to this, Chrissy, how did Spanish perceptions of Muslims in the Mediterranean influence the response to Moro piracy? the the spanish first arrived in the philippines in magellan makes it to the philippines very early

you know 1540s but the spanish set up their first permanent kind of settlement in the philippines at cebu in the 1560s and so this by this point they've already defeated the muslims in the iberian peninsula and finished their reconquista and they're well into building this american empire when they get to manila they find and when they get to the philippines they find that there you know muslims in maritime asia and they see muslims in the philippines as you know very much connected to the muslims in the mediterranean world and for spain muslims are enemies they're not people who could become um could ever become trusted citizens and there's no vision of i guess security with muslim subjects so the idea would be we need to kind of kick these people out or

convert them um to catholicism so when they when they arrive in manila in 1571 and find that there are muslims there i think there's an there's a very immediate view that you know that these are people we need to subject to our authority what was the colonial government's response then to chinese piracy i think very early on in the philippines spain thought that they could conquer China and there were proposals circulating that you know with a few ships and 2,000 men we could go to China and we could conquer China but that view was pretty quickly abandoned and the Chinese remained became a threat that there are Chinese pirates and they could attack the Philippines so we see Chinese large-scale Chinese piracy escalate in the 16th

century or 17th century sorry a period known as the Ming-Qing transitions the big civil war in china and that kind of disorder created by the civil war allows his giant chinese pirate fleets to become very powerful in maritime asia the maybe the largest chinese pirate fleet is the zeng family they become so big that they their operations are much the amount of money that they're moving around the world through trade is much bigger than the dutch east india company at the same time and they end up capturing taiwan which is a spanish and then a dutch colony and then the pirates kind of take taiwan and make this a pirate's nest so in the 17th century the spanish are really worried okay these pirates these chinese pirates are going to come and

invade manila so they actually do attack chinese pirates to attack manila very early on in the 1570s they attack and destroy the city the settlement it's very early days and while they don't return there's there's rumors that they'll return lead to chinese massacres in manila and the hinterlands So when there are rumors of a pirate invasion, the Spanish respond by really having pogroms against the Chinese. And in these kind of violent episodes, we see indigenous Filipinos kind of help the Spanish to really kill large numbers of people. So what's interesting, though, is in Chinese piracies and suppressed in the end of the 17th century, where the Qing in China become more powerful and they establish their authority over the land

but also maritime borders, I think that changes things for the Chinese communities in the Philippines. And we see new alliances in the 18th century, like the Spanish and the Chinese, the kind of forging alliances to fight against Muslim pirates. So we see Chinese people, individuals and communities in Manila, donating money and weapons to these wars against Muslim pirates in the southern Philippines.

How did the indigenous population respond to the British invasion in the 1760s, and what was the result? So the British attacked Manila in 1762, which is only a few months after they attacked Havana in Cuba. So this is part of, at this time, is the height of the Seven Years' War. So it's a very global war where Britain is fighting against Spain and France and their other European powers involved. But because of these countries have global empires, the war is spilling out, you know, as we know, into North America, across the Atlantic and into the Pacific world.

The British, when they planned to attack Manila, they really believed that local Indigenous peoples would support their occupation and would take the opportunity, enthusiastically take the opportunity to overthrow the Spanish rule. They were really shocked when they found local people putting up quite a stiff resistance. when the british tried to attack intramuros which is the walled city of manila where the key government buildings and religious buildings were standing at the time they found that kind of walled city was very well defended in addition to soldiers who already posted there like thousands of militias men come in from nearby provinces and there's like a three week or so battle for intramuros which the british ultimately sees they break a hole through the wall and they capture of that walled city, but they really fail to push beyond

that piece of land, and when they do try and push out into the hinterland of Manila, they're pushed back by Indigenous fighting forces who are supporting the Spanish. But by the end of 1762, we see big Indigenous revolts break out in Luzon, which is the big northern island of the Philippines. Their Indigenous leaders put their demands to the Spanish. and they're demanding the abolition of tribute the end of tributary labor as the demands become more radical we see some groups demand that all priests leave the province um churches to set on

fire and so the spanish who have been exiled from manila at this point are forced to kind of fight a two-front war against both the british and manila and these indigenous rebels but ultimately what happens is the spanish and their indigenous allies are able to defeat you know both the british and these rebels and kind of restore what sovereignty looks like for them at the time and then what sort of lingering after effects did the philippines experience from the british invasion and occupation i think the most immediate kind of local consequence in the say decade after the war is that the spanish really scapegoat the chinese for the for the war And the Chinese people in Manila, there's roughly maybe,

I think, 6,000 to 7,000 China-born men living, you know, mostly in Manila but also throughout Luzon and other islands. And they're really blamed collectively for helping the British. And the government held an inquiry to kind of establish, you know, what did the Chinese do during the war? And even though that inquiry shows witness testimonies that indicate that the Chinese played a variety of roles in the war, which is not surprising that many helped the British

and became soldiers, but many helped these loyal, multi-ethnic forces, many tried to remain neutral. They're really still all blamed, all held guilty, and the government decides to expel the Chinese, just as they expelled Mariscos and Muslims from Spain hundreds of years earlier. So they forcibly round up all Chinese-born men in the islands. send them to a kind of camp in Manila.

They use a market hall turned kind of a camp and then they're forcibly repatriated to China on merchant vessels and they force the captains of those merchant ships who are both Chinese and Spanish to carry as many of these expelled refugees as they can back to China. If we look out beyond the Philippines in this era, we see an effort to kind of fortify the Spanish or secure the Spanish presence across the greater Pacific Ocean.

Obviously, we know this is a time when the British, you know, aggressively pushing into the Pacific. It's the decade where Hook is coming, you know, in these voyages of exploration. So in the Atlantic and the Pacific, we see the expansion of fortifications, militia reforms to kind of centralise and professionalise militias, and also the Bourbon reforms, which are kind of these economic initiatives that are taken

to raise more money for the Crown, the creation of various government monopolies, including a tobacco monopoly in the philippines a bassy or a coconut wine monopoly so efforts to make money to really fund these major um military projects well unfortunately that's all that we have time for today i'd like to thank my guest dr christy flannery christy where can we find you online and what are you working on next i'm working on a new project about slavery and the slave trade in the pacific So looking at how, what slavery looks like in the Spanish colonies in the Pacific, how people are moving into Manila and then into, say, the Dutch East Indies and other European colonies in the region and also other Southeast Asian sovereign states at that time. That sounds fascinating. I hope you'll come back and talk with us once you're ready to publish.

But thank you again for joining us. To listeners, thanks for tuning in and we'll see you next time. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021