Stephanie Mawson is a historian of maritime Southeast Asia and its global connections across Pacific and Indian Ocean worlds in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her research focuses on questions of Indigenous agency, resistance, and sovereignty in the face of European imperial expansion.

Her first book, Incomplete Conquests: The Limits of Spanish Empire in the Seventeenth-Century Philippines (Cornell, 2023), uncovers the limitations of Spanish empire in the Philippines, unearthing histories of resistance, flight, evasion, conflict, and warfare from across the breadth of the Philippine archipelago during the seventeenth century. The Spanish colonization of the Philippines that began in 1565 has long been seen as heralding a new era of globalization, drawing together a multiethnic world of merchants, soldiers, sailors, and missionaries. Colonists sent reports back to Madrid boasting of the extraordinary number of souls converted to Christianity and the number of people paying tribute to the Spanish Crown. Such claims constructed an imagined imperial sovereignty and were not accompanied by effective consolidation of colonial control in many of the regions where conversion and tribute collection were imposed. Incomplete Conquests foregrounds the stories of indigenous, Chinese, and Moro communities and their responses to colonial agents, weaving together stories that take into account the rich cultural and environmental diversity of this island world.

Prior to joining ICS, Stephanie was a research fellow at St. John’s College Cambridge (2018-2022). She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2019, where she was supported by a Gates Cambridge Scholarship and the Royal Historical Society’s Marshall Fellowship. Originally from Australia, she completed her undergraduate and masters degrees from the University of Sydney. Her research has been published in leading academic journals including the American Historical Review (forthcoming), Past & Present, The Historical Journal, Ethnohistory, and The Journal of Pacific History. She is the recipient of a number of prizes, including the Royal Historical Society’s Alexander Prize, the Dr. Robert F. Heizer Award, and The Jan Lucassen Award.

As a researcher at ICS, Stephanie’s focus will expand geographically to encompass a wider Southeast Asian world, incorporating the modern-day geographies of eastern Indonesia, the southern Philippines, Papua New Guinea, and Northern Australia. Her research investigates the history of early globalisation centred on a region that was central to the story of emerging colonialism and global trade: the “Spice Island” archipelago (Maluku, modern-day Indonesia). This region is famous as the stage on which competing European powers fought for control of the lucrative spice trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and launched expeditions to chart the coast of the unknown Terra Australis. Yet, this region was also the site of powerful Indigenous tributary networks, providing examples of spaces where European hegemony was limited, contested, and subordinate to existing Asian networks of trade and cultural and political power.

List of selected publications:

Stephanie Joy Mawson, Incomplete Conquests: The Limits of Spanish Empire in the Seventeenth-Century Philippines, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023)

Stephanie Mawson, ‘Escaping Empire: Philippine Mountains and Indigenous Histories of Resistance,’ American Historical Review, (forthcoming)

Stephanie Mawson, ‘Folk Magic in the Philippines, 1611-1639,’ Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, (forthcoming)

Stephanie Mawson, ‘Convicts or Conquistadores?: Spanish Soldiers in the Seventeenth-Century Pacific,’ Past & Present, Vol. 232, No. 1 (2016), pp. 87-125

Stephanie Mawson, ‘Philippine Indios in the Service of Empire: Indigenous Soldiers and Contingent Loyalty, 1600-1700,’ Ethnohistory, Vol. 63, No. 2 (2016), pp. 381-413