Abstract Unlike in other contexts and regions in India, servants/slaves in Goan homes (in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) received inordinate attention from European non-Portuguese travellers. They provided disturbing descriptions of Goan households and the violence inflicted on the subalterns. Slave ownership in the Portuguese empire was both an economic imperative and a problem for moral theology in Europe and overseas. Although slavery was not at the centre of the debate, it contributed to the construction of the ‘Black Legend’ of Portuguese colonialism in Asia. It nourished the complaint regarding moral dissoluteness due to the mixing of population and economic corruption of the Portuguese imperial institutions. The argument was that the Portuguese intermarried and consequently started closely resembling gentiles, some of whom they first enslaved. By looking into three types of archival documents, I discuss slavery/servitude in Goan households: 1) in the legal and moral framework for the ‘just’ slave society debated by ecclesiastics, 2) as it was seen and represented by foreign travellers, 3) and in the seventeenth-century history rewriting of elite Goan Christian theologians obsessed with the purity of blood of their ancestors.
Iñes G. Županov (Tue,) studied this question.