Navigating the Spanish Lake: The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521–1898

Navigating the Spanish Lake examines Spain’s long presence in the Pacific Ocean (1521–1898) in the context of its global empire. Building on a growing body of literature on the Atlantic world and indigenous peoples in the Pacific, this pioneering book investigates the historiographical “Spanish Lake” as an artifact that unites the Pacific Rim (the Americas and Asia) and Basin (Oceania) with the Iberian Atlantic. Incorporating an impressive array of unpublished archival materials on Spain’s two most important island possessions (Guam and the Philippines) and foreign policy in the South Sea, the book brings the Pacific into the prevailing Atlanticentric scholarship, challenging many standard interpretations. By examining Castile’s cultural heritage in the Pacific through the lens of archipelagic Hispanization, the authors bring a new comparative methodology to an important field of research.

The book opens with a macrohistorical perspective of the conceptual and literal Spanish Lake. The chapters that follow explore both the Iberian vision of the Pacific and indigenous counternarratives; chart the history of a Chinese mestizo regiment that emerged after Britain’s occupation of Manila in 1762-1764; and examine how Chamorros responded to waves of newcomers making their way to Guam from Europe, the Americas, and Asia. An epilogue analyzes the decline of Spanish influence against a backdrop of European and American imperial ambitions and reflects on the legacies of archipelagic Hispanization into the twenty-first century.

Specialists and students of Pacific studies, world history, the Spanish colonial era, maritime history, early modern Europe, and Asian studies will welcome Navigating the Spanish Lake as a persuasive reorientation of the Pacific in both Iberian and world history.

• Rainer F. Buschmann, Author

  Rainer F. Buschmann is professor of history at California State University Channel Islands.

• Edward R. Slack, Author

  Edward R. Slack Jr. is professor of history at Eastern Washington University.

• James B. Tueller, Author

  James B. Tueller is professor of history at Brigham Young University-Hawaiʻi.

• Anand A. Yang, Series Editor

• Overall, the authors deserve credit for their contribution to re-centring scholarly focus on the Pacific Ocean. Attention to the complexities of the Spanish presence in the Pacific Rim and Basin provides a welcome corrective for studies that have neglected the broader dimensions of the Spanish Empire. This study is indispensable reading for those interested in Asian history, global history and the history of Spain in the Americas.
  —Asian Studies Review
• Scholars and other readers hoping to learn more about the Spanish presence in the Pacific especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which probably is the period least familiar to most Hispanists, will find this slim volume rewarding. . . . Readers seeking to learn more about the presence and impact of the Spanish in the Pacific . . . will find a great deal of interest here.
  —Historian

• Navigating the Spanish Lake . . . [is] at the vanguard of a contemporary challenge to the Anglo-French
  centrism of Pacific colonial history.

  
  —Journal of World History