2026-06-26 –, Room 208 (Seats 40)
For this conference, I would like to present on my upcoming book, Our Long and Fatiguing Voyage, which details the Woodes Rogers privateering expedition. The voyage presents a key facet of New Spain’s trade with the Philippines and thus neatly fits into the conference’s overall theme. Although the voyage is more famous for circumnavigating the globe and picking up a castaway, their capture of a Spanish Manila ship illustrates how vital the Spanish Philippines were to Spanish commerce.
A key chapter of the book focuses on the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade, which integrated the Philippines and Marianas into New Spain’s economy. The privateers kept a detailed ledger of the galleon’s cargo as it would be sold at auction in Britain once processed. Many of the privateers’ backers were cloth merchants, who sent agents to catalog and categorize every item. Since these agents were often tied to the cloth trade, they could distinguish between different sorts of cloth and create a highly detailed manifest.
Throughout the chapter, I emphasize the characteristics of the galleon officers and crews, as well as the sheer variety of “Oriental goods” that made their way from Manila to Acapulco, thence to Vera Cruz, and finally to Havana and Spain. Furthermore, I detail how the Filipino and Chinese sailors, or lascars, were treated by their Spanish officers as well as by the British privateers who regarded them as second-rate labor and as skilled captives, respectively
Privateering, maritime
A maritime historian, Dr. Ian Abbey has focused his career on piracy and privateering. Dr. Abbey is a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow and has studied American maritime communities from the ancient world until the present day. He has lived and worked throughout the world. That includes teaching English in South Korea, working for Qatar's Texas A&M campus, and serving as an advisor to Prairie View A&M University's Model United Nations.
It is vital to understand daily life in past civilizations and time periods, which is why Dr. Abbey has improved his culinary skills and can cook dishes from the past. It started as a Medieval feast for a Game of Thrones viewing party, but those feasts grew more lavish every season as his historical cooking skills became more refined and diverse. It is not uncommon for his dinner guests or wife to dine on foods from the Medieval Islamic world, Ancient Rome, and the Firefly universe.
He is currently an assistant professor of history at Prairie View A&M and is turning his dissertation on privateers into a book.