Introduction

Cosmopolitanism in the early modern period was by no means limited to the shores or salons of Europe, nor was it solely an intellectual pursuit. In recent years historians have been finding it throughout the globe, in milieux where peoples met and intermingled throughout the early modern world: port cities, sailing ships, royal courts, households, and inquisitorial prisons, among others. As the paths of trade, empire, and migration connected corners of the world like never before, strangers and foreigners who moved by will or were dispersed by force “approached those different than themselves” for a variety of reasons ranging from interest to wonder. Their cosmopolitan world was not primarily an intellectual “benign posture” toward the foreign, but rather a far more intimate mestizaje—a mixture and comingling of cultures and bodies marked by mutual dependence.

Few places in the seventeenth-century exemplified this condition as fully as seventeenth-century Manila. The founding of the city in 1571 set the stage for unprecedented commercial ties between Asia and America that drew migrants and merchants from the four winds. Between 1571 and 1620, commerce, migration, and colonization transformed Manila from a Malay settlement of two thousand to a port city of forty thousand people.

Even the worldliest travellers of that century marvelled at its diversity, and its fame as a global emporium spread far and wide. “The variety of nations one finds in Manila and its surroundings is the greatest in the world,” a Franciscan in Mexico wrote, “for there is hardly a kingdom, province, or nation, whose people are not present here, due to the regularity of their navigations from the East, West, South, and North.” Exiles, merchants, slaves, missionaries, soldiers, sailors, and tradesmen from across the globe made their homes or passed through here, and the global scale of their mestizaje produced a multicultural society that was both by-product and guarantor of the city's commercial power. In so doing they made Manila the cosmopolis of an emerging Hispano-Asian Pacific world.

Historians have long studied the commercial opulence and opportunity that made early seventeenth-century Manila a city of migrants and strangers, but we know far less of how its residents experienced its diversity.