Principle Investigator: Katarina O’Briain
Research Assistants: Jasmine Gui and Dani Magsumbol
In September 1762, toward the end of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), an expedition sailed from the British East India Port of Madras to invade and then occupy the fortified city of Manila from October 1762 to April 1764. Part of the unprecedented territorial expansion of the British empire at the end of the war, the siege on Manila would have a lasting effect on both the colonial administration in the Philippines and the British imperial imaginary. Yet this crucial moment of history continues to be overlooked in accounts of the literary history of British empire and the Seven Years’ War as well as in accounts of race and empire in the global eighteenth century. Centring the understudied poems and cultural materials of the British occupation of Manila, this project offers an important glimpse into a history of shifting forms of dispossession and a long and ongoing history of Philippine resistance.
While the Seven Years’ War is often understood as the first global war, British literary and cultural histories have tended to place their focus on its North American theatre. By focusing on materials surrounding the occupation of Manila, this project looks elsewhere to two crucial contexts: the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. The expedition that sailed from Madras consisted of South Asian, Chinese, African, French, and British military labourers, inciting a complex set of contexts, antagonisms, and potential solidarities, which have come to define the field of Indian Ocean Studies. At the same time, the occupation threatened, and led ultimately to the demise of, the transpacific Manila–Acapulco Galleon trade that had been central to the Spanish empire. “Manila in the Transoceanic Archive” recovers this connected set of histories by looking to the work of Tagalog and British poets who recount the siege of Manila. From distinct contexts, perspectives, and coordinates, writers take up the neoclassical poetic mode—citing Virgil and writing in classical forms—to recount the events and aftermath of the siege. This project thus seeks to tell a transnational history of neoclassical poetics, which has relevance across a variety of archives and disciplines, including British empire studies, the Spanish Enlightenment, Indian Ocean studies, Pacific studies, and the global eighteenth century.