‘No obvious home: The flight of the Portuguese “tribe” from Makassar to Ayutthaya and Cambodia during the 1660s”, International Journal of Asian Studies 7/1 [2010]

no obvious home: the flight of the portuguese “tribe” from makassar to ayutthaya and cambodia during the 1660s Stefan Halikowski Smith Swansea University E-mail s. halikowski-smith@swansea. ac. uk Western historiography has both turned its back on the... More

no obvious home: the flight of the portuguese “tribe” from makassar to ayutthaya and cambodia during the 1660s Stefan Halikowski Smith Swansea University E-mail s. halikowski-smith@swansea. ac. uk Western historiography has both turned its back on the Portuguese in the East after their ascendancy during the sixteenth century, and largely misunderstood the changed seventeenth-century realities of that presence. While scholars recognize how the missionary blueprint overtook the military one, the Portuguese population, particularly in areas outside official Crown control, in fact had very little to do with Europe, nowhere more so than in its racial composition. One might think of this entity as a “clan” or “tribe”. The internal social structure of this entity, and the reasons it was able to gain mass allegiance on the part of native populations, remains to be ascertained. This article examines how the “tribe” responded to two successive displacements as a result of the Dutch conquests Less