Nicholas Michael Sy

I study enslavement in the lowlands of Luzon (in the archipelago that came to be known as the Philippines) from the sixteenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries. Tatiana Seijas (2014) examines how Asian slaves in colonial Mexico negotiated the category "Indio" alongside the crown’s gradual racialization of slavery. Seijas describes the sourcing of Asian slaves in Luzon from indigenous and Iberian markets to introduce her readers to their transfer to and presence in New Spain. In discussing indigenous enslavement, her work and the work of William Henry Scott (1991) find "natives of the Spanish Philippines labor[ing] as slaves far longer than Indians from the other colonies." However, their studies mention but do not explore how the Indian Ocean slave trade became a vehicle for Philippine natives to themselves own, work along-side, and form families with colonial slaves sourced from overseas---an experience that resulted in renegotiations of native conceptualizations of slavery.

Using parish registers, petitions, and deeds of sale, as well as an in-depth qualitative analysis of the petitions of individuals describing their own enslavement to court, I address this gap. When the Spaniards arrived with the word "esclavo" in mind, how did they conflate its meaning with the indigenous term "alipin"? How did the presence of Indian Ocean slaves and former slaves purchased under European models of slavery impact the meaning of slavery for Luzon’s inhabitants? I find that, in opposition to static understandings of the equivalence or inequivalence of the colonial and indigenous concepts of dependency taken for granted by Seijas and Scott and unexplored by Stephanie Mawson (2023) (who argues that the colonial state used crippling debt to institutionalize not calling a slave a slave) these ideas only were progressively entangled in early modern indigenous attempts to call an "alipin" and "esclavo," that is: a slave a slave.