1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [227]
That is a comparatively simple distinction. Consider the Parián, the big Chinese ghetto in Manila that played an important role in the silver trade. Spanish records routinely refer to its inhabitants as chinos and sangleys. Using the latter is discourteous, to say the least—sangley is a pejorative, analogous in weight, perhaps, to “kraut” or “frog” for German and French people. Chino means “Chinese person.” It isn’t particularly pejorative, but it also isn’t particularly accurate: more than a few Parián residents were not from China. As used in Manila, the term really meant something like “people from Asia who are not from the Philippines.” (Because the Spaniards often distinguished the Japanese from other Asian peoples, it may be more accurate to say that it meant something akin to “people from Asia who are not from the Philippines or Japan.”) Unsurprisingly, Parián residents didn’t think of themselves in this way. Most were from Fujian, and Fujianese people typically described themselves as Hakka or Min—“Chinese,” in their view, applied mainly to the Han, the dominant ethnic group.
Matters get more complex still when one considers that Spaniards in different places used chino to mean different things. In Mexico, the rulers of New Spain viewed anyone with “Asiatic” features as a chino, including people from the Philippines. Thus a Spanish word used to distinguish Filipinos from other Asians in one place was used to describe them in another. Worse still, the word chino in Spanish America soon lost its connection with China, and even Asia. Peculiarly, some of the mixed descendants of Indians came to be known as chinos. (A popular folk figure in the Mexican city of Puebla is the china poblana, the Chinese Pueblan woman, a racy, flirtatious sort who wears a white blouse, a colorfully patterned skirt, and a shawl. Visitors to Puebla are told that the style was originated by Catarina de San Juan, the pious, vision-filled Mughal slave whom I described in Chapter 8; the patterned skirt, one is solemnly assured, was inspired by her sari. But Muslim women like Catarina didn’t wear saris; purdah was becoming popular, and they wore concealing garments. In addition, there is ample testimony that in Puebla Catarina wore black and was anything but flirtatious. The dress style, researchers say, is simply an adaptation of Indian dress.)
Similar concerns apply to “European.” The idea of Europe as a geographic entity has existed for a long time. The idea that this entity was populated by people with commonalities enough to be described as a group has not. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first English use of the word to mean “a resident of Europe” occurred only in 1639. For most of the time surveyed in this book, people from the eastern Atlantic shore referred to themselves by nationality: English, French, Dutch, and so on. The people from the Iberian Peninsula who play such a large role in this book often identified themselves by region—Extremaduran, Basque, Castilian, and so on. If all these diverse people had recourse to a collective noun, it was “Christian,” because Europe was part of Christendom. (Early in the writing of this book, I tried using “Christian” in that sense. I gave a few pages to a friend, who asked why I was dragging religion into a story about trade—was I writing some kind of pro- or anti-Christian tract?)
The peoples of Africa, America, and Asia quickly learned that Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch, and English were different. Nevertheless, they also regarded them as members of a single group—people who showed up from another continent, wanting to take over. In China, Europeans were often grouped together, disparagingly, as gweilo or laowai; the terms retain some sting for those to whom they are applied.
Given these spiraling complexities, I