Manila

Assembled from 12 blocks · 2 evidence · 15 related

1. Story
2. Founded as a Spanish city on Manila Bay in 1571 on the site of an existing Muslim settlement, and immediately the eastern terminus of the transpacific trade. Manila was not a producer of anything the galleons carried. It was an exchange point: Chinese junks brought silk, porcelain and manufactures from Fujian on the monsoon, Spanish American silver came in from Acapulco, and the two were traded within the walls of Intramuros and the adjacent Chinese quarter. The city therefore ran on a Chinese merchant and artisan community whose presence the colonial government simultaneously depended on and feared, a tension that produced repeated massacres. Manila is the clearest demonstration that the Spanish Pacific was not a colonial enterprise in the Atlantic sense at all — it was a bullion-for-goods counter placed where the winds allowed one.
3. Knowledge
4. Manila
5. Connections
6. Silver
7. The Manila galleon (Nao de China)
8. Manila is founded as the eastern terminus
9. The last Manila galleon sails
10. Evidence
11. The standard narrative history of the transpacific galleon trade: its route, its cargoes, its termini at Manila and Acapulco and its ending in 1815. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session. Schurz remains the reference work but is now over eighty years old, and its figures have been revised by later scholarship; a curator should treat it as the frame and check quantities elsewhere.
12. The argument that the founding of Manila in 1571, by linking the American silver supply directly to the Chinese demand for it, marks the beginning of genuinely global trade. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session. The volume and year are given from the author's knowledge; pagination is omitted. The 1571 thesis is a position in an ongoing debate about the periodisation of globalisation, not a settled fact.