Partus Sequitur Ventrem in Theory and Practice: Slavery and Reproduction in Early Modern Portuguese Asia

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhereas partus sequitur ventrem (“the birth follows the womb”) laws and their effects on the lives of enslaved women and their children are well understood in the Atlantic context, they remain entirely unstudied in the case of the slave trade in Asia, in particular Portuguese Asia, the string of entrepôts between India and Japan. Focusing on Portuguese Asia between c. 1550 and 1750, this article relies on a little‐known corpus of manuscript treatises on slavery alongside baptismal records, manumission letters and other archival documents to argue that Jesuit missionaries built on the longstanding and varied legal tradition that they had inherited to create a mixed descriptive‐prescriptive framework for understanding and regulating the hereditability of slavery in Asia, which simultaneously admitted departures from partus sequitur ventrem, including Chinese, Japanese and Mughal slavery. This theoretical framework reflected (and to some degree created) the reality on the ground, although the lives of enslaved women were inevitably also shaped by factors that the Jesuits did not fully comprehend, such as Chinese conventions surrounding female bondservants and the seemingly divergent manumission rates of different ethnic groups.