Catholic Missions and Native Subaltern Workers: Connected Micro-Histories of Labour from India and Brazil, ca. 1545–1560

Abstract

The chapter intersects two different fields of possible application of the methodology of global labour history in the context of the early modern Portuguese Empire: the organization of the Catholic missions that spread across its transoceanic possessions and the transformation of the labour relations among the natives the missionaries interacted with, which contributed to turning them into subaltern workers. Following the traces of a churchman’s global life, Pêro Fernandes Sardinha, this micro-spatial analysis of four radically different contexts—Goa and Chorão in India, Salvador da Bahia and Piratininga in Brazil—allows to look at concrete interactions between settlers and natives and their consequences at the level of labour relations in the sixteenth-century Portuguese world.

I would like to thank Andrea Caracausi and Roquinaldo Ferreira, as well as the editors of this volume, Christian G. De Vito and Anne Gerritsen, for their remarks and suggestions.