The ten essays in this collected volume represent papers presented at a conference convened at Princeton University. The editor, a specialist on the history of Portuguese Jesuits, invokes an editorial principle that departs from the traditional manner of presenting Portuguese colonial history. Instead of grouping his essays by geography, between the Atlantic and the Asian worlds, he chooses to “consider the Portuguese empire as a unit with a global scale, an entity whose cities can (and should) be considered in parallel, rather than serial, terms” (p. 11). He therefore groups the ten essays in three thematic parts, with three each under “Religion and Empire” and “Cities and Commerce”, and four under “Politics of Empire”. This editorial approach, despite some merits, has obvious disadvantages, notably in the difficulty of neatly segregating the religious, the economic, and the political, as Brockey himself readily acknowledges. Indeed, there is no easy way of grouping these diverse essays, very different in methodological approach and scope of coverage, as one might expect from a conference volume. A chronological approach would work with some, but several essays in the collection, notably Malyn Newitt's on Mozambique Island, address the entire span of the early modern era, while others have a narrower temporal focus. Grouping the essays by region would also not have worked well in this case: for one, Tavim's survey of Jewish communities ranges broadly from the metropolitan country to Morocco and India; for another, there is a notable lacuna, namely the absence of papers on the crucial Portuguese Asian stronghold of Malacca, wrested by the Portuguese with help from Hindu and Chinese merchants from the Muslim Sultan Mahmud Shah in 1511 and lost to the Protestant Dutch in 1641. Aware of this gap, Brockey opens his Introduction with an anecdote on Malacca from the early 1650s before proceeding to explain his editorial approach and summarize the contributions.
In the first essay, José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim offers an interesting comparison between the Jewish communities of Morocco and the Éstado da Índia in the sixteenth century. The greater tolerance enjoyed by the former was due to the indispensable diplomatic role played by Moroccan Jews as intermediaries between Christians and Muslims, Portuguese and Arabs. In India, Jews (and Jewish converts) were not the only minority useful to the Portuguese elites, as was the case in Morocco, hence the greater severity toward the conversos, to wit the establishment of the Inquisition in Goa in 1560. A contribution with original insights, Tavim's essay fails however to make a strict distinction between Lusophone Jews and Jewish converts, the conversos. The full rigor of Christian prejudice and legal repression was directed against the latter, which in part explains the different cases in Morocco and India. It should also be noted that conversos comprised the most significant group of suspects at the Bahia Inquisition, though the sixteenth-century Brazilian Inquisition operated only haphazardly, compared to the rigor of its Goan counterpart. The second essay by Charlotte de Castelnau-L'Estoile treats three incidents from early seventeenth-century Salvador: the 1610 anti-Jesuit riot, the 1614 procession of reconciliation, and the 1622 procession in honor of the canonization of Ignatius, founder of the order. Using discursive analysis, she offers a fine case study of urban history, symbolic representation, and the question of slavery in Bahia. The third essay by J. S. A. Elisonas on Nagasaki refutes the claim by Portuguese historians of Japan that this port city in Kyushu was a Portuguese creation. Citing ample Japanese sources, Elisonas presents, in great detail (at thirty-nine pages this is by far the longest contribution) the history of Nagasaki before the arrival of the Portuguese, life and institution in the city during “the Christian century”, and the eventual demise of Christianity. His argument that Nagasaki was a “Jesuit city” more than a Portuguese colonial city serves as a sound reminder not to confuse the Jesuit Mission with Portuguese commerce, nor to flatten out indigenous local histories by writing over them the script of Portuguese colonialism.
In Part II, “Cities and Commerce”, Isabel dos Guimarães Sá and Glenn Ames give us contrasting pictures of Macao and towns in the “Province of the North”, Diu, Damian, Baçaim, and Chaul. While Sá focuses on a quintessential Portuguese institution, the Misericórdia, Ames offers a broad survey of the four Portuguese strongholds in Gujarat. The two essays, sharply different in focus, present, in fact, complementary views. Whereas the documents of the Macao Misericórdia reflect the exclusivity of Portuguese identity transplanted to Asia, its charity largely denied to Chinese Christian converts, the survival of Portuguese rule in Gujarati cities testified to its complete dependence on Gujarati merchants, a fact that would also be reflected if one were to examine Portuguese Macao from an economic angle. The point here is that by using very different frames and by studying divergent historical sources, one could come up with vastly different interpretations of the Portuguese colonial experience. The problem of perspective and comprehensiveness is not present in Newitt's essay on the rise and decline of Mozambique Island. He offers an exemplary account of Mozambique's history, tracing its rise as the key point in the route between Lisbon and Goa, its importance in the slave, gold, and ivory trade, while describing, in a succinct manner, the topography, local story, and the larger history of this failed colonial settlement.
Part III, “Politics of Empire” may be more appropriately renamed “the discourse of empire”. The four essays offer little in terms of traditional political history; three are readings of eighteenth-century political and academic discourses and the fourth analyzes processions as symbolic texts of power. As such, they very much reflect recent trends in cultural history and represent a new approach in the study of Portuguese colonialism.
Several cases of dispute over precedence and decorum in processions allow Stuart Schwartz to analyze power conflicts in seventeenth-century Salvador. He lays out lucidly the pretenses of ecclesiastical dignity, the authoritarian claims by the Câmara, dominated by the plantation elite, the political demands by the povo, politically empowered Lusophone householders, the eruption of African-Brazilian “disorder” in ordered processions, and the pervasive anxiety of slave rebellion. Based on the reading of a single document, a proposal to reform Goa in 1728, Diogo Ramada Curto brilliantly dissects this never-enacted reform in order to demonstrate the violence, domination, and control that suffused the text, and to argue against scholars who presented an idealized picture of social and ethnic integration in the capital of the Portuguese Éstado da Índia. The last two essays, by Kirsten Schultz on representations of empire and city in early eighteenth-century Brazil and Catarina Madeira Santos on Luanda in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, echo a similar theme: the emergence and articulation of distinct Lusophone ultramarine identities and their dialectic with the rhetoric of Portuguese imperialism. In the Brazilian case, this was predicated upon the discovery of gold during the reign of João V, which propelled Brazil to the first rank among Portugual's shrunken empire and, ultimately, to eclipse even the mother country during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. The rise of Brazilian academies, and their discourses of imperial destiny and Brazilian identity, form the subject of Kirsten's analysis, a process that foreshadowed the emergence of Angolan identity under Pombal in the second half of the eighteenth century. Santos traces the formation of a white-mestiço Angolan elite in the wake of enlightened reforms: the military engineer, trained in a new Luanda academy, emerged as a new figure of a rational and reformed empire, replacing the Capitão-Mór, a fidalgo of the ancient regime. With its back to the African hinterland and its face toward the Atlantic and Brazil, Luanda would experience a new wind in its fortune; while the sun had already set on the Portuguese empire in Asia, “sol oriens in occiduo”, the sun rises in the West, to use the eloquent title of Schultz's essay.
Even though the editor has forsaken the geographic approach, this collection is nonetheless well balanced: Brazil is represented by three essays, India by two, East Asia by two, and Africa by two. Chronologically, there is only one essay on the sixteenth century, and a thematically marginal one at that (Jewish communities), while one essay deals with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, three essays focus on the seventeenth century, and four on the eighteenth, with only one tracing the development of Mozambique over the entire duration of early modern Portuguese colonialism. Specialists in Portuguese history, Asian history, and on the history of European expansion will welcome this collection of essays, which offer in places summaries of the contributors' published scholarship, in places original research. However, readers unfamiliar with Portuguese history will have difficulty in using this work. It is best if they ignore the present organization of the book and read either geographically or chronologically. Still, it may be hard to get an overall picture. A timeline would have helped, as would maps, although the volume does reproduce many fine plates and old city plans. Some of the implicit connections between essays could have been brought out explicitly in the Introduction: the contrast between the Atlantic and Indian Ocean, Brazil and India, the different perspectives from using exclusively Portuguese language sources and of a multilingual, multi-perspectival approach, the question of race (ethnicity in the current preference) and gender (particularly since the so-called Portuguese in Asia were born of non-European mothers) are all questions that call for further study and reflection. It is therefore a tribute to this volume that it makes a first step in a field that has still not received sufficient attention in historical scholarship. One can only hope to see more endeavors of its kind in the future.
