At the beginning of 1763 in the Pampangan town of Bacalor, Spanish colonial officials and Pampangan militiaman executed 181 Chinese men. This organized and meticulously-documented massacre occurred as British Royal Navy and East India Company forces occupied Manila, having seized the city in a surprise invasion months earlier. Despite is being the largest recorded mass killing of Chinese people to take place in the Philippines in the eighteenth century, Bacalor has been largely forgotten by historians. Attending to these deaths is important not only as a form of justice, but also to deepen our understanding of the historic relationship between maritime violence and colonial massacres in Spain's Asian empire. Flannery considers how maritime violence inflected intercultural relationships between Spaniards, Indigenous Filipinos, and Chinese migrants and their descendants in the archipelago.
Kristie Patricia Flannery
Kristie Patricia Flannery is a historian of the global Spanish empire and research fellow at the Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2024 she wrote 'Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World', published by the University of Pennsylvania.
Register
Please register by e-mail: clue@vu.nl
