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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 August 2009
Over recent years some Portuguese politicians and historians have been very concerned to argue, with undoubted sincerity, as Armando Cortesão has argued, that:
‘The Portuguese never had any preconceived notions of race or colour. They always dealt and still do deal with Christian brotherhood towards all peoples, whether they are white, black, khaki or yellow’. and ‘they have always treated indigenes with humanity and, when civilized, as equals amongst equals,’
The expression of this viewpoint has taken a variety of forms, often expressed quite categorically and without any qualification whatsoever, and has been supported by official policy and, academically in particular, by the distinguished Brazilian socio-historian Gilberto Freyre. More recently it has been attacked by Professor Charles Boxer in his Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415–1825 (Clarendon, 1963), where the author has presented a substantial body of entirely reliable historical evidence of actual discrimination against indigenes and mestiços within the Portuguese Empire and Provinces, and has argued that whilst this viewpoint is sincerely held it is substantially incorrect in its extreme and bald form.
1. Cortesão, A., Realidates e desvarios Africanos. Discurso proferido na Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa em 9 de junho de 1962, Lisboa, pp. 30–1.Google Scholar
2. idem p. 23.
3. The attribution of the collapse of the Portuguese Empire in the East to these reasons is disputed by this writer. Certainly there was corruption, there was greed and there were fanatical excesses: the Portuguese were, after all, only typically human, but these were not the main causes of collapse. From its inception the Portuguese Asian Empire contained the seeds of its own destruction: overextended lines of communication, inadequate manpower, inadequate shipping, administrative inefficiency, inadequate financial resources, necessary reliance on fortresses and factories with little or no control of strategic hinterland, and dependence upon Asian neighbours for foodstuffs. When these factors were combined with local Asian hostility by powers such as Acheh, Java and the dispossessed Malacca Sultanate, and with the ultimate and decisive arrival of the Dutch, with considerably greater resources and determined to oust the Portuguese, the astonishing thing to be appreciated is not that they were largely dispossessed of their Eastern Empire but that they succeeded in clinging tenaciously to it for so long.
4. Saldanha, C. F., A Short History of Goa, Goa, 1957, pp. 66–7.Google Scholar
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10. His Declaraçam de Malacca e India Meridional com O Cathay, Goa, 1613Google Scholar; Informação da Aurea Chersoneso, ou Peninsula, e das Ilhas Auriferas, Carbunculas, c Aromaticas, 1597–1600; Tratado Ophirico, 1616Google Scholar; Historia dos serviços com martirio de Luis Monteìro Coutinho, 1613/5.Google Scholar
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15. As Boxer has remarked (Four Centuries of Portuguese Expansion, 1415–1825, Johannesberg, 1963, pp. 43–4)Google Scholar: ‘The policy of the Portuguese Crown to the colour-bar was not always clear and consistent, but on the whole the Portuguese kings took the line that religion and not colour should be the criterion for full Portuguese citizenship, and that all Asian converts to Christianity should be treated as the equals of their Portuguese co-religionists’. See Padre Miguel de Purificação. O.F.M., Relação Defensiva dos filhos da India Oriental, e da provincia do apostolo S. Thomé dos frades menores da regular observencia da mesma India, Barcelona, 1640, and de Melo, , The Recruitment and Formation of the Native Clergy in India, 16th–19th Century, Lisbon, 1955Google Scholar. See also Boxer, , Race Relations, pp. 62–75.Google Scholar
16. See Document 1 appended.
17. See Document 2 appended.
18. Cartas de Afonso de Albuquerque, I, p. 27.Google Scholar
19. idem, p. 56–7.
20. Azurara, , Chronica de Guiné, pp. 87–8.Google Scholar
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22. Cartas de Afonso de Albuquerque, I, 351–2.Google Scholar
23. Ibid.
24. da Cunha Rivara, J. H., Archivo Portuguez Oriental, Vol. V, Nova Goa, 1857, pp. 12–16.Google Scholar
25. See Saldanha, , A Short History of Goa.Google Scholar
26. For these documents in the original see de Andrade, António Alberto, Many Races — One Nation, Lisbon, 1961.Google Scholar
