To Be Lord of the Spice Trade: Iberian Empire Building in Southeast Asia in the Early Seventeenth Century

To be Lord of the Spice Trade: Iberian Empire-Building in Southeast Asia in the Early Seventeenth Century.

This paper will examine the evolution of Iberian efforts to secure religious, commercial, and political hegemony over the islands of the East Indonesian Archipelago and their subject populations, during the reign of Philip III, 1598-1621.  Within the trajectory of current revisionism concerning Philip’s role in Spanish government, this paper argues that the affairs of empire in East and Southeast Asia provoked the king’s considerable interest.  Iberian methods and aims in these distant imperial domains are found in the rich collections of archival documentation preserved in the Archivo General de Indias, the Arquivos Nacionais Torre do Tombo, and the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu.  Evidence from these manuscript sources is supplemented by the vivid accounts of campaigns for conquest and conversion published in the early seventeenth century.  These sources make it possible to examine Iberian diplomacy in the Southeast Asia within the broader context of Habsburg strategic goals for the maintenance of the security of other possessions in Asia, most notably the port-cities of Macao, Manila, Malacca, and Goa.  They also permit an analysis of the responses of indigenous elites to these overtures.  In the first decades of the seventeenth century, the islands of Southeast Asia continued to be seen as key to the security of much broader imperial ambitions.  This period is particularly important as a time of Iberian experimentation in new forms of sovereignty, in which Spanish and Portuguese models of empire-building in the region adapted to local circumstances.  Rather than focusing on manifest decline, this paper seeks to develop an understanding of the innovations employed by the Iberians in their imperial project during this period.