Stephanie Mawson
Lecturer in Early Modern History

Profile

Biography

BA (Sydney)
MPhil (Sydney)

PhD (Cambridge)

Stephanie Mawson is a Lecturer in Early Modern History. Before joining York in 2024, she held early career fellowships at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociais in Lisbon and St. John's College in Cambridge. 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. Stephanie specialises in the history of early modern Southeast Asia, with a focus on the contested nature of colonisation in the Philippine and Indonesian archipelagos.

Research

Overview

Stephanie's research centres on the world of island 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 University Press, 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. It foregrounds the experiences of indigenous and other non-European communities and their responses to colonial agents, weaving together stories that take into account the rich cultural and environmental diversity of this island world. By shifting focus from the aims of empire towards its limitations, the book interacts with key debates over the nature of early modern empires, state formation, sovereignty, and the agency of Indigenous and non-European communities.

Stephanie's new research project expands 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.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Arguments & Analysis
• Historical Thinking
• Confronting Empire in the Early Modern Asia-Pacific
• The Margins of Empire: Frontiers and Borderlands in the Americas and Southeast Asia, 1550-1800

Publications

Full publications list

Books

Incomplete Conquests: The Limits of Spanish Empire in the Seventeenth-Century Philippines, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, July 2023.

Published articles and book chapters

‘Escaping Empire: Philippine Mountains and Indigenous Histories of Resistance,’ American Historical Review, Vol. 128, No. 3 (2023), 1211-1243. 

‘Folk Magic in the Philippines, 1611-1639,’ Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 54, No. 2 (2023), 220-244.

‘Slavery and the Contestation of Empire in the Seventeenth-Century Philippines,’ in Richard Allen (ed.), Slavery and Bonded Labor in Asia, 1250-1900, (Amsterdam: Brill, 2022), 256-283.

‘The Deep Past of Precolonial Australia,’ The Historical Journal, Vol. 64, No. 5 (2021), 1477-1499

(with Sebestian Kroupa and Dorit Brixius), ‘Science and Islands in Indo-Pacific Worlds,’ British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 51, Special Issue 4 (Science and Islands in Indo-Pacific Worlds), (2018), 541-558.

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

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

‘Rebellion and Mutiny in the Mariana Islands, 1680-1690,’ Journal of Pacific History, Vol. 50, No. 2 (2015), 128-148.

‘Unruly Plebeians and the Forzado System: Convict Transportation between New Spain and the Philippines during the Seventeenth Century,’ Revista de Indias, Vol. 73, No. 259 (2013), 693-730. 

‘The “Workingman’s Paradise”, White Supremacy and Utopianism: The New Australia Movement and Working Class Racism,’ Labour History, No. 101 (2011), 91-104.