ABSTRACT
Since the late sixteenth century, the economic base of the Philippine imperium was built upon trade, contraband, and New Spain’s annual subsidy (royal situado) to pay the soldiers’ and officers’ wages, as well as the missionaries’ synods or stipends. In the early eighteenth century, European conflicts forced the Spanish authorities to protect the Manila Galleon’s trading route from Acapulco to Manila. The loss or capture of a galleon could jeopardize Spanish control of its Asian possessions. The colonial powers had to adapt to new imperial circumstances (the growing power and competition of the Dutch and the English vis-à-vis the Spanish empire), but also to what Josep Maria Delgado has defined as intra-imperial dynamics:1 the dissociative forces generated within the empires themselves (corruption of the colonial bureaucracies, depopulation in the colonies, revolts, etc.) often described as a drain to the Spanish treasury.
