The arrival of American plants in the Philippines: ecological colonialism in the sixteenth-to-eighteenth centuries

Abstract

This paper discusses the phenomenon of the introduction of American plants in the Philippines between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, during the time of transpacific trade between the New Spain and this Asian archipelago through the Manila Galleon. Two topics excel in this paper: first, that transplanting plants from America to Asia was due more to individual motivations to a deliberate policy of the Spanish Crown, and secondly, the most important plants of an American origin in Philippines are analyzed.