The historians joining this panel range across the geographic, racial, economic, political, religious, and legal landscapes of the early modern Lusophone Atlantic world to examine methods and modalities used to forge social hierarchies that privileged some while excluding others. Building on the efforts of a new generation of Lusophone scholars, who with increasing insistence are working to dismantle conceptual relics, their emphasis on inclusion and exclusion highlights a generalized coerciveness in Portuguese relations with Amerindians, Africans, and their multiracial descendants. These panelists insist, moreover, on Portuguese America’s significance as an early modern crucible of transatlantic contestation predicated on hardening conceptions of the incommensurability of peoples of different origin, color, creed, and/or caste. These divisions deepened despite coeval discourses and praxes of moderation and coexistence, for which the panelists also account. In his paper “At the Frontlines of Early Racial Capitalism: The Atlantic Rise of Afonso de Torres, 1520s-1550s,” Gabriel de Avilez Rocha considers the significance of a Luso-Castilian merchant and trafficker of enslaved Africans, who forged early links between Iberia, Atlantic Africa, the Caribbean, and Brazil. His social ascent, Rocha argues, helped convince contemporaries that slaving and other colonial enterprises could yield substantial prestige and profits, that investment risk could be minimized, and that legal impediments could be overcome, contributing to the consolidation of transatlantic racial capitalism. Hal Langfur’s paper, “Pedagogies of Racial Violence in Colonial Brazil, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” examines the history of violence targeting enslaved peoples of Indigenous and African descent as a transatlantic form of what he calls “coercive pedagogy.” The primary sources he has amassed detail specific practices refined by authorities to teach colonists about the parameters governing what the Portuguese crown and the church deemed the permissible use of force to coerce compliance, clarifying how colonizers learned to sanction violence organized along what we now construe as racial lines during a time before race was commonly invoked as a social construct. Examining landed property as another nexus of social exclusion and inclusion in her paper “Local Specificities in the Sesmaria System in Colonial Brazil: Race, Gender, Family, and Property (18th century),” Carmen Alveal compares land grants (sesmarias) distributed by the Portuguese crown across several regions, including some properties conceded to free Blacks and women. Her study reveals an intense localism that characterized this foundational land tenure regime, underlining how specific contexts and individual circumstances mediated access to large tracts of landed property and the financial and familial security that accompanied them. The panel discussant, Kirsten Schultz, is an established authority on the political, social, and cultural history of the Lusophone Atlantic world. Together these panelists comprise a diverse cohort, including senior and junior scholars from the US and Brazilian academies, pursuing varied historical approaches and methodologies, and representing both public and private universities. The panel is designed to attract a broad audience interested in early modern Europe, colonial Latin America and the Caribbean, the Atlantic world, and the histories of Indigenous peoples, the African diaspora, trade, slavery, racial formation, violence, property, and the law.