The Trade Networks of Japanese Porcelain in the Asia-Pacific Region

The Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route was established after the Spanish founded Manila City in 1571. Many Asian goods, such as silks and spices, were exported by the Spanish galleons. Many New World goods, including Mexican silver, crossed the Pacific Ocean and were brought to Asia. For instance, the cargoes sent to Acapulco from Manila included East Asian porcelain. On the other hand, in the early modern period, Japanese porcelains were exported from Nagasaki and carried throughout the world. Although, under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate, Spanish galleons could not enter Nagasaki until the mid-nineteenth century, the Spanish could still get Japanese porcelains if they were brought by Chinese ships. Because Manila was one of the most important port cities of the trade network in Asia, Chinese ships imported many Chinese and Japanese porcelains to Manila. The Spanish in Manila used Japanese porcelains and exported some of them to Acapulco. These were distributed among Spanish colonial cities in the Americas. The majority of them were underglazed blue Kraak-type dishes, underglazed blue items, and overglazed enamel chocolate cups. They reflect Spanish colonial life and culture in America. Moreover, Chinese and Japanese porcelain had an influence on the ceramic industry in America.

The Discovery of Spanish Colonial Coins from the Sixteenth through the Eighteenth Centuries in the Southeast Coast of China

The southeast coast of China played a key role in the ancient maritime history of East Asia. During the tenth to sixteenth centuries there was a common local maritime cultural community inside the South China Sea. Since the beginning of the sixteenth century, the maritime trading contact with Europeans had emerged, with Portuguese and Spanish navigation to eastern Asia, showing the new era of maritime history of early globalization. Since the Spanish conquest of America, European settlers mined and transported silver abundantly into Asia for trade. In the last 50 years, Chinese archaeologists have discovered hundreds of historical silver coins—which were originally from Spain and Spanish colonial settlements in the Americas and thus related to this globalizing trade—in the southeast coast of China. This chapter puts together a description of these materials, and so, for the first time, sheds a light to the early maritime trade between East and West.

Contesting Modes of Colonialism

The Spanish entrance to Island Southeast Asia in the sixteenth century had profoundimpacts on native peoples and terrain, but followed a millennia of intrusion into the region by Indian (Hindu), Buddhist, Chinese, Muslim, and native traders who established entrepôts in the Indonesian Archipelago from Malaka to Java to the Moluccas Islands. This trading network extended from Venice to Guangzhou. The southern Philippines lay at the edge, but participated in the trade of cloves, nutmeg, pepper, and other spices and forest products, first through Majapahit and later through Chinese traders. A consulary visit to China from Butuan was recorded in the eleventh century in the Chinese Song Shih, and a Cham trade mission was reported in 1001. Nine plank-hulled boats dating from the eleventh century were found buried in flood deposits in the Agusan del Sur River in Butuan, Mindanao, and, along with Song Dynasty ceramic artifacts, demonstrate the trade’s global reach . A century before Spanish colonization, Muslim pilots and traders initiated the spread of Islam. This has made an imprint on the region. Islamic conversion contrasted with Christian colonial patterns of subjugation and led to persistent boundaries and enduring, localized, and cultural effects that continue to shape ethnic and political divisions.

Maritime Trade in the Philippines during the Early Colonial Period (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries CE)

The arrival of the Spanish naval expedition in the Philippines in 1521 CE transformed the archipelago from a series of small and fragmented ports and polities engaged in Southeast Asian intra-regional trade into a locus of a maritime trade network on a global scale. Manila became an entrepôt in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries due to the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade, which ran for 250 years and linked the eastern and western worlds through the exchange of tangible trading commodities and technology as well as ideas, beliefs, and traditions. This chapter provides a brief historical background of the maritime trade in the Philippines, with special focus on the Manila galleon trade. It also provides a summary of the excavation results of Philippine underwater sites that have been dated to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The shipwrecks include the Manila galleons San Diego, Nuestra Señora de la Vida, Encarnación, and San José as well as other shipwrecks: Española, Marinduque, Royal Captain Shoal, and San Isidro. These vessels carried both peoples of different nationalities and a wide range of trading and utilitarian goods, and they provided valuable information on the diversity and complexity of maritime trade in the Philippines at this time.

Colonialism in Vietnam and Southeast Asia in the Late Pre-European Period

The rise of the Yuan Dynasty under Kublai Khan, the fifth emperor of the Mongol Empire, in thirteenth century China shows a distinctive polity that exemplifies two overlapping forms of colonialism. The first form is settler colonialism, where large (or small) scale migration of people creates colonies in places with a pre-existing population. The second is exploitation colonialism, where small groups of people established trading posts and settlements that controlled economic, cultural, and political power. The Yuan Dynasty’s early policy during Kublai Khan’s reign shows the adoption of strong naval power, specifically for territorial expansion. The Yuan court was also in control of the port cities in the middle and southern coasts of the Chinese mainland, which had been fully developed since the Southern Song period (1127—1279 CE). Chinese bureaucrats and regional authorities in these ports were actively engaged in investing capital in overseas trade, especially if conducted by private traders. These trading systems and policies facilitated the expansion of trans-regional networks into Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean World in the form of exploitation colonialism. The archaeological vestiges of the maritime commercial and naval activities that resulted from Yuan colonialism will be considered in this chapter.

European Ceramics in the Spanish Philippines

Nearly a century ago, in 1922, Carl Guthe, from the University of Michigan, conducted a three-year-long archaeological reconnaissance of the southern Philippines. He identified 542 sites. Twenty-six of these sites contained European-made ceramics dating from the 377 years of Spanish colonial rule. Significantly, the majority of these were made during the nineteenth century in Great Britain and the Netherlands, both of which were neighbouring colonial powers in Southeast Asia. The century-old Guthe Collection continues to yield information regarding life in this remote corner of the Spanish colonial world.

The Impact of the First Conquest on the Indigenous Populations of the Philippines (Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries)

Every process of discovery, conquest, and colonization, regardless of its magnitude and historical implications, entails a transformation in those societies in which contact takes place. Such a transformation, though, must not make us assume that there was no resistance, in different ways and intensity, aimed at the outsiders by the receiving population. The Philippines was no exception. In the present investigation, we will address aspects such as the impacts on the settlement patterns, the social structure, and the population shock and consequences of the conquest on the economical structure, culture, and spiritual world of the Philippine indigenous populations between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Power of Images in the Boxer Codex and Cultural Convergence in Early Spanish Manila

The Boxer Codex is one of the most important documents for the study of the history of the Philippines. Produced in the late sixteenth century, the colorful illustrations of the manuscript offer some of the earliest images of people living in the archipelago and its Asian neighbors at the time. Although the codex, especially its illustrations, has been cited in a variety of Philippine studies, the manuscript has not been examined carefully as an integrated document, combining an analysis of the images and the text. This interdisciplinary study synthesizes methods derived from history, art history, anthropology, and archaeology to focus on the illustrations of the Boxer Codex in terms of both the structure, content, composition, and artistic style and the correlation between the Spanish text and Chinese characters within their historical context. I suggest that the manuscript was designed to promote and justify the Spanish enterprise in the Pacific rather than to present an objective ethnographic record of people in the region. Nonetheless, the Boxer Codex documents cultural exchange and artistic hybridity in early colonial Manila, reflecting the complex ethnic composition of Spain's most distant colony.

A Geographic Analysis of Traders and Trade Goods in Japan’s Late Medieval Seto Inland Sea

Japan has traditionally been seen as an “isolated” country, often excluded from analyses of Asian trade and even ignored in its maritime influence on domestic trade. Examining both documentary and archaeological evidence in the late medieval periods (fourteenth to sixteenth centuries) reveals a thriving trade network of both domestic goods and items from the mainland. Analyzing this data through a Geographic Information System (GIS) provides important information about the transshipment hubs, the multidirectional flow of trade items between communities in the Inland Sea, and even the labor patterns of the captains that plied those waters. Those trade patterns were also influenced and used by domestic “pirates,” sometimes referred to as “sea lords,” who controlled certain areas in the Inland Sea. They were able to procure items for their own use, possibly outside of legitimate trade channels. The thriving domestic maritime trade revealed through this analysis paints a fuller picture of the networks within the Inland Sea before Japan’s contact with the West.

Introduction

We briefly review the topics that our case studies and note the value of these studies in framing a comparative approach to colonialism in the Asia-Pacific region. Each case study highlights different aspects in the colonial relationship. The chapters have been grouped following a geographical criterion, and the imbalance reflects the fact that some areas have been better studied than others, albeit with different perspectives. We express our hope that the book has gathered some previously little systematic or accessible evidence, offered comprehensive histories of some of the areas, and raised questions for the future.