The San Juan de Santa Cruz Family Business Empire and the Asian Frontier in Eighteenth Century

In 1712, Miguel Gallo, the alcalde mayor of Acapulco received the Manila galleon without registering the royal taxes. The scandal that ensued would implicate Gallo's sons and his soon to be son-in-law Manuel San Juan de Santa Cruz, all major investors in the newly arrived Asian goods. As part of a family merchant empire that Manuel and his older brother Francisco built with funds embezzled from the crown, their merchant activities stretched from Manila, through Acapulco, to the center of colonial power in Mexico City, to Chihuahua at the height of silver production,to Veracruz, and south to the viceroyalty of Peru. For the brothers San Juan de Santa Cruz, the Philippines was more than a distant Asian outpost of the Spanish empire. Instead it functioned as the engine of their financial success. My study investigates the enormous scope of Spanish influence in a global context, beyond the well-known infusion of American silver into Europe and Asia, through the lens of a single family business empire, demonstrating how two brothers employed local strategies to connect the periphery to the core. Through research conducted in Spain, Mexico and the Philippines, this paper will focus on the strategies employed by the San Juan de Santa Cruz brothers to cement alliances in both Manila and Acapulco, as well as document the extent of their Asian trade. As a microcosm of the global economy of the early modern world, the San Juan de Santa Cruz family empire provides a focalpoint to see the interrelationship of the global and local processes at work in the early modern world, when Europe not only found a new supply route for Asian goods, but Manila and Mexico together found wealth that rivaled the Atlantic economy, often beyond the reach of European control.