Building upon Dr Crossley's 2011 book ('Hernando de los Ríos Coronel and the Spanish Philippines in the Golden Age') this new work further expands our understanding of the Spanish Philippines by looking at Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas and his son Luis, successive governors from 1589. Drawing upon a rich selection of documents from the official Spanish archives (principally the Archivo General de Indias, Seville) and earlier histories, the book also utilizes an unpublished 628 page manuscript in the Lilly Library at Indiana University to provide many details not available elsewhere. In so doing the book reveals the complex situation that existed in the Philippines and how the two governors (and the people around them) threw out, and responded to, challenges from a variety of different cultures. Born into a rich family in north-western Spain about 1539, Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas had a distinguished career in Spain before being selected in 1588, to become the new governor of the Philippines. A devout Christian intent on converting the new country in which he found himself, Dasmariñas epitomised the Spanish state's increasing emphasis on its missionary role. He departed Spain with clear instructions from the king, which had been drawn up in response to requests from the Philippines, asking for a better governor and one of higher moral standards than they had previously enjoyed. From the evidence found in his sources, John Newsome Crossley argues that Dasmariñas largely measured up to these requirements. Killed in an attempt to capture the fort at Ternate in the Moluccas in 1593, Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas was succeeded by his son Luis. After being replaced himself as governor in 1596, Luis remained in the Philippines until his death in the Chinese rebellion of 1603 in Manila. In revealing the story of the two Dasmariñas governors, this book further illuminates the history of the Spanish Philippines and its relationship both with the wider Spanish empire, and the regional powers including China, Japan, Siam and Cambodia.

"The essential source for scholarly reassessment of the Asia-Pacific region's diverse and significant archaeology and history."--James P. Delgado, coauthor of The Maritime Landscape of the Isthmus of Panama "Underpins a nuanced picture of Asia-Pacific that shows how the activities of the Chinese and Japanese in East Asia, the spread of Islam from South Asia, and the efforts of the Iberians and especially the Spanish from southern Europe ushered in a world of complex interaction and rapid and often profound change in local, regional, and wider cultural patterns."--Ian Lilley, editor of Archaeology of Oceania: Australia and the Pacific Islands The history of Asia-Pacific since 1500 has traditionally been told with Europe as the main player ushering in a globalized, capitalist world. But these volumes help decentralize that global history, revealing that preexisting trade networks and local authorities influenced the region before and long after Europeans arrived. In the volume The Southwest Pacific and Oceanian Regions, case studies from Alofi, Vanuatu, the Marianas, Hawaii, Guam, and Taiwan compare the development of colonialism across different islands. Contributors discuss human settlement before the arrival of Dutch, French, British, and Spanish explorers, tracing major exchange routes that were active as early as the tenth century. They highlight rarely examined sixteenth- and seventeenth-century encounters between indigenous populations and Europeans and draw attention to how cross-cultural interaction impacted the local peoples of Oceania. The volume The Asia-Pacific Region looks at colonialism in the Philippines, China, Japan, and Vietnam, emphasizing the robust trans-regional networks that existed before European contact. Southeast Asia had long been influenced by Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim traders in ways that helped build the region's ethnic and political divisions. Essays show the complexity and significance of maritime trade during European colonization by investigating galleon wrecks in Manila, Japan's porcelain exports, and Spanish coins discovered off China's coast. Packed with archaeological and historical evidence from both land and underwater sites, impressive in geographical scope, and featuring perspectives of scholars from many different countries and traditions, these volumes illuminate the often misunderstood nature of early colonialism in Asia-Pacific.

During the early modern period, regional specified compendia – which combine information on local moral and natural history, towns and fortifications with historiography, antiquarianism, images series or maps – gain a new agency in the production of knowledge. Via literary and aesthetic practices, the compilations construct a display of regional specified knowledge. In some cases this display of regional knowledge is presented as a display of a local cultural identity and is linked to early modern practices of comparing and classifying civilizations. At the core of the publication are compendia on the Americas which research has described as chorographies, encyclopeadias or – more recently – 'cultural encyclopaedias'. Studies on Asian and European encyclopeadias, universal histories and chorographies help to contextualize the American examples in the broader field of an early modern and transcultural knowledge production, which inherits and modifies the ancient and medieval tradition.

This book focuses in the Spanish presence in Taiwan during the years 1626-1642. It examines the motives which drove the Spaniards to come to Taiwan. There were two main reasons for the Spaniards to come to Taiwan from Manila; firstly, so that the civil authorities might counterbalance the Dutch expansion, which since 1625 had been threatening the traditional trade between Fujian and Manila; and secondly, to enable missionaries to find a staging post to enter Japan in moments of strong persecution, and to create an alternative entry point into China.