Striking as it is, Wallerstein's dictum that ‘in the sixteenth century, Iberia establishes colonies in the Americas, but trading-posts in Asia’ over-simplifies the variety of political relations involved. It was one of the most notable Dutch rulers in the Indies who wrote of the Portuguese that

Hence the stubborn and prolonged Lusian resistance to the assaults of the better-found and better-organised naval power of the Dutch; hence too, together with Albuquerque's conscious policy of integration by miscegenation, the much more marked cultural impression left by the 150 years of Portuguese rule in littoral Ceylon compared with that of the succeeding 150 years of Dutch rule. Malacca, Macao, Nagasaki may look like trading-posts pure and simple; yet perhaps only the last of these was truly one in the sense that the European factories of the seventeenth century in India, of the eighteenth at Canton, were such. From the start, the Iberian ‘trading-posts’ were bases not for wide political dominion but for extensive political and social influence (the latter largely mediated by religious missions) as well as trade. And if this is true of the scattered Portuguese holdings, it applies perhaps a fortiori to the relatively large but more concentrated- 221 -Spanish base in the Philippines, which lasted until 1898 and whose legacy of ‘Hispano-Malayan Catholicism has survived the double collapse of the political and the linguistic presence of Spain.’^[54]

This is perhaps the key. Philip II may not actually and cold-bloodedly have made the magnificent, if Quixotic, assertion that ‘for a single hermitage, in which the Holy Name of God should be maintained in the Filipinas, he would expend the whole revenue of his Kingdoms'^[55]—but it is significant that it could be ascribed to him, and it is certainly a highly symbolic statement. It is as certainly not consistent with a view of Iberia as merely planting trading-posts. It is of course true enough (and this is doubtless the core of Wallerstein's approach) that wide-ranging Conquistas, extensive colonies of settlement, were not possible in Asia as they were in the Americas. Entradas in Siam and Cambodia came to sticky ends, and serious contact with China and Japan soon dissipated such early dreams of glory as Sande's and Riquel's; the effectively organised and ruthless Dutch took the better part of a century to complete the subjugation of even the small island realms such as Mataram,’ Bantam, Makassar. By the same token, neither Spanish nor Portuguese ever displaced Asian shipping from a large share of the regional carrying trade; they ran the long-distance lines to other parts of the world, but these were fed by locally built, owned and managed craft.

But when Legazpi arrived on Cebu, the people of the archipelago had not developed for themselves political structures larger or more solid than loose associations of a few villages; ‘for themselves’, since in the south Islam was bringing new forms of political and social life, and here, in Sulu and Mindanao, it was not until within two or three decades of her own supersession in 1898 that Spain was able to claim anything more than the most nominal authority. North of Mindanao, however, the Spaniards found little difficulty in extending their control in the first place, and then in enlisting ‘Indios’ to maintain it by the repression of their fellows: in both phases they had powerful support from the spiritual arm. There was it is true much resistance—Zaide lists over a score of risings between 1574 and 1762, and this is not exhaustive—but it was sporadic, local in inspiration and leadership; there was no unity.^[56] Manila intra muros became a central Spanish strongpoint, uneasily watching over suburbs of Indios and the more sinister-seeming Parian, a solidly Chinese town of perhaps 30,000 people in 1627; and although the encomendero system was not so central to society as it was in the Americas, over half a million Indios lived in the nearly 200 encomiendas of 1621. But the real colonisers were the clergy, who covered the islands north of Surigao Strait with over a thousand ‘towns’: most of them poor places, no doubt, but forming a network for cultural impregnation and social control.^[57] This is hardly the work of a trading-post.

Yet, if something more than a trading-post, the Philippines were something less than a full-fledged colony, and Manila has the air of being superimposed onto the islands, not growing from them. In contrast to Anthonio van Diemen's Portuguese, the Castilians of the Philippines did not even in thought detach- 222 -themselves from Spain, still less perhaps from New Spain; and they enriched themselves not from local resources but by playing middleman between the treasures of America and the luxuries of Asia. A certain amount of gold was received from the Indios in trade or tribute, and from time to time there was a flurry of interest in reports of new finds; but nothing came of these. After the first few years, nothing was done to tap the potential of Mindanao in nutmeg and cinnamon, though the latter had formed part of one of the earliest cargoes shipped for New Spain: the local variety was inferior, but hardly enough so to warrant importing the spice from Ceylon, as was done. Intermittent attempts were made to export Indio-woven cottons to New Spain, but this industry could hardly stand up to Chinese and peninsular Indian competition even on its home ground. Tobacco seeds were brought from Cuba before 1600, and in 1641 Governor Corcuera presented the Viceroy of New Spain with two chests of Manila cigars; but the great days of their world fame, when the tobacco monopoly became the chief source of government revenue, had to wait until late in the eighteenth century. Some indigenous products—honey, wax, deer-skins, civet cats—went to Japan; China was as yet, and would long remain, sublimely independent of European wares. So by and large the exports of the Philippines were re-exports, to such an extent that when Grau y Monfalcon says that the islands ‘abound in copper’ while ‘the quicksilver of the Filipinas’ is of no less importance, the context makes it clear that he is speaking of imports from China. The lure of the super-profitable entrepôt trade stifled all other enterprise.^[58]

‘The manifest lists of the galleons are a veritable catalogue of the products of the Orient’, and after over a page of enumeration of the rareties brought from China, Morga gives up: ‘to recount all would mean never finishing, nor would even masses of paper suffice for the task.’^[59] More prosaically, Guzmán-Rivas classifies the main lines exported to New Spain: food products—spices and later tea (both re-exports), palm wine; raw materials and drugs—amber, benzoin, borax (from inner China), Manila hemp, raw cotton and silk, iron, sandalwood, dyestuffs, tin, wax; manufactures—ceramics, many lines in silk and cotton textiles, jewellery, escritoires, screens, fancy boxes, and all sorts of curios and knick-knacks, chinoiserie in short. Obviously, with China and tropical Southeast Asia at hand to supply the luxuries of life, Japan the necessities such as iron, copper, lead, saltpetre, and Chinese artisans at Manila itself to provide domestic comforts, clothes, and furnishings, there was little call to import consumption goods from across the oceans. Some such there were, cacao and cochineal from New Spain, from Old ‘peculiarly national goods’ such as olive oil, wine, and books; but returns ‘were of so little bulk that the galleon virtually sailed in ballast.’ Basically the trade remained the exchange of silver for silk, much of which reached Europe itself.^[60]

The effect of the Galleon trade in Asia, strictly commercial exchanges apart, was essentially to maintain the Spanish presence in the Philippines; Spanish action- 223 -outside those islands (the Japanese and later the Marianas missions excepted) was military and ineffectual; the Portuguese seem to have had more intimate contact with local populations, over a wider field, and hence much more of a cultural impact. In the Philippines themselves, of course, things were different. Apart from direct religious indoctrination, romances such as those of Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers inspired Tagalog verse narratives, and there were many linguistic borrowings—over 150 plant names, hundreds of personal names.^[61] Plants introduced via the Pacific included acacias, capsicums, groundnuts, papaya, indigo, manihot, tobacco; maize was probably already in Southeast Asia before any Spanish introduction. The agave or maguey was also brought in, but its use for pulque, the universal fermented drink of Mexico, did not catch on; rather the Indios who came to New Spain corrupted the natives of Colima and Acapulco by introducing them to tuba or palm ‘wine’: this was distilled, ‘as strong as brandy, [so that] they crave it rather than the wine of España’, a manifest menace to the vintners of Spain (and probably Peru!). This apart, there was little plant transferral from Asia; in contrast to the westbound sailings, the cold on the northern reaches of the eastwards run was probably enough to inhibit success with seedlings, which were space- and labour-demanding on the tight-packed ships to Acapulco; in any case, such traffic was not likely to appeal to the Manileño penchant for large profits and quick returns. There is a possible Japanese influence, dating from Vizcaino's times, on house-types in Michoacan, and more definite Malayan and Chinese motifs in ornamental glazed tiles (azulejos) and jars made for the mass market in New Spain. There were also some thousands of Chinese and Filipino immigrants, either as slaves or as Indio crewmen deserting the Galleon after the inhuman treatment and climatic rigours of the voyage. This seems to be almost the total cultural influence of the trans-Pacific trade in New Spain.^[62] Indeed, if we wished to find a trading-post in connection with the Galleon route, we might find it on American rather than Asian shores: Acapulco was entirely a town of trade, and that concentrated on the feria when the Galleon was in. As in Puerto Bello, there were then a few weeks of frantic activity, a milling population of 12,000 or so, rich and poor, officials and seamen, merchants and muleteers, clergy and slaves; afterwards, as all who could afford to do so fled the stifling cauldron-like bay, the lowly permanent residents—Indians eastern and western, Negroes, Chinese, and all possible combinations—relapsed into months of monotony under the brazen sky of the tierra caliente.^[63]