Paper Archipelago: The Spanish invasion and colonization of the sixteenth century Philippines

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.