Slavery and Religious Conversion in Portugal's Indian Empire, 1500-1700 (Indian Ocean Studies Series)

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, enslaved Africans and Asians were part of the larger Portuguese project of building and maintaining a Catholic empire in the Indian Ocean.Both the Church and the Crown influenced the owner-slave relationship across households, the most basic organizational unit of power over the populace.Responsible for their enslaved dependents’ conversion to Catholicism, slaveholders became religious stewards whose spiritual duties toward their slaves helped expand the Christian population.This converted population was part of the imperial security apparatus, which conceptualized enslaved Catholics as loyal allies against neighboring Muslim states.They became members of the broader colonial community in which Catholicism also conveyed rights, enabled agency, and provoked household struggles between owners and slaves.Thus, the making of a Catholic empire was a contested process tied to the complex relationships between enslaved individuals, their enslavers,