Alliances, Mestiçagem, and Slavery: Interethnic Relations in the Lusophone Atlantic and Beyond

For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Portuguese and Brazilian historiography sustained a benevolent and often apologetic view of the origins and dissemination of official policies and informal practices that actively promoted interethnic unions, either by projecting an image of exceptional “racial tolerance” or by arguing that the acute shortage of Portuguese women in the overseas possessions not only gave rise to a “natural” mestiço community but also moved the crown to reward soldiers and sailors who were willing to marry local elite women. Beginning in the 1970s, however, scholars began to shift their attention to the African, South Asian, and Amerindian societies directly engaged in relations with the Portuguese, often demonstrating that intercultural unions and the creation of mestiço communities also had much to do with indigenous strategies of alliance and with local practices involving the incorporation of outsiders. Nevertheless, these studies also show that the Portuguese who “went native” and their mestiço offspring also played a crucial role in establishing slave trade outlets in Africa and South America, and in articulating military or commercial activities that directly benefited formal Portuguese interests. This paper discusses recent approaches to early interethnic unions on both sides of the Atlantic and the mestiço communities they generated, emphasizing a fundamental but often neglected aspect: the crucial distinction between male and female mestiços and their respective roles in the emergence of new societies – and new kinds of society – in the Atlantic world.