Slavery shaped the culture of the Philippines & the wider Asia-Pacific
This time period is of particular interest to Dr Kristie Flannery, a historian of the global Spanish empire, the Pacific, and early modern worlds. Funding from the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2022 supported her research on the history of slavery and trafficking in Philippines.
She says understanding this history is crucial to understanding how the ideas of slavery and practices of unfree labour developed and changed the political economy and culture of the Philippines — and the wider Asia-Pacific.
“The Philippines has always played a very important role in history as a contact zone or place of encounter between Asia and the Americas and Europe,” explains Dr Flannery.
“In the period I study, Indigenous Filipino peoples were living alongside Spaniards, Latin Americans, and people of the Chinese diaspora in Manila. My initial research suggests that who was deemed ‘enslavable’ in the ‘Spanish’ Pacific world changed over time and was entangled with emerging and contested concepts of indigeneity that had currency in the wider Iberian world.”
Dr Flannery is drawing comparisons about how Spanish colonial categories and definitions of concepts such as “Indigenous” and “slave” may have influenced Australia’s early colonial period.
Some of this work will appear in a forthcoming chapter in Everyday Life in the Philippines, 1657–1699: Selections from the Manuscripts of Juan de Paz, forthcoming in April 2025 with Palgrave Macmillan and coedited by Norah L. A. Gharala, Marya Svetlana T. Camacho, and Juan O. Mesquida.
The Dominican scholar, Juan de Paz was one of the most influential legal theorists in colonial society in the 17th-century Philippines. The book translates and analyses documents that have not been translated into English before, providing critical insight into the cultural and social history of the Philippines and the Spanish empire.
Connecting to international networks
“The AAH grant allowed me to travel to Spain to pursue original research in several archives, including the Archive of the Indies in Seville, and the archives of the Dominican missionary order in Asia,” says Dr Flannery.
“I was able to read and photograph rare documents that shed light on Spanish colonialism and everyday life in the eighteenth-century Philippines, including materials that tell us about slavery in Manila at this time.”
“Being in Spain also gave me the chance to network with Spanish historians of the early Pacific world, and other international scholars who were also visiting to work in archives. I accepted invitations to give talks on my most recent book, Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World (Penn Press 2024) at Madrid’s CSIC and at the University of Seville.”
“I’m continuing to collaborate with these colleagues, developing joint applications for major international research grants on Spain and the Pacific world.”
Receiving a Humanities Travelling Fellowship also supported Dr Flannery’s bid for an ARC Discovery grant.
“Last year I joined a group of researchers at Flinders University, the Australian National University, and the Marshal Islands to develop a new research project investigating the history of empire in Micronesia,” she says. “The islands were under Spanish occupation for centuries, before Germany, Japan, and the USA established successive colonial regimes.”
“Our application for an Australian Research Council Discovery Project was successful in 2024. This will not only support new research in understanding the history, and cultures, of our region, but it will also offer two new PhD positions.”
Humanities Travelling Fellowships
The Humanities Travelling Fellowships, awarded annually, are one of the Academy’s longest standing awards and were first awarded in 1985. These Fellowships support early career researchers with costs of up to $4,000 to undertake research overseas, including accessing archives and other research materials and connecting with international researchers and networks. Applications for the Academy’s 2025 round close 28 March 2025.
