Trade at the Crossroads of the Pacific and Indian Ocean Worlds: Credit Networks and the Financial Structure of Merchant Cooperation in Eighteenth-Century Manila

During the course of the Manila galleon era (1571–1815), merchant networks were essential to the operation of trans-Pacific and Indian Ocean routes, though until now we have had little systematic evidence of how these operated. The allocation of networkable resources, specifically credit, can be gleaned from Spanish archival record and acts as a proxy for a less tangible resource: mercantile trust. The National Archives of the Philippines (NAP) house a cache of maritime loans formalized before notaries in Manila during the 18th and early 19th centuries, which can be mined for data. These loans were a form of “respondentia,” where the principal’s cargo served as collateral. These credit contracts provide data on lenders and borrowers (ethnic Spaniards and Chinese) that can be used to recreate merchant networks through relational databases and Social Network Analysis. This kind of systematic study of Manila’s merchant population has been priorly impossible without the kind of extensive micro-level data captured in these contracts. Thus Spanish traders have been largely excluded from the literature on intra-Asian trade. These new archival sources and methodology present an empirical challenge to existing historical narratives of the Pacific and Indian Ocean economies, as well as being a contribution to the burgeoning study of self-organizing merchant networks in the early modern world.