Mancini, JoAnne (2015) Disrupting the transpacific: objects, architecture, war, panic. Colonial Latin American Review, 25 (1). pp. 35-55. ISSN 1060-9164

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Abstract

In recent years, scholarship on transpacific exchange in colonial Latin America has expanded and deepened, particularly with reference to the trade of silver for moveable goods produced in Asia such as silk, porcelain and ivories, and the implications of that exchange for local cultural production both in the Americas and in the western Pacific. Although these emphases are understandable, they risk overshadowing another factor that also shaped the transpacific as a zone of interconnection and interactivity: war, and particularly conflict between Spain and one of its chief imperial rivals, Britain. The empires of Spain and Britain clashed frequently in the early modern period, and in the eighteenth century Britain’s increasingly global approach to inter-imperial war repeatedly brought such conflict into the Pacific. During The War of Jenkins’ Ear or Guerra del Asiento (1739–1748), for example, George Anson sacked and burned the town of Paita, in Peru, before crossing the Pacific and ultimately seizing the Manila-bound Nuestra Señora de Covadonga in June of 1743. And, only decades later during the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763), British forces captured both the city of Manila and the Acapulcobound Santísima Trinidad in 1762. To be sure, Britain’s militarised turn to the Pacific did not signal an end to its attacks on more traditional targets: in 1762, British forces also took the city of Havana, and during every war in the century British naval ships and privateers attacked and seized Spanish vessels in the Atlantic (indeed, in 1779, one of Spain’s first losses after its entry into the U.S. War of Independence was the urca Santa Inés, returning from Manila via the Cape of Good Hope). Thus, despite its geographical remoteness from, and other differences to cities in the Americas, Manila and its inhabitants shared an experience common to colonial Spanish American history in its exposure to war with Britain. A full account of that shared history is beyond the scope of this essay, but a more limited consideration of Anglo-Spanish war in the context of a volume on transpacific exchange has two potential advantages, the first being that it adds a new dimension to the study of economic issues...

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Manila; History;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Arts,Celtic Studies and Philosophy > History
Item ID:	11503
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2016.1180781
Depositing User:	Dr. Joanne Mancini
Date Deposited:	29 Oct 2019 17:04
Journal or Publication Title:	Colonial Latin American Review
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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