Book History

The transatlantic book trade between Spain and Spanish America during the colonial period has received a great deal of academic attention, yet the same cannot be said for the Philippines. Though some scholars have mentioned the arrival of certain books to the islands, no one has attempted to systematically document the movement of books across the Pacific to the archipelago. To rectify this substantial lapse in scholarship, this study will investigate the movement of books into Manila for the period 1571–1821. It examines the characteristics of the book trade among the Spanish in Manila, the external and internal factors that promoted or inhibited the circulation of texts, and the agents of this trade. Relying on published scholarly work and archival evidence from the files of the Inquisition in the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City, it is argued that books had an early and constant presence in the islands; that the Inquisition did not impede the entry of popular Spanish literature into the city; that even before the mid-eighteenth century books had begun to come from sources other than Spain and the annual galleon; and that such phenomena were made possible by the existence of transimperial institutional and familial networks.