Book Review: Stephanie Joy Mawson. Incomplete Conquests: The Limits of Spanish Empire in the Seventeenth-Century Philippines. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023, 294 pp. ISBN: 978-1-501-77027-2

The vibrance of the historical research in the last decades concerning maritime Asia ca.1500-1800 makes one envisage the early modern Philippines from the sea.In reality the historiographical debates often revolve around Manila as a nodal point of transoceanic and regional axes of circulation.First and foremost, we think of commodities, port cities, commercial networks and trading communities either in the Transpacific context or in a spatial nexus that comprises insular Southeast Asia, the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan.Stephanie Mawson somehow recenters our gaze and focuses instead on the Philippines as "territory," or as a geopolitical space that begs to be studied per se.Her work is about mainland Luzon and the Southern archipelago under Spanish rule: soldiers, officials and priests, rather than sailors, merchants and go-betweens, populate Incomplete Conquests.Still, the book's real protagonists are those who lived in the Philippines prior to the foundation of Manila in 1571 and continued to live thereafter.