Situated at the crossroads of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the Spanish Philippines offer historians an intriguing middle ground of connected histories that raises fundamental new questions about conventional ethnic, regional and religious identities. This volume adds a new global perspective to the history of the Philippines by juxtaposing Iberian, Chinese and Islamic perspectives. By navigating various underexplored archival resources, senior and junior scholars from Asia, Europe and the Americas explore the diverse cultural, religious, and economic flows that shaped the early modern Philippine milieu. By zooming in from the global to the local, this book offers eleven fascinating Philippine case studies of early modern globalization.

Jos Gommans is Professor of Colonial and Global History at Leiden University. He wrote extensively on the medieval and early modern history of South and Central Asia and on Dutch Colonial History. He is also the director of the Leiden-based Cosmopolis Programme.

Ariel Lopez is Assistant Professor at the Asian Center, University of the Philippines. He received his PhD, MA and BA in History from Leiden University as part of the Cosmopolis Programme. He has published articles on piracy and slave-raiding in early modern Philippines and Southeast Asia.

"An exploration in the multiple cultural and social dynamics that shaped the Philippine Islands in the early modern period, this inspiring volume should be essential reading not only for scholars of southeast Asia and the Iberian empires but for all students interested in the intricacies of global history."
– Giuseppe Marcocci, Associate Professor in Iberian History, Exeter College, University of Oxford

"This collection of papers fills a major gap in the scholarship on Philippine history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In a superb and fascinating way, the papers demonstrate that the Philippines was not marginal in global history; if anything, they show that the Philippines was a cosmopolitan space where ethnically diverse, transoceanic, cross-cultural, and multilingual individuals and groups negotiated, interacted, disputed, came to agreement, soldiered, and even enslaved others during this early period. Manila was a major crossroads of Hispanic, Islamic, Sinic, Malayan, and other Asian civilizations, which resulted in dynamic hybridity in the local culture. This volume compels us to rethink Philippine historiography."
– Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr., Professor of History, Ateneo de Manila University