In the last few years, early modern historians have looked at Spanish borderlands as lived places where Indigenous people were not the backstage crew but rather the subjects of the play. This book analyzes Indigenous and colonial mobilities in the borderlands of the Spanish colonial Philippines. Instead of using the conventional categories of borders and states, Mark Dizon proposes a rethinking of colonial relations in terms of how people moved about. The so-called mobility turn brings cross-cultural interactions between Spanish colonizers and Indigenous communities to the foreground. Unlike conventional imperial history, which assumes the idea of a state territorially expanding and conquering the periphery in a one-dimensional, unilinear manner, Dizon argues that colonial encounters between Indigenous islanders and Spanish officials are better understood as part of a series of contacts that happened in multiple places across time. As a result, reciprocal mobilities and frictions question state-centric tales of conquest, thereby...

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