Description: In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, enslaved Africans and Asians were crucial to expanding the Portuguese Catholic empire. The Crown and Church mandated their conversion, expanding the Christian population and securing anti-Muslim allies. Inquisition records from Goa highlight the complex dynamics of conversion, slavery, and imperial ambitions.
Review Quotes:
"A remarkable new consideration of the fundamental, dynamic relationship between slave labor procurement and the soul-binding religious conversion of those enslaved individuals. . . . This is very fertile ground, and Stephanie Hassell has made excellent use of surviving archival material to produce a highly innovative, incisively argued volume."
--Timothy Walker, author of Doctors, Folk Medicine and the Inquisition: The Repression of Magical Healing in Portugal during the Enlightenment