New Books In East Asian Studies

Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) offers a new interpretation of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippine islands. Drawing on the rich archives of Spain’s Asian empire, Dr. Kristie Patricia Flannery reveals that Spanish colonial officials and Catholic missionaries forged alliances with Indigenous Filipinos and Chinese migrant settlers in the Southeast Asian archipelago to wage war against waves of pirates, including massive Chinese pirate fleets, Muslim pirates from the Sulu Zone, and even the British fleet that attacked at the height of the Seven Years’ War. Anti-piracy alliances made Spanish colonial rule resilient to both external shocks and internal revolts that shook the colony to its core. This revisionist study complicates the assumption that empire was imposed on Filipinos with brute force alone. Rather, anti-piracy also shaped the politics of belonging in the colonial Philippines. Real and imagined pirate threats especially influenced the fate