Women in the Portuguese Colonial Empire: The Theatre of Shadows compiles an extensive collection of essays on the status of women throughout the vast Portuguese colonial space, from Brazil to the Far East, crossing Europe, Africa and India, between the 16th and the 20th century. Absent or mystified, silenced or victimized, women in the History of Portugal and its colonial venture are the living example of the part historiographical discourse, ideology and popular memory have played in the construction of identities, their practices and representations. The production and critical consumption of History have long revealed countless gaps and silences within its own discourse. This book questions the reason for such gaps and silences and wonders about the real role of all those who do not or have never had access to power and to the perpetuating word, those whose voices have been systematically erased from sources and documents because of past or present attending interests. Women in the Portuguese Colonial Empire: The Theatre of Shadows congregates a wide assortment of disciplines so as to provide multiple independent viewpoints, sources and methodologies. By bringing authors from around the world together, this work ensures that the various cultures and memories that are part of the global saga, as well as the various versions of the history of the Portuguese colonial empire, may be heard.

Three lectures given at the University of Virginia in November, 1962.

In 2004, a conference was held at King’s College London to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Charles Boxer. The theme of the conference was the development of the culturally mixed ‘Portuguese’ societies in Asia, Africa and America, which reflected Boxer’s own interest in the social history of Portugal’s overseas empire. Although the conference papers were published by Bristol University, this volume is long out of print and the outstanding quality of many of the contributions has made it necessary for this collection to be republished. Portuguese overseas expansion over a period of five centuries led to the formation of many mixed or creole communities which drew culturally not only on Portugal, but also on indigenous societies. This cross-cultural interaction gave rise to a creole ‘Portuguese’ identity that in many cases outlasted the formal empire itself. Reflecting upon the main tenets of Boxer’s work, this collection provides a broad geographical perspective upon areas of Portuguese presence in Guinea, Cape Verde, Angola, São Tomé, Brazil and Goa. The chapters cover a wide range of social strata, including plantation slave and maroon communities, private settler-traders and pirates, indigenous trade-diasporas, and Luso-African, Luso-Brazilian and Afro-Brazilian groups, as well as the formation of Creole elites against the background of shifting racial, gender, ethnic, linguistic and religious boundaries. As such, this collection represents an exercise in ‘subaltern’ history which shows that the informal social relations were often more important in the long term than the formal structures of empire.

The Portuguese Colonial Empire established its base in Africa in the fifteenth century and would not be dissolved until 1975. This book investigates how the different populations under Portuguese rule were represented within the context of the Colonial Empire by examining the relationship between these representations and the meanings attached to the notion of ‘race’. Colour, for example, an apparently objective criterion of classification, became a synonym or near-synonym for ‘race’, a more abstract notion for which attempts were made to establish scientific credibility. Through her analysis of government documents, colonial propaganda materials and interviews, the author employs an anthropological perspective to examine how the existence of racist theories, originating in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, went on to inform the policy of the Estado Novo (Second Republic, 1933–1974) and the production of academic literature on ‘race’ in Portugal. This study provides insight into the relationship between the racist formulations disseminated in Portugal and the racist theories produced from the eighteenth century onward in Europe and beyond.

This book examines how and why Portugal and Spain increasingly engaged with women in their African colonies in the crucial period from the 1950s to the 1970s. It explores the rhetoric of benevolent Iberian colonialism, gendered Westernization, and development for African women as well as actual imperial practices – from forced resettlement to sexual exploitation to promoting domestic skills. Focusing on Angola, Mozambique, Western Sahara, and Equatorial Guinea, the author mines newly available and neglected documents, including sources from Portuguese and Spanish women’s organizations overseas. They offer insights into how African women perceived and responded to their assigned roles within an elite that was meant to preserve the empires and stabilize Afro-Iberian ties. The book also retraces parallels and differences between imperial strategies regarding women and the notions of African anticolonial movements about what women should contribute to the struggle for independence and the creation of new nation-states.

Forced convict labor provided the Portuguese with solutions to the growing criminal population at home and the lack of infrastructure in Angola and Mozambique. In Convict Labor in the Portuguese Empire, Timothy J. Coates examines the role of large numbers of convicts in Portuguese Africa from 1800 until 1932. This work examines the numbers, rationale, and realities of convict labor (largely) in Angola during this period, but Mozambique is a secondary area, as well as late colonial times in Brazil. This is a unique, first study of an experiment in convict labor in Africa directed by a European power; it will be welcomed by scholars of Africa and New Imperialism, as well as those interested in law and labor.