Where is the Spanish Empire located? Even though this question might seem simple to answer for an early modernist, The Indies of the Setting Sun by Ricardo Padrón (University of Virginia) shows that it is not. In this intriguing and highly recommendable work, we learn about the contingency of dominant world views, the variety of metageographies, and the relevance of competing map-making concepts for empire building. Also, it becomes evident that the invention of America and the Pacific did not happen overnight but was a slow process that took for over a century. In this sense, the book is a sequel to the author’s last work on the Atlantic, The Spacious Word (2004), but now our gaze is directed to the Pacific Ocean, fitting neatly with other studies, for example by Mariano Ardash Bonialian or Rainer Buschmann.

Covering the period of Spanish explorations and conquests in the Pacific, from roughly 1513 to 1606, Padrón diligently presents Spanish and European spatial conceptions, maps, and a variety of narratives. His main argument is that the Pacific Ocean, after its discovery by Europeans, was not simply perceived by Spaniards as a hostile and dividing body of water – as in most recent world maps – but also as a contained sea that connected different parts of their empire. To counter diverging interpretations from Portugal and from countries north of the Pyrenees, the official Spanish chroniclers and mapmakers applied a series of arguments, which were sometimes very contradictory. They intended to show that the rich Molucca Islands (the “Spice Islands”) as well the whole of Southeast and East Asia, which together formed the “Indies of the West,” lay within the Spanish side of the line of demarcation that was agreed on in the Treatises of Tordesillas and Zaragoza. The book argues that Spain preferred to map its transoceanic empire by displaying the Spanish peninsula, America, and the Indies of the West as a unity – from a mapmaker’s view, all together on the left side of the world map. The Portuguese Empire and its possessions in South Asia, on the other hand, should be clearly separated from them – on the right side of the map.

The most controversial points in these debates included the positioning of the antemeridian, closely related to the breadth of the Pacific, which was again based on the supposed difficulty to cross a huge untamed ocean – as opposed to the paradigm of “smooth sailing” on a small domesticated ocean basin. Another issue was if the American continent was connected to Asia in the North, i.e. the concept of Amerasian continuity vs. American insularity. All of these questions could not satisfactorily be answered in the 16th century but many mapmakers and chroniclers still insinuated solutions, leaving traces of their political aims along the way. Already the usage of the names America and Asia was, for example, a statement, which was in opposition to the concept of a tripartite colonial system with the Indies of the North, the South, and the West (for North and South America and the Spanish claims in Asia). Another way to downplay the importance of the distance between the continents was to recur to the theories of climates, which assessed a region based on its location in the topics or the temperate zones, which determined animals, plants, and people’s temperament, making some regions more suitable to becoming colonies than others.

The charm of Padrón’s narrative resides especially in the beautiful dialogues he creates between the narratives of the chroniclers and the sketches of the mapmakers. In several ways, these two groups compete with and complement each other, as for example Juan Cobo’s map and Juan González de Mendoza’s Historia. The biggest overarching contribution of the book might be that it makes us reconsider our traditional world views and helps us understand the contingency or even arbitrariness of perceptions of our planet.

Similar to Timothy Brook in Vermeer’s Hat (2008, studding paintings), Padrón constructs almost every chapter around one or more central maps or spatial texts (“cartographic literature”) to make his point and illustrate his arguments, applying what he calls “contextualized close reading of period sources.” (pp. 7, 42) The first two of the eight chapters of the book, all of which are in a chronological order, serve as introductions and to establish a geographic baseline. They familiarize the readers with the relevant historiography and the conceptual framework of the European reading of the early 16th-century Pacific Ocean world, above all the different metageographies such as the architecture of continents, theories of climate, or the idea of maritime networks of Iberian empires. Chapter 3 and 4 highlight the changes that came about with the circumnavigation of Magellan and Elcano (1519-1522). While the published account of this arduous voyage by Pigafetta and the disaster of succeeding expeditions contributed to seeing the Pacific as a great divide between the continents (and the different parts of the Spanish Empire), the chroniclers at the court struggled to contain such a perception and displayed, with a variety of means, how it was possible to tame it and smoothly reach the Moluccas via America. The underlying political agenda was to show that these islands were well within the Spanish line of demarcation. Padrón, at any rate, goes a long way to explain that the mapmakers and chroniclers were not necessarily lying about the correct position of this line but rather selecting the one option, from a range of possibilities, that was most advantageous to Spain at that moment.

In chapter 5, the readers enter the world in which sailing across the Pacific in both directions had finally become a reality, and Spain had established its first Asian colony, the Philippines (1565). Padrón focuses here almost exclusively on the work of the first Spanish cosmographer Juan López de Velasco, who synthesized all available Spanish knowledge about the Indies. By that time, the civilizations of the Chinese and the Japanese had entered the European minds with verve (replacing the Moluccas) and, based on the theory of climates and the inferiority of peoples of the tropics, Velasco promoted the expansion of the Spanish Empire in East and Southeast Asia (which had become the “transpacific America”) to free the peoples of their tyrannical governments.

Chapter 6 very nicely depicts the discursive setting in regard to the assessment of China in the Spanish view: Were they similar to Europeans or different, tyrannical or just, militarily strong or easy to conquer? The Sinophobic “hawks” (in Manila) and the Sinophilic “doves” (in Madrid), were arguing for the conquest of or the peaceful approach to China. In both cases, in Spanish eyes, China was located clearly within the Spanish side of the demarcation line and part of their Indies of the West. China was perceived to be within the hodological space of the three Indies, which means that it was subjectively best to reach it from Europe via America. Therefore, the Catholic expansion should obviously be carried out by Spain and not by Portugal. Padron’s critical reading of González de Mendoza’s Historia in this section is eye opening, in particular how selectively he used his sources.

Chapter 7 is dedicated to Japan but really only touches upon the country at the beginning. The real focus is set on the competition between the Jesuits and the mendicant orders in regard to exclusive access to East Asia. The main source here is the Historia of the Franciscan Marcelo de Ribadeneira, which narratively maps Catholic expansion into East Asia after the traumatic Nagasaki martyrdom of 1597. The Jesuit’s presence in East Asia was strongly connected (via the Indian Ocean) to the Portuguese colonies while the Franciscans were based in Spanish Manila (via the Pacific Ocean). Thereby, the missionary rivalry can be seen as an extension of the disputes of demarcation lines and geopolitical units. Padrón shows convincingly that the Spanish drive westward (and the perception of the unity of the three Indies) was adopted by the Franciscans, who enhance it with the ideology of millenarism. Thereby, they specified the Catholic conversion of America and East Asia as ultimate goals of their missionary zeal, establishing the Ganges River as the divide of a global (Portuguese) east and (Spanish) west.

The final chapter ponders upon the last twitches of Spanish chroniclers and their visions of colonial grandeur, in the face of the rising powers of England and the Netherlands. During the union of the Iberian Crowns (1580-1640), Spain gradually had taken over from Portugal most offensive colonial tasks. Therefore, by the first decade of the 17th century, the official chroniclers in Madrid came to the conclusion that Spain had all rights and even the obligation to continue its religious and secular conquests in Asia. However, due to the political circumstances these could not materialize. Even more importantly, because of the dominance of competing geographic narratives, the Spanish vision of a transpacific unity of the tripartite Indies could not be sustained any longer, not even within Spain itself. Instead, the periodic voyages of the Manila Galleon would become dominant in the creation of the Pacific area as a political, economic, and social space.

The book ends with a conclusion and also offers a useful general index. Barely any weakness can be found. Padrón himself alludes to his selectivity of the sources and concedes that other scholars with different language capacities and other foci might contradict his arguments (pp. 6-7). Yet, as the book is based on an impressive body of cartographic literature, this seems rather unlikely at the moment (at least for the cultural and intellectual sphere). On a minor note, some general statements are not adequately corroborated, making it hard to find their source. An unfortunate example is when “Maynila” is inaccurately called a “sultanate” in 1571 (pp. 139, 167). One last concern is the supposed intentionality that the author assumes for some of the analysed chroniclers and mapmakers, including their frustrations (pp. 131-132) and hopes (passim). While it can be understood that these emotions and intentions are introduced for the sake of guiding the reader through the narrative, at times, and in spite of Padrón’s excellent “contextualized close reading,” one cannot be certain if the contemporary author really intended for all of these things. Maybe sometimes Padrón sees too much intentionality in the sources but, on the other hand, these emotional passages contribute to the joy of reading the book and the conversant reader knows how to appreciate them.

To close, The Indies of the Setting Sun is a fascinating book and a milestone for early modern history, in particular, global history, the history of colonial expansions, geography, and mapmaking, and for the general studies in American, Asian, and Pacific history. It will be a very welcome and extremely useful read for students, teachers, and researchers of the respective fields.