New Perspectives on Manila’s Chinese Community at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This article reexamines the political dynamic within Manila’s Parián (Chinatown) in the early eighteenth century, challenging the “conventional” paradigm of Christian Chinese monopolization of power. The centerpiece of my research focuses on a judicial case initiated by the Chinese community against Pedro Barredo, a Spanish official charged with committing a variety of sadistic crimes against Chinese merchants and their families in 1701. It also analyzes the psychological rationale undergirding Spain’s systemic racism against Chinese immigrants responsible for the colony’s economic prosperity. Utilizing unpublished documents from the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain, and the National Archives of the Philippines in Manila, this new perspective fills in significant details missing from scholarly literature regarding the Chinese Overseas experience in Manila prior to 1800.