Introduction

Slave raids, the primary activity of the Moro Wars fought between the 1560s to 1660s, had global implications for our understanding of the histories of the Philippine Islands and forced migrations. Spanish slavers and their native allies captured Muslims in the Philippine and Sulu Archipelagos and other islands in Southeast Asia, enslaved them, forced them to convert to Catholicism, and then sold them as human chattel in markets that fed the transpacific slave trade to the Americas. A transoceanic perspective reveals the human cost and diasporic dimensions of slaving during the Moro Wars.

The Moro Wars as a historical narrative, and as a category of analysis, needs revision. Scholars have mainly interpreted the Moro Wars in the context of Spain's imperial project to expand Christendom and vanquish Islam. This perspective is outdated and eurocentric. A revised reading of this conflict needs to acknowledge the political and military weaknesses of the Spanish government in the Philippine archipelago during the late sixteenth and seventeenth century. During this period, Spanish officials faced existential threats from distinct regional states like Brunei, as well as from the Dutch East India Company. The Spanish government in Manila lacked the necessary men and weaponry to prevent ongoing military attacks by their competitors, much less to expand Spain's colonial presence in the region. Narratives that emphasize religion and political competition need to acknowledge instead that the Moro Wars had an underlying economic logic. Spanish settlers and soldiers who partook in the skirmishes that characterized this conflict sought to profit from the wider region's economy based on slave labour.

Historiography

Scholars have employed the term Moro Wars to discuss the long history of Muslim-Christian conflicts in the Philippine Islands, dating from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The underlining assumption in much of this work is that religious identity was a unifying force that drove political competition in the archipelago. This chapter, by contrast, steps away from the framework of religion to show that slaving, rather than missionary zeal, was the primary economic impetus for the confrontations that took place from circa 1565 to 1663—the first century of Spain's presence in Manila.