Paper Archipelago: The Spanish invasion and colonization of the sixteenth century Philippines (forthcoming 2028)
Paper Archipelago explores how the Spanish established a colonial administration in the late sixteenth century Philippines through a close reading of archival sources. To do so, it considers how the military invasion was carried out; how the circumstances of the Philippines affected the institutions and policies colonial agents pursued and how these differed from those that developed in the Americas; and examines the impact of colonial demands on the Indigenous political economy.
Although this monograph sets the Philippines in dialogue with colonial Latin America and Portuguese Asia, it does not import models and assumptions from better-documented and better-studied spaces, as is often the case in histories of the region. Instead, it focuses on what can be reconstructed about how colonialism developed and was practiced in the Philippines specifically by a careful analysis of the surviving archival corpus. My book provides a new interpretation of how the so-called Spanish conquest was carried out, revises current understanding of the much-neglected history of the sixteenth-century Philippines, and provides a broader framework for analysing the highly local and contingent development of the praxis of colonialism across Spain’s early modern empire.
This book is under contract in the Oxford Historical Monographs series.
Reading Sources for Colonial Spanish American History: A Guide, ed. Juan Cobo Betancourt, Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez, and Natalie Cobo (forthcoming 2028)
Paperwork was the central technology of the Spanish empire, making possible the administration of vast territories and diverse peoples, and the work of historians. These sources, the circumstances and processes of their production, and the granular histories of their preservation and interpretation are also at the centre of a new turn in scholarship across the field of colonial Latin American studies. As recent scholarship has called for a greater attention to the shape of the archive, and drawn attention to new ways of reading old materials to reveal new voices and perspectives, an up to date guide to the different genres and typologies of sources, the ways in which they have been interpreted, and new approaches to their study is more needed than ever before. We propose to gather a diverse group of scholars, bringing together established historians and new voices, across the Anglophone world and Latin America, to produce a guide to reading sources for colonial Spanish America.
This volume is under contract with Routledge.
Oracles of Asia: Manila theologians and early modern political thought (future project)
Early modern Manila was a key centre of European academic and intellectual knowledge production in the region. It had three printing presses in the sixteenth century. The main reason for this dynamic intellectual effervescence was that Manila was one of the few Catholic strongholds in Asia. Missionaries who were sent to China, Japan, and other parts of East and Southeast Asia trained in the Philippines. Manila provided unique opportunities for missionaries to learn Asian languages before beginning a mission, but it was more than just a linguistic training ground. Manila was a centre of consultation for legal and theological questions for the entire region.
This project will examine the unstudied manuscript corpus of academic consultations and treatises written in Manila. A study of this corpus of documents will make three main research contributions that counter the erasure of the importance of the early modern Philippines in intellectual history and its role in shaping Iberian imperialism. Firstly, this project will uncover practical concerns and events in the archipelago and beyond it, like those pertaining to Catholic ritual performance by Indigenous people, not visible in other kinds of sources because the Philippine archive is quite thin relative to other spaces in the empire during this period. Secondly, it will compare the issues and responses of these consultations with those produced in the Americas and Europe to analyse the specifically Philippine perspective on these matters and so reveal the challenges of understanding Spanish imperial claims in Asia. Finally, this project will trace the correspondents of these consultations to examine trans-imperial connected histories in Asia, and map the movement of peoples, ideas, and practices in this multiethnic early modern space.