Villamar examines the role of Portuguese merchants in the formation of the Manila Galleon as a system of trade founded at the end of the sixteenth century. The rise of Manila as a crucial transshipment port was not a spontaneous incident. Instead, it came about through a complex combination of circumstances and interconnections that nurtured the establishment of the Manila Galleon system, a trading mechanism that lasted two and half centuries from 1565 until 1815. Villamar analyses the establishment of the regulatory framework of the trade across the Pacific Ocean as a whole setting that provided legality to the transactions, predictability to the transportation and security to the stakeholders. He looks both at the Spanish crown strategy in Asia, and the emergence of a network of Portuguese merchants located in Manila and active in the long-distance trade. This informal community of merchants participated from the inception of the trading system across the Pacific, with connections between Europe, ports in Asia under the control of Portugal, the Spanish colonies in America, and the city of Manila. From its inception, the newly-founded capital of the Philippines became a hub of connections, attracting part of the trade that already existed in Asia. Surveying the Portuguese commercial networks from the ‘Estado da Índia’ across the ‘Spanish lake,’ this book sheds light on the early modern globalization from a truly comprehensive Iberian perspective. This is a valuable resource for scholars of Pacific and Iberian trade history and the maritime history of Asia.

In this study of the Portuguese intervention in the Manila Galleon Trade, Etsuko Miyata explores its history through a new approach: the examination of Chinese ceramics.

Volume I surveys the long history of fashion from the ancient world to c. 1800. The volume seeks to answer fundamental questions on the origins of fashion, challenging Eurocentric explanations that the emergence of fashion was a European phenomenon and shows instead that fashion found early expressions across the globe well before the age of European colonialism and imperialism. It sheds light on how fashion was experienced in a multitude of ways depending on class, gender, and race, and despite geographical distance, fashion connected populations across the globe. Fashions flowered and were reseeded, through entanglements of empire, forced and voluntary migration, evolving racial systems, burgeoning sea travel and transcontinental systems.

In The Atlantic World and the Manila Galleons, José L. Gasch-Tomás offers an account of the trade of Asian goods between colonial Spanish America and East Asia, and the distribution and consumption of those goods in the Spanish Empire, during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Portuguese explorations opened the sea-route to Asia, bringing armed trading to the Indian Ocean. This Element examines the impact of the 1511 Portuguese conquest of the port-kingdom of Melaka on early travel literature. Putting into dialogue accounts from Portuguese, mestiço, and Malay perspectives, this study re-examines early modern 'discovery' as a cross-cultural trope. Trade and travel were intertwined while structured by religion. Rather than newness or wonder, Portuguese representations focus on recovering what is known and grafting Asian knowledges-including local histories-onto European epistemologies. Framing Portuguese rule as a continuation of the sultanate, they re-spatialize Melaka into a European city. However, this model is complicated by a second one of accidental discovery facilitated by native agents. For Malay texts too, travel traverses known routes and spaces. Malay travelers insert themselves into foreign spaces by forging new kinship alliances, even as indigenous networks were increasingly disrupted by European incursions.

Bailey describes how the Sea of Okhotsk area became integrated into a world system of economic and cultural ties between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. This happened primarily because of maritime explorations, travel, and trade, which led to increased connections with both Russia and Japan. Individual chapters of the book provide analyses of historical sources which describe cross-cultural encounters and changes in the Sea of Okhotsk area. This includes analyses of explorers and travelers who traversed the region for commerce, exploration, diplomacy, and possible colonization. Historical sources are explored from the different perspectives of Russians, Japanese, Indigenous peoples, and international observers from Western countries. Cross-cultural encounters in the region among these groups led to collaboration, syncretism, and resistance, sometimes violent and sometimes peaceful. The last chapter discusses how some international travelers and foreign residents of Hokkaidō described the area at the end of the nineteenth century. Their perspectives confirm that Hokkaidō had become a fully colonized space. An essential resource for students and scholars of cross-cultural studies, Russian history, Japanese history, and Ainu and Indigenous history.