The year is 1588. Agustin de Legazpi, a Tagalog chieftain from Tondo, a suburb of Manila, is planning to overthrow Spain's Philippine colony, a colony that is only about 20 years old. His covert allies include dozens of other chieftains, locally known as datus , a band of Japanese merchants, and coalition of Muslim rulers from the nearby islands of Borneo and Jolo. If he succeeds, Spanish ships will stop coming to Southeast Asia with American silver, and the largest economy in the world, China's economy, will be cut off from a vital source of currency. Chinese economic growth will stagnate and poverty will increase. 1 Spanish America will similarly never develop its Asian silk industry, an industry that will otherwise adorn its churches, decorate its colonial estates, dress its priests, clothe its governors, and employ thousands of its artisans. Then, of course, there is also the porcelain and ivory trade that will likewise never set Latin American tables with fine china or fill its churches with made-in-China images of Jesus and Mary. 2 Agustin's plot, in short, comes at a pivotal moment the history of Manila and in the history of the world. Will the port city return to what it had been before the Spaniards arrived? Or will it grow into a colonial capital and major focal point of world trade? Will the final link in truly global trade, the one connecting Asia and the Americas, continue to annually ship 2–4 million pesos of silver and Chinese goods across the Pacific? 3 Or will the 250 year history of the Manila galleons be cut off in its infancy? As these questions suggest, the expansion of Spain's empire into Manila is fundamentally transforming Agustin's city, and Manila is in turn beginning to play a prominent role in a larger transformation of the world. 4 Transformation, however, does not mean starting from scratch. Agustin's plan to overthrow the Spanish colony, in fact, shows the continued presence of two vital precolonial layers of globalization. He is reaching out to a group of East Asian merchants, the Japanese, and to various Muslim rulers, those on Borneo and Jolo. The Japanese merchants are a legacy of an earlier China-centered network of world trade, and the Muslim rulers are similarly manifestations of Islam's medieval global expansion. These two previous layers of globalization, China and Islam, had converged on the archipelago before Spain's arrival, and they have as much to do with making Manila into a global port-city as does the arrival of the Europeans. The last piece of the puzzle, in other words, is not always the most important. Remove any one of these three networks—China, Islam, or Spain—and Manila would not become a global port city, and by extension the Philippines would likely never form into a unified political community. Taki