The roundtable begins with each panelists presenting a five minute provocation that introduces the discussion’s themes and poses questions to fellow panelists. Afterward, conversation will flow between panelists and the chair with audience engagement. Diego Javier Luis examines how the Chinese community in Manila recovered and eventually rebounded after a Spanish-led coalition army murdered thousands of them in 1639. Kristie Flannery considers how Indigenous and Chinese migrant communities in the Philippines supported the Spanish colonial governments’ wars against ‘Moro’ pirates in the first half of the Eighteenth Century, forging a multiethnic Catholic coalition against Muslim others in the archipelago. Michael Salgarolo explores the case of Lorenzo Pablo, a sailor from the Philippines tried for murder in a Baltimore courtroom in the 1840s, which forced jurists to settle complex questions of racial categorization. Jilene Chua will examine how Chinese mestizos complicated US attempts to exclude Chinese residents in the Philippines from Filipino citizenship and forced the colonial government to define and delineate who or what made someone “Chinese” or “Filipino” in the first half of the twentieth century.

The archives of empires in the Pacific, while ridden with gaps and silences, are for historians effectively ‘growing’ as a result of digitization initiatives. The historians on this roundtable have worked extensively with a wide range of materials such as letters and reports preserved in the libraries of Catholic missionary orders, legal trial records, and imperial account books. The participants use these new primary sources to establish both points of comparison and interrelation between transpacific studies and the more established field of Atlantic World history. The discussion turns to approaches to finding and interpreting archival evidence to recover Filipinx and Chinese voices and actions with a particular focus on words and acts of resistance that undermined colonial governance, as well as negotiation, accommodation, and support.