This volume examines the impacts of Pacific trade on three port cities-Zhangzhou in China, Manila in the Philippines, and Mexico City in New Spain-during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, exploring how these urban centers generate critical spaces in which competition, cooperation, and connections among imperial actors crystallize into spatial forms and policies.

It argues that port cities function as intermediary spaces-sites wherein central state authority intersects with local engagement in global trade. Drawing on miscellanies, travelogues, gazetteers, and government correspondence, the book uncovers how people, goods, and ideas circulate through urban environments. While these cities enable convergence in everyday life, they also reveal tensions and contradictions at the imperial level. The spatial organization of these cities fosters social and cultural dynamics that often exceed the intentions of imperial planners, demonstrating that early modern globalization is neither coherent nor uniform but unfolds through multiple and sometimes competing regional networks.

Contributing to the scholarly discussion of early modern trade from a Pacific perspective, this book is essential reading for scholars and students of early modern history, Pacific studies, urban history, and global trade networks.

Xiaolin Duan is Professor of History at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on medieval and early modern China and trans-Pacific exchange. She is the author of The Rise of West Lake: A Cultural Landmark in the Song Dynasty (2020) and An Object of Seduction: Chinese Silk in the Early Modern Trans-Pacific Trade (2022). Her recent publications include studies of the 17th-century crisis, Zhangzhou migrants in Manila, local food and tea culture, and late-Ming Chinese visual culture.