AHA Session 16
Conference on Latin American History 2
Thursday, January 4, 2024: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Continental Ballroom 3 (Hilton Union Square, Ballroom)
Chair:
Ian W. Olivo Read, Soka University of America
Session Abstract
Notarial, judicial, and parish records from the early modern Portuguese Atlantic World often reveal families formed by marriages between spouses of different geographical origins and associated to distinct socio-racial categories. These marriages challenge expectations of colonial societies neatly organized along racial lines. And yet, the families and households they created, and the transmission of property they facilitated were an intrinsic part of the Portuguese Atlantic Empire. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth century, mixed families and households helped to support various economic activities central to Portuguese imperial pursuits. They produced new generations of colonial subjects for the Portuguese crown. And they shaped various dynamics of gender and race, from the experiences of mothers and the obligations of spouses to the enslavement and ownership of other people. Ultimately, they helped to ensure the viability, expansion, and longevity of a Portuguese imperial presence in parts of Africa and the Americas. In The Portuguese Empire, 1415-1808: A World on the Move, A.J.R. Russell-Wood argues that the establishment and workings of Portugal’s early modern empire were the product of Portuguese male migration and settlement in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. He adds, however, that this history owes much to the inter and intracontinental movement of people, both voluntary and coerced, that the Portuguese promoted. African and American indigenous and descendant peoples, whether in their native lands or abroad were encouraged or forced to embrace Portuguese laws and practices when conducting their everyday and intimate affairs. In this manner, they helped to promote a social and cultural coherence that supported Portugal’s imperial aspirations and claims and were crucial to explaining emerging social and power dynamics within the Portuguese, and indeed broader, Atlantic World.
Historians agree that the everyday actions of white, European born or descendant men sustained the imperial dynamics and colonial realities of the early modern Atlantic World. But there is less consensus regarding the historical centrality of the life choices and trajectories of non-white African and American indigenous and descendant women and men to those same processes. The papers in the panel advance Russell-Wood’s insight into the human and intimate foundations of empire. They explore marriage patterns, the formation of families and households, and everyday social and economic exchanges between Portuguese, African, and American peoples in West and Central Africa (Santos and Oliveira, respectively), and northern and south-central Brazil (Pelegrino and Dantas, respectively). Through various case studies recovered from local and regional archives, the panelists discuss the everyday and intimate realities of non-white women and men which challenged, shaped, and reproduced gender and racial dynamics that characterized power relationship within the Atlantic World.
