Seventeenth Century Population Displacements in
the Portuguese Indies and the Creation of a
Portuguese ‘Tribe’
Stefan Halikowski Smith
The point of this contribution is to challenge the way historians impose the
demographic and social realities of the...
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Seventeenth Century Population Displacements in
the Portuguese Indies and the Creation of a
Portuguese ‘Tribe’
Stefan Halikowski Smith
The point of this contribution is to challenge the way historians impose the
demographic and social realities of the sixteenth century Estado da Índia
on the Luso-Asian world of the seventeenth century.
It was far less white,
and there were far fewer people prepared to come out to the Indies from
Europe.
Miscegenation, population displacements and a changing sense of
mission had transformed the martially inclined ‘filhos de Albuquerque’ into
numerically substantial communities of rootless and racially mixed ‘filhos
de Francisco Xavier,’ particularly to the east of Cape Comorin.
This coincided with what historians see as an age of ‘decadência,’ or
decline of the Portuguese in the East, with respect to the seventeenth
century.
But rather than seeing desperate communities of expatriated
Europeans clinging on to ever receding territorial landholdings th
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