Fighting Moros, Forging Empire: Catholic Anti-piracy in Spain’s Asian Empire, 1749–62

In the mid-eighteenth century slave-raiding moro (Muslim) pirates from the Sulu Sultanate sacked and destroyed Catholic missions and villages across the Spanish Philippines - along the coastlines of northern Mindanao, the Visayas, and Southern Luzon - with the predictable regularity of a monsoon. Colonial officials considered piratas moros to be the greatest contemporary threat to the survival of Spain’s Asian Empire, however the state-sponsored military campaign to destroy this enemy became the foundation of imperial legitimacy in the archipelago.

Drawing on extensive, multi-site archival research, this paper shows that the Spanish colonial government formed military alliances with Indigenous Filipinos to fight moro pirates on the colonial borderlands. Bilingual and bicultural missionaries brokered these compacts. Religion transformed temporary coalitions between friars and Filipinos into a unified, cultural world. Moreover, Manila’s multiethnic population actively participated in the reinvigorated war against pirates. Spaniards, Mexicans, Indigenous Filipinos, as well as Chinese and Armenians living in this Asian metropolis donated silver and weapons to the Hispano-Filipino armadas dispatched to fight the enemy. They also joined solemn religious processions that passed through Manila’s streets begging the Virgin Mary to aid and protect sailors and soldiers heading into battle. Whether they were sincere or strategic, I argue that these public performances of Hispanic patriotism facilitated social cohesion in the heterogenous colonial capital.

This new research deepens our understanding of the nature of piracy and anti-piracy in early modern maritime Southeast Asia and provides new insight into how Spain maintained control over its most distant colonial possession at the beginning of the tumultuous Age of Revolutions.