Slavery and Religious Conversion in Portugal's Indian Empire, 1500-1700
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Ohio University Press
Publishing:29th Apr '25
£28.99
This title is due to be published on 29th April, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Featuring slave testimonies from the Portuguese Inquisition in India, this book demonstrates how Portugal used slavery to help build a Catholic empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, enslaved Africans and Asians were crucial to expanding the Portuguese Catholic empire. The Crown and Church mandated their conversion, expanding the Christian population and securing anti-Muslim allies. Inquisition records from Goa highlight the complex dynamics of conversion, slavery, and imperial ambitions.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, enslaved Africans and Asians were part of the larger Portuguese project of building and maintaining a Catholic empire in the Indian Ocean. Both the Church and the Crown influenced the owner-slave relationship across households, the most basic organizational unit of power over the populace. Responsible for their enslaved dependents’ conversion to Catholicism, slaveholders became religious stewards whose spiritual duties toward their slaves helped expand the Christian population. This converted population was part of the imperial security apparatus, which conceptualized enslaved Catholics as loyal allies against neighboring Muslim states. They became members of the broader colonial community in which Catholicism also conveyed rights, enabled agency, and provoked household struggles between owners and slaves. Thus, the making of a Catholic empire was a contested process tied to the complex relationships between enslaved individuals, their enslavers, and the Church.
The Portuguese Inquisition was a hybrid ecclesiastical and state institution, and its records detail the Crown’s commitment to the creation of a worldwide Catholic empire. Accordingly, inquisitorial encounters brought conversion, slavery, and empire into one field of vision. The Portuguese Inquisition had only one overseas tribunal, located in Goa, India. While most trial records of the Goa Tribunal were destroyed, author Stephanie Hassell has utilized extant sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cases featuring enslaved defendants and witnesses. Her use of thousands of case summaries provides a broader inquisitorial context by showing how prosecutorial trends reflected the anxieties of the Portuguese imperial state. Parish records, ecclesiastical council records, and municipal council records likewise emphasize the significance of religious conversion.
A remarkable new consideration of the fundamental, dynamic relationship between slave labor procurement and the soul-binding religious conversion of those enslaved individuals. . . . This is very fertile ground, and Stephanie Hassell has made excellent use of surviving archival material to produce a highly innovative, incisively argued volume.
-- Timothy D. Walker, author of Doctors, Folk Medicine and the Inquisition: The Repression of Magical Healing in Portugal during the EnlightenmentMaking use of a rich corpus of materials, Stephanie Hassell deftly explores the interpenetrating worlds of religious conversion, slavery, and the firmament of early modern empire in Portuguese India. The book opens up new questions about the dynamics of slavery, specifically through the lens of conversion and relations within the sphere of the household. There are fascinating interventions in its pages into how we understand slave engagement with the Goan Inquisition and their use of its mechanisms in a variety of ways to stake a claim to imperial and communal belonging while navigating the territorial boundedness of religious identity as they established space for themselves in a prescriptive but nonetheless fluid environment of multiple mobilities.
-- Pedro Machado, author of Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c.1750–ISBN: 9780821425947
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
244 pages