Portuguese Merchants in the Manila Galleon System

1565-1600

Cuauhtémoc Villamar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000293494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire prémoderne

Villamar examines the role of Portuguese merchants in the formation of the Manila Galleon as a system of trade founded at the end of the sixteenth century.

The rise of Manila as a crucial transshipment port was not a spontaneous incident. Instead, it came about through a complex combination of circumstances and interconnections that nurtured the establishment of the Manila Galleon system, a trading mechanism that lasted two and half centuries from 1565 until 1815. Villamar analyses the establishment of the regulatory framework of the trade across the Pacific Ocean as a whole setting that provided legality to the transactions, predictability to the transportation and security to the stakeholders. He looks both at the Spanish crown strategy in Asia, and the emergence of a network of Portuguese merchants located in Manila and active in the long-distance trade. This informal community of merchants participated from the inception of the trading system across the Pacific, with connections between Europe, ports in Asia under the control of Portugal, the Spanish colonies in America, and the city of Manila. From its inception, the newly-founded capital of the Philippines became a hub of connections, attracting part of the trade that already existed in Asia. Surveying the Portuguese commercial networks from the 'Estado da Índia' across the 'Spanish lake, ' this book sheds light on the early modern globalization from a truly comprehensive Iberian perspective.

This is a valuable resource for scholars of Pacific and Iberian trade history and the maritime history of Asia.

Part I

Origins of the Manila Galleon system

Portuguese Seaborn Empire

O mar com fim será grego ou romano: O mar sem fim é português.

(The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman: the endless sea is Portuguese)

Poem “Padrão” by Fernando Pessoa

1Rivalry and complexity of the Iberian monarchies

Soon after the first voyage of Columbus across the Atlantic in 1492, leading European powers struggled with an overwhelming question: What was the actual dimension of the world? Just few years before, Portugal had managed to ascertain the route to India, bordering the Cape of Good Hope. It was more than a contingency that both Iberian powers embraced the planet through the east and west routes to India, as they sought equally the riches from the Spice Islands in Asia. The monarchies of Portugal and Spain confronted immediately the effects of an “enlargement of the world” and faced the need to develop methods to continue further explorations and expand their territorial dominions. Equally important was the imperative to consolidate Roman Catholic religious principles all over the territories under their domains. A sense of urgency was heightened early the sixteenth century by the split in the Roman Catholic Church caused by the Reformation in Europe. Finally, the Iberian powers needed to understand the nature of the peoples living in vast territories in Asia and America, in order to exercise their dominance. Clearly, the challenge was political, economic and technical, but also moral.

This chapter introduces the environment in which the Portuguese and Spanish competed in encircling the globe and secure domination during the sixteenth century. It pays particular attention to the Portuguese deployment around Africa, and the settlements on Asian coastal areas. Far from a Eurocentric optic, the study of the circumstances that shaped European competition in Asia makes it possible to show the mix of technologies and knowledge originating in the latter region. The text helps to understand the modalities of adaptation of the merchant diaspora studied in this book.

Map 1.1Portuguese expansions

A round and connected world

The constant transformation of geographical knowledge from the late fifteenth century was modifying the cultural references and introducing new terms in the European languages. The problem posed by the widening of the world claimed for an immediate agreement between Portugal and Spain to set limits to their respective domains.¹ In the minds of the Portuguese and Spanish peoples, a fictitious border located in East Asia and defined by the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), denoted an imaginary division of the world, in places barely known to them at the time.

The Iberians were creating in each voyage a “meta-geography” that either confirmed or modified their previous knowledge. In either case, they were surprised by the magnitude of these regions. How the Iberians constructed their knowledge of the world has been the subject of several studies, but for the present discussion, it is worth pointing out that the imago mundi (image of the world) was one of the most valuable results of the period.² The majority of this knowledge was kept within the inner circle of each monarchy and the leading navigators under its control. Their ability to collect information was as important as the adaptation to the new sceneries, e.g. through their navigation technics, including ship designs to suit local weather and conditions.³

The European perception of the world was transformed since the fifteenth century thanks to the parallel Iberian explorations in America and beyond Africa and India, the most populated region in the world.⁴ Up to that point, Asia in the imagination of the Europeans was an island-world, Orbis terrarum, known only by accounts of ancient and medieval travellers and their high-end products of remote origin, such as spices, silk, and porcelains.⁵ The explorations reported by chroniclers, the letters, and the maps, transformed the European view of the dimensions of the planet, breaking with the classical and Medieval geographic nomenclature. The Ptolemy’s geography was gradually replaced with actual descriptions of places. The toponyms of antiquity, such as Ophir and Tarsis, Gog and Magog, Taprobana, Golden Chersonese, and Cathay were replaced by the new, more accurate names. The real places appeared in the new cartography, including: Ceylon, Sumatra, Melaka, Java, Siam, Borneo, Luzon, and China, becoming part of the collective interpretation, although with Portuguese or Spanish pronunciation, at the end of the sixteenth century.⁶ The narrative that we can obtain from the sources of that time was mostly a seaside perspective, a vision from the littoral.

Different modalities of expansion

The evaluation of the expansion modalities employed by the Castilians and the Portuguese during the sixteenth century helps to understand the specific context that led to a certain level of interaction – under intense competition – between these monarchies. The following description serves to explain the specific momentum of the last quarter of that century and the multiple connections between ports dominated by the Iberians, mainly Melaka, Macao, Manila, and the Maluku. Notwithstanding their conflict at the higher political level, the Portuguese and Spanish merchants took a pragmatic approach for survival in Southeast Asia.

The economy of the Portuguese expansion was based on trade, rather than production, and this was part of the initial success of the Portuguese in Asia, where local markets were already developed. In explaining the driving forces behind Portuguese overseas expansion, it is possible to identify an urgent need to overcome the weaknesses in its economic structure and the remaining religious zeal of the Crusades. Scarce population, agricultural smallholders, and religious motivations played a combined driving role in the Portuguese overseas expansion. Subsistence farming on small plots of land and herding triggered migration to coastal cities. Fishing was one of the most effective economic resources in the country, dedicating part of the population to long seasons at sea. For the Portuguese crown, international trade was attractive in terms of tax revenue.⁷

Demographic factors played a crucial role in Portugal’s problems and also served as one of the solutions to its shortcomings. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Portugal had around one million inhabitants.⁸ Castile accounted for five or six million people, and Aragon, one million inhabitants.⁹ During the century, the Portuguese had 10,000 men permanently in Asia, plus another 25,000 in Brazil; roughly 3.5 per cent of its population.¹⁰ By comparison, estimates of the Spanish population in the Americas range from 105,000 to 200,000 migrants throughout the sixteenth century, with an average annual drip of 1,000 people. That represents between 1.5 to 2 per cent of the population of Castile and Aragon combined living overseas.¹¹

Religious motivations moreover played a driving role in the Portuguese and Spanish expansion. The Iberian monarchies developed two parallel religious structures in their overseas domains: royal sponsorship of missionary work, known as Padroado (Patronato in Spain) and two equivalent Inquisitions. The fervour of the Counter-Reformation after 1563 revitalised both institutions.¹²

The Portuguese crown nourished the dream of reconquering Jerusalem, as had been done at the time of the Crusades. The fervent religious stand of the king of Portugal required sources to finance his conquest, and the evident obvious way to achieve this was to dominate the trade of Oriental products arriving in Europe.¹³ The ensuing chain of events is well known. After facing many difficulties in Africa, the Portuguese nurtured the idea of conquering India as a way of controlling the supply of highly appreciated products, such as pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. The initial religious drive shifted into an interest in conquering the Spice Islands.

Spain instead, tried another form of colonisation, based on the control of territories and, as they had done in the Americas, controlling and extracting rents from large populations.¹⁴ The Spanish settlers from New Spain to Peru developed local economies for their survival, keeping a connection with Europe through trading of new varieties of products, such as cochineal dye for textiles, chili and tobacco, and importing European goods, such as wheat, olives, and wine, aiming to maintain their way of life in an American environment.¹⁵ The Spanish American continent became an extension of the Castilian culture with attractive economic conditions for European settlers, an extensive local indigenous workforce, land, and gold and silver mining in the second half of the sixteenth century. A few decades after the conquest, a growing segment of mixed-blood mestizos appeared.¹⁶

Compared with the coastal Portuguese expansion, the Castilian “founded a land-based colonial empire whose characteristics and extent were far different from the factory and fortress empire”.¹⁷ The price for this type of colonisation was the radical transformation of the base of production in the Americas, the labour submission—and to a large degree the slavery—of the massive indigenous populations. Remarkably, this also entailed the integration of the local economies to the world circuit supporting the dominant role of the Habsburg empire, through Spain, in the European context.

In social terms, the main results of the Spanish expansion, both in the Americas and in the Philippines, was the following: the foundation of cities built upon the urban planning of the Baroque era; the creation and expansion of a Creole population, subordinated to the Spanish rule but exerting significant domination through the Spanish language, and the imposition of Roman Catholic religion. The Viceroyalty of New Spain was created in 1535 and the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1542. The coordination of general strategies in the Americas remained in the hands of the Crown through the Council of the Indies, founded in 1524 and active for 300 years. The regulation of trade, first in the Atlantic and later in the American territories, fell in the Casa de Contratación de las Índias (House of Trade of the Indies) located in Seville. Curiously, the Archive General of the Indies occupies nowadays the headquarters of the former house of trade.

Portuguese administrative consolidation and social differentiation in Asia

It is accepted the division of the Portuguese deployment in Asia in three periods: first, 1500–1515, the time of active conquest of city ports in Asia, led by the Portuguese governors of the Estado da Índia. A second period, 1515–1560, which witnessed the apogee of Portuguese power in the region. A third period, 1560–1580, illustrates the crisis resulting from the methods used and the over-extension of Portuguese power. Bearing this chronological division in mind, the chapter will now take a closer look at the major trends in the deployment of the Portuguese.¹⁸

The central administration of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of maps
• List of tables
• List of abbreviations
• Note on currencies and conversions
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Origins of the Manila Galleon system: Portuguese Seaborn Empire
• Part II The art of trade
• Part III Trans-Pacific connections
• Epilogue
• Appendix Visualisation of the Portuguese merchant network
• Bibliography
• Index