Maintaining Freedom: The Commercial Activities of Free Black People in Colonial Manila

During the seventeenth century, Manila had one of the largest non-Spanish populations in the Spanish empire. While there is a growing scholarship that has examined sources pertaining to the city’s Chinese, Japanese, Philippine, and Armenian populations, the free and enslaved Black sector of Manila’s populace remains severely understudied. Indeed, the mobility of Black people through the early modern Pacific has been, with only a few exceptions, almost entirely missed by the Pacific turn in Spanish imperial studies. Nonetheless, as early as 1637, the governor of Manila wrote that 400-500 free Black people inhabited the city, and he petitioned the king that they be deported to an isolated island in the Pasig River. Despite the open hostility of the highest Spanish authority in the land, the treasury records for Manila, held in the Archivo General de Indias, document the commercial activities that Black people engaged in to maintain their freedom and presence in the city. From the 1630s to the 1690s, some 150 people described as “moreno/a” paid licenses to open shops to sell a wide variety of goods both in and around Manila. These license notations reveal that Black women were fundamental to the city’s economic life, that “morenos” and Japanese residents often worked in the same districts, and that the free Black population sustained considerable numbers throughout the seventeenth century. Furthermore, the treasury records register the presence of both a free Black militia and a community-appointed “moreno” intermediary with Spanish authorities. This first-of-its-kind research uncovers a silenced history of free Black activity in the Spanish Pacific and unearths the large scale of Black shop ownership at the center of Spanish colonial operations in Asia.