3 - Race and Violence in Portuguese America

Summary

This chapter examines the history of racial violence in Portuguese America as a transatlantic coercive pedagogy. It considers the ideas and methods refined by secular and ecclesiastical authorities to teach peoples of indigenous and African descent, as well as white settlers, about the parameters governing the permissible use of force. Concentrating on the enslavement of Indians and blacks, it examines how colonisers came to accept violence organised along racial lines. The Portuguese devised an array of practices intended to inflict physical and psychological harm on early Brazil’s non-white majority population. Imperial authorities rationalised physical aggression as necessary, virtuous and just, deeming violence indispensable as an instructional practice intended to communicate and secure the dominant position of Portuguese settlers. They did so by making biologised judgements about native, African and mixed-race peoples. They then translated these judgements into punitive acts orchestrated to achieve didactic effects. The chapter concentrates on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century efforts to assemble and control the largest enslaved workforce in the Americas.