Migrants and the Making of the Urban-Maritime World

Agency and Mobility in Port Cities, c. 1570–1940

Christina Reimann, Martin Öhman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000173536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume explores the mutually transformative relations between migrants and port cities. Throughout the ages of sail and steam, port cities served as nodes of long-distance transmissions and exchanges. Commercial goods, people, animals, seeds, bacteria and viruses; technological and scientific knowledge and fashions all arrived in, and moved through, these microcosms of the global. Migrants made vital contributions to the construction of the urban-maritime world in terms of the built environment, the particular sociocultural milieu, and contemporary representations of these spaces. Port cities, in turn, conditioned the lives of these mobile people, be they seafarers, traders, passers-through, or people in search of a new home. By focusing on migrants—their actions and how they were acted upon—the authors seek to capture the contradictions and complexities that characterized port cities: mobility and immobility, acceptance and rejection, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, diversity and homogeneity, segregation and interaction.

The book offers a wide geographical perspective, covering port cities on three continents. Its chapters deal with agency in a widened sense, considering the activities of individuals and collectives as well as the decisive impact of sailing and steamboats, trains, the built environment, goods or microbes in shaping urban-maritime spaces.

Part I

Migrants and the Construction of Port City Spaces

1 Migrant Agencies in the Early Modern Manila Bay

Birgit Tremml-Werner

This chapter looks at the socioeconomic development in Manila and how its multiethnic population shaped the built environment. It aims to add nuance to our understanding of early modern ethnic segregation by focusing on patterns of migrant collaboration and signs of mutual influence in developing a functioning urban settlement. In doing so, it invites readers to think about the contradictions and complexities of mobility, ethnicity, gender, and power relations in the development of early modern port cities.

Early modern port cities were male-dominated communities.¹ While this holds mostly true for Manila, gender imbalance does not justify the lack of women in the city’s current historiography.² Nor does it explain why only a few efforts have been made to understand gender dynamics or to write about the women in what was a multiethnic Manila after the Spaniards established their colonial headquarters there in 1571. Over the past two decades, a wealth of research has stressed the importance of indigenous settlers, residential Hokkien (sangleys in Spanish records), and Japanese communities, or the effects of the Armenian trading network on the social and economic life of Manila and the Philippines.³ At the same time, a number of studies have looked at the role of women in colonial settings in Southeast Asia.⁴ Building on these insights, this chapter provides a more nuanced narration of the multiethnic nature and highlights related gender dynamics that underlay Manila’s development from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century.

The historian Pedro Luengo has not only shown how Spanish women served as house owners in Manila but argued persuasively that against the backdrop of a high male mortality rate, Spanish women stabilized society.⁵ Yet while recent research has shed light on Spanish women in Manila, women of other ethnicities remain unresearched.⁶ This is mostly due to their near absence from archival sources. However, by reading multilingual source material against the grain, it is possible to get an idea of the lives of local and emigrant women, as well as other residents and visitors of Manila. Documents such as petitions to colonial offices, public moral reports, and commercial records reveal information about gender and ethnic relations. The source material is, however, affected by the fact that record-keeping was nearly monopolized by a very small group of educated men connected to government offices and Catholic printing presses.⁷ Gendered space and the lives of low-class members of ethnic groups in urban Manila are therefore difficult to reconstruct. And yet, the active participation of women and multiethnic non-elites in economic and social life challenges traditional views of what was going on in the streets of Manila, and thus needs to be articulated more explicitly.

Manila, which operated as the Spanish colonial headquarters in Southeast Asia and, to a lesser extent, the main port of entrance at Cavite, has often been called an entrepôt or way station between China and Mexico.⁸ Historian Manel Ollé has argued that the Spanish colony in Asia did not respond to the logics of territorial dominion, but rather to the mercantile logics of the region.⁹ Previous scholarship has often relied on mercantilist explanations and overemphasized the ambivalence of cross-regional power relations when arguing that in early modern Southeast Asia, the state existed because of trade, not trade because of the state.¹⁰ The traditional narrative regards Manila as a colonial base from where the representatives of Spanish imperial power intended to govern a territorial colony and support missionary activities beyond the shores of the Philippines. More than four decades ago, social geographer Robert R. Reed wrote:

Yet there is little doubt that Philip II and his metropolitan advisors projected their imperial power across the Pacific and into South East Asia not simply to exploit the resources of a region fabled for its spices, fine cloths, and other exotic goods, but also to confirm the glory of Spain and the supremacy of the Catholic Church by Hispanicizing and Christianizing newly conquered peoples.¹¹

The same underlying assumption explains why greater attention has been paid to government institutions as the most powerful within the urban landscape.¹² However, both the Hispanicization argument and views of inflexible yet effective missionary activities are far from convincing.¹³ Newer scholarship informed by indigenous, Pacific or China Sea-centered views attempts to understand the local nature of urbanities.¹⁴ What all studies have in common is their understanding of Manila as part of a dynamic Southeast Asian maritime realm, rather than an exceptional, isolated case.¹⁵ While many of these revisionist studies focus on migrant agency in order to debunk Eurocentric colonial narratives, they often overlook the Spaniards’ position as a foreign minority. What is more, studies focusing on the entangled histories of Overseas Chinese trade and European commercial expansion tend to underrepresent the role of local and indigenous agency in the urbanization process.¹⁶

To what extent was Manila really a city of men, dominated by merchants, soldiers, sailors, and friars? Many seafaring merchants from China were married in their native country and would also occasionally return there. Nonetheless, in Manila, their relations with women were not limited to spontaneous sexual contact, but often resulted in official partnerships or second marriages. Like other trading diasporas, the Overseas Chinese merchant community of the Nanyang had an enormous surplus of men. Firmly grounded in a Min family system of large clans, migrants remained linked to their mainland kin. Sufficient data is only available beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, when records reveal a gender imbalance of 191 Chinese women to 23,000 men in the Philippines.¹⁷ The shortage of Chinese women led to a quick emergence of mestizo de sangley (the mixed race population of Chinese and indigenous inhabitants) in mid-seventeenth-century Manila. Those with ties to their communities in mainland China were often forced to violate moral ideals out of necessity. Simultaneously, the practice of interethnic marriage was likely to affect the role and status of women in Manila. Given that traveling merchants involved in global trade used Manila as hub, there must have been periods when women dominated the urban and perhaps even social life of the city.

Similar to other port cities such as Hoi-An in modern Vietnam or Ayutthaya in Thailand, Manila attracted Japanese and Chinese merchants as a neutral zone outside the restrictions governing trade between their native regimes.¹⁸ With Japan’s debut in maritime commerce in the 1590s, such neutral settings were booming in Southeast Asia. In particular, the role of the Overseas Chinese (Hokkien) migration for Manila’s development can hardly be overestimated. Since its founding, Manila attracted people from Fujian, where rural poverty forced tens of thousands to emigrate to more promising destinations in the Nanyang (Chinese South Sea) during the last century of Ming rule (1378–1644).¹⁹ New trade opportunities were also the strongest impetus for Miguel López de Legazpi (1502–1572) and his fellow explorers and conquistadores from Spain in founding the colonial capital of Manila. When the Spaniards arrived, a small number of Chinese and Japanese merchants were already living amongst the locals. Within a few years, residents from Southern China multiplied.²⁰ The initially small trading port offered optimal conditions (such as access to attractive goods, a thriving market open to merchants of any origin) facilitating foreign trade with and through East and South East Asia. Before long, the Overseas Chinese community dominated all commercial exchange in the city, including production and distribution, monopolizing retail, artisan work, and the service sector, thanks to both their quantitative superiority and flexibility. However, various other groups also possessed economic and political bargaining power. In the meantime, many members of the small Spanish community were often cash-poor and powerless, like many of their non-Hispanic neighbors beyond the city walls. Hence, the functioning of urban life was not the result of dictating elites but of multiethnic interactions. Although this by no means suggests favorable conditions for all participating parties, an assumption of local agency helps to go beyond simplified narrat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Introduction
• Part I Migrants and the Construction of Port City Spaces
• Part II Urban-Maritime Space and Migrant Experiences
• Notes on Contributors
• Index