ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the relationship between the Spanish colonial government and Chinese merchants through the policy of Chinese expulsions and makes reference to other containment policies as they relate to expulsions, by focusing on the eighteenth century. It explores the complicated policy tensions that accompanied the centrality of Chinese commerce in Spanish Philippines. The chapter contributes to the scholarship of transnational merchant communities by providing the case of Chinese traders with minority status in a colonial paradigm within the context of empire, in which issues of political economy played out across a vast realm. The persecution of Chinese traders in eighteenth-century Philippines presented here is an important part of merchant's narratives and, in a larger view, of comparative history and global history, allowing the reader to draw similarities and differences in regard to the exploits of Chinese traders in the rest of Asia.
