Portuguese Merchants Research Articles

Shylock in Fuquieo: Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and the Trial of a Portuguese Stranger by China’s Courts in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations

In 1548, the Portuguese merchant Galeotto Perera was captured along with his shipmates in the waters off China’s southeastern coast. In his account of his time as a prisoner in Fuquieo (in contemporary Fujian province), Perera details his trial before the city’s magistrates in a Chinese court of law, writing of his amazement when he and his fellow Portuguese merchants were acquitted of the charges brought against them by two of the city’s most prominent men. Perera’s prison account reached an Elizabethan readership via Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1589), a sprawling compendium of European travel writing translated into English. In this essay, I maintain that the outcome of Shylock’s trial in Shakespeare’s comedy entails a reversal of Perera’s legal fortunes in China. In light of Perera’s assertion that the Chinese legal process “cannot be falsified, as it happeneth sometimes with vs,” I argue that The Merchant of Venice asks why these European failures of justice, mercy, and truth sometimes happen in Europe’s courts and in negotiations with non-Christian peoples. I aim to demonstrate that the comedy’s treatment of economic and religious exchange with strangers is inflected by Perera’s account of his encounters with the Chinese during his time in Fuquieo—as well as by other travel writings collected by Hakluyt that describe legal, financial, and inheritance quandaries that European traders faced during their travels to places like China, Java, and modern-day Myanmar.

BIOTECHNOLOGICAL IMPROVEMENT OF CASSAVA YIELD AND PROCESSING FOR FOOD SUSTAINABILITY IN NIGERIA

Cassava (Manihot esculenta) was introduced into Nigeria by Portuguese merchants in 1501. Since then, it has become a major source of food and raw materials leading to an increase in demand. In Nigeria, two-thirds of the States, mainly in the southern region, produce cassava. Malnutrition among the rural populace, especially children and women has led scientists to device means of increasing the nutritional content and varieties of cassava for food sustainability in Nigeria. Many genetically modified cassava species are produced and marketed in Nigeria. Today we have varieties with vitamin A, reduced carbohydrate content, disease resistance to mention but a few.

Catholic Paternalism and Slavery’s Capitalism: Bishop John England’s Defense of Domestic Slavery and the Interstate Slave Trade

Catholic Paternalism and Slavery’s Capitalism: Bishop John England’s Defense of Domestic Slavery and the Interstate Slave Trade David Roach (bio) The 1840 presidential campaign between Democratic president Martin Van Buren and Whig challenger William Henry Harrison set the stage for the most sustained and most important American Catholic defense of slavery, Charleston bishop John England’s letters to Georgia politician and U.S. secretary of state John Forsyth.1 By then, the prelate had lived in South Carolina for the better part of two decades and overseen the gradual growth of his fledgling diocese. In 1820, the thirty-four-year-old Irish priest had been installed as the first Bishop of Charleston, a newly created diocese spanning all of Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina but counting perhaps four churches and three other priests to minister to the small number of communicants scattered across the region.2 But when England died in 1842, the diocese boasted [End Page 205] fourteen churches, twenty priests, two female religious institutions, and some seven thousand members.3 (So small a community, it turned out, could not fund all these projects, and England left a much-indebted diocese to his successor, Ignatius A. Reynolds.4) While pastoral, administrative, and ecclesiastical duties occupied much of England’s time, he also dedicated himself to literary endeavors, most often by writing editorials in the United States Catholic Miscellany, the diocesan publication he had founded in 1822 and the country’s first Catholic newspaper. By dint of his brilliant and often acerbic pen, the bishop won a national reputation as the most articulate champion of the compatibility of American republicanism and Roman Catholicism.5 (His erudition won for the bishop some respect from the local literati, too, as was evident from his occasional participation in Charleston intellectual circles.6) Though ever eager to praise his country’s political institutions, he was more reluctant to defend slavery. He had imbibed his political ideology back in Europe and, as historians have demonstrated, never fully embraced the South’s synthesis of republican values and human bondage.7 Nevertheless, circumstances compelled him to defend the institution at length in 1840. That fall, John Forsyth had planned on stumping for Van Buren throughout Georgia, but illness forced him to stop in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he jotted off an article for his constituents that the Augusta, Georgia, Constitutionalist published on September 12, 1840. Eschewing more substantive matters of policy, Forsyth played upon [End Page 206] white southerners’ fears of English abolitionists, hoping to connect those much-reviled reformers to his American political opponents, the Whigs.8 The address may also have tapped into his readers’ nativism, for Forsyth suggested that “influences proceeding from the British isles” had set in motion the promulgation of In Supremo Apostolatus, Pope Gregory XVI’s 1839 apostolic letter condemning the international slave trade. Southern Catholics, most notably Bishop England but also others, interpreted Forsyth to be implying that the Vatican was plotting with the British Parliament against slavery, and they feared such accusations impugned American Catholics’ loyalties to southern institutions.9 And so, as he had done on so many other occasions, John England took up the pen to demonstrate Catholics’ loyalty to their country’s political institutions, this time defending slavery, over the course of eighteen letters published between October 1840 and April 1841 in the United States Catholic Miscellany.10 Throughout this correspondence, England sought to place an ecclesiastical imprimatur on the specific customs and laws at the core of antebellum southern slavery, including, in his first missive, a roundabout defense of the domestic slave trade. The bishop began his argument by distinguishing the domestic slavery practiced in the American South from the transatlantic slave trade sustained by Spanish and Portuguese merchants, and most often, historians have understood the bishop’s rhetorical thrust as follows: the pope censured only avaricious Iberians and so neither endorsed immediatism nor criticized southern slaveholders.11 But England made another, more precise, distinction [End Page 207] between the international slave trade and the internal slave trade.12 His decision to do so was quite understandable, for the pontiff’s condemnation of “that inhuman trade by which negroes, as if...

Review: Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America, by Aaron M. Hyman; Clothing the New World Church: Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520–1820, by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi

Review: <i>Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America</i>, by Aaron M. Hyman; <i>Clothing the New World Church: Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520–1820</i>, by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi

Kebijakan Politik Pragmatis Strategis Maulana Hasanuddin Banten (1546-1570) terhadap Portugis

This paper explores the trade relation between Banten and Portugal in the last three-quarters of the sixteenth century, with special reference to the reign period of Sultan Maulana Hasanuddin (1546-1570). The mutual relationship between these two political entities and the absence of Banten rulers in the alignment of the Muslim kings of the Archipelago against Portugal are also paid due attention. This paper used historical method, which comprises four following steps: heuristic, critic, interpretation, and historiography. The study of the European primary sources, especially letters of Portuguese Catholic missionaries, accounts of the scribes of the Portuguese viceroys in Goa India, travelogues of Portuguese merchants as well as works by the Portuguese historians, unravels a piece of very important information that the relation between Banten and Portugis can be regarded as the closest one. In addition to the pepper trade, the topic of establishing the Portuguese fortress in Banten is also dealt with by the sources. The intensive arrival of the Portuguese catholic missionaries to Banten to give spiritual guidance to their fellow citizens can be associated with the fact that many Portuguese stayed in Banten. Finally, the absence of Banten rulers in the anti-Portuguese alignment led either by Aceh (1568, 1575) or by Jepara (1551, 1574), led to conclude that the commercial policy of the Islamic kingdom of Banten is pragmatic-strategic oriented rather than ideological.

Prussia against Rome, 1724–1742: Mathurin Veyssière La Crozeʼs and Giuseppe Simone Assemaniʼs Mediterraneist views on the Nestorians in India*

In 1740 the Roman Church – through its major expert on Oriental languages and regions, Giuseppe Simone Assemani – was censoring Mathurin Veyssière La Croze’s Histoire du Christianisme des Indes, his second work on Christians between the Mediterranean and Ethiopia. This article puts censorship of this book into a global political context: first, of the competition of European powers between Catholics and Protestants (Prussia, France, and Rome) and, second, of the entanglements of the Dutch, Portuguese, Danish, and German merchants, colonizers, and missionaries with Eastern Christianity and non-Christian cultures between the Mediterranean and India. Third, the censorship proves to have happened at a time when Rome wanted to resolve definitively the Malabar rites controversy. Conservative Christian-Mediterraneanist hermeneutics to perceive the global religious situation can be revealed, opposed to a Pietist scheme of four world religions coexisting.

The Portuguese Slave Trade in Early Modern Japan: Merchants, Jesuits and Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Slaves by Lúcio de Sousa

Reviewed by: The Portuguese Slave Trade in Early Modern Japan: Merchants, Jesuits and Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Slaves by Lúcio de Sousa Jan Leuchtenberger (bio) The Portuguese Slave Trade in Early Modern Japan: Merchants, Jesuits and Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Slaves. By Lúcio de Sousa. Brill, Leiden, 2019. xiv, 594 pages. €180.00, cloth; €180.00, E-book. Much has been written about Iberian trade with Japan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but few of those sources mention the fact that the [End Page 193] Portuguese ships often carried Chinese, Japanese, and Korean slaves from Japan to Macau and beyond. In fact, as Lúcio de Sousa points out in this significant study, for several decades in the late sixteenth century, the port of Nagasaki became the center of a lucrative Portuguese trade in Asian slaves, for which the Society of Jesus initially provided some support before working to end it at the turn of the century. In the absence of any single documentary source on the slave trade, de Sousa has consulted Portuguese and Spanish legal cases, Inquisition records, government reports, and census data, as well as Jesuit letters and reports, to pull together an account of a practice about which little has been known until now. In doing so, he has been able to demonstrate how an initially disorganized trade, primarily in Chinese abducted by pirates, evolved into a complex system managed by Portuguese merchants in Macau that in some years transported thousands of Japanese and Korean slaves to be sold in places as far away as Manila, Goa, Europe, and even Latin America. In addition to providing a comprehensive look at the slave trade itself, the study offers new information about Jesuit involvement in it and about Japanese, Korean, and Chinese diasporas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Thomas Nelson has shown, forms of slavery existed in Japan long before the arrival of the Portuguese.1 In medieval Japan, Japanese people were enslaved for a variety of reasons, as were captives from Korea and China. The practice may have been in place before the arrival of the Portuguese, but as de Sousa notes in his introduction, the term "slave" was understood differently in European and Asian cultures of the time. The laws under which the Portuguese operated granted fewer rights to slaves than did Japanese laws and often erased the difference between "ownership of bodies and ownership of labor" (p. 6). Another important difference from medieval Japanese slave practices was that the Portuguese were taking Asian slaves far from their homes, with no prospect of returning. This latter point was noted by the Japanese ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi in his communication with the Jesuits leading up to the expulsion edict of 1587, in which he objected to the Portuguese depriving the Japanese of their country, their families, and their friends. Though Japanese canvassers and brokers were punished by Hideyoshi at the time, the expulsion of the Iberians was not enforced, and Portuguese traders continued to buy Chinese, Japanese, and Korean men and women and transport them around the world into the seventeenth century. In the first four chapters of the book, the author outlines four major stages in the Portuguese slave trade and the various political, economic, and social changes that influenced those stages. In the first, from 1520 to [End Page 194] 1569, trade was relatively unregulated, and the majority of slaves bought in that period were abducted from China and sold to the Portuguese in Japan. According to de Sousa, some of the earliest Western references to slaves in records of this time were by priests who objected to Portuguese taking Chinese and Japanese women back to Macau. In fact, enough complaints reached Portugal that King Sebastian issued an edict in 1570 forbidding the enslavement of Japanese people. However, powerful merchants in Goa and Macau ignored restrictions on this lucrative business, and the ban was difficult to enforce from Europe. Not only did the slave trade continue unabated, it actually expanded. In the second stage (1570–92), most of the slaves sold in Nagasaki were prisoners and refugees from the constant wars among the Kyushu daimyō. The proportion of Japanese slaves declined...

The Namban Trade: Merchants and Missionaries in 16th and 17th Century Japan by Mihoko Oka

Reviewed by: The Namban Trade: Merchants and Missionaries in 16th and 17th Century Japan by Mihoko Oka Adam Clulow The Namban Trade: Merchants and Missionaries in 16th and 17th Century Japan. By Mihoko Oka. Leiden: Brill, 2021. 277 pages. ISBN: 9789004463837 (hardcover, also available as e-book). Oka Mihoko is one of the most exciting scholars currently writing about Japan's encounter with Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She is the author or editor of a number of field-defining works in both Japanese and English, including A Maritime History of East Asia. That book, coedited with Haneda Masashi, is a remarkably ambitious and rich survey of maritime activity stretching across an expansive region centered on the East and South China Seas.1 If A Maritime History of East Asia was a composite achievement brilliantly shepherded to final publication by Oka and Haneda, the book under review here returns to Oka's area of expertise: the Nanban (Namban) trade carried out by Portuguese merchants with Japan. The field of Portuguese-Japanese studies has long operated in the shadow of Charles Boxer's numerous publications, and although Japanese scholars have worked productively to expand its perimeters, until recently there was (with some notable exceptions such as the work of Reinier Hesselink) relatively little in English for those interested in understanding the longer trajectory of Japan's foreign relations in this period. This has changed in the past several years with an explosion of new work that has permanently altered how we see this crucial encounter. Oka's new book can be read alongside another important Brill publication, The Portuguese Slave Trade in Early Modern Japan by Lúcio de Sousa, a monumental study of more than five hundred pages that presents a radically new interpretation of Portuguese trade built around an exhaustive investigation of the lives of thousands of enslaved people.2 [End Page 372] The Namban Trade: Merchants and Missionaries in 16th and 17th Century Japan is an English translation of a book that was originally published in Japanese just over a decade ago. In fact, the Japanese title—Shōnin to senkyōshi: Nanban bōeki no sekai (Merchants and Missionaries: The World of Nanban Trade)—provides a perhaps more accurate window into the contents of this important volume.3 This is a book that concerns itself not so much with presenting a general overview or imposing a clear chronology as it does with exploring a string of important episodes or aspects in the wider world of Nanban trade, taking the reader on a fascinating and never entirely predictable journey from Macao to Nagasaki. Oka combines the best of English-language scholarship with a panoramic view of Japanese-language publications. The former includes the work of George Bryan Souza and James Boyajian, who have argued among other things for a new focus on private Portuguese trade.4 Building on this insight, chapter 1 of The Namban Trade provides a case study of a key Portuguese figure, Diogo Pereira, the leader of one of the "multi-ethnic smuggler groups" (p. 24) that operated on China's maritime fringes and that blurred into the wider wokou (Jp. wakō) phenomenon of mass pirate raids on the coast. It has long been clear that the early activities of the Portuguese in East Asia must have overlapped in significant ways with those of the wokou, but only recently have scholars started to expand the picture. One key contribution has come from the abovementioned volume by de Sousa, which shows the Portuguese deeply immersed in the trafficking of people seized from wokou raids. Oka gives a fascinating portrait of Pereira, who operated within the wider wokou context before eventually rising to become "a substantive ruler of Malacca" (p. 49). She also traces a clear connection between Pereira and Francis Xavier, arguing that Jesuit activity in general and Xavier's operations in Japan specifically cannot be divorced from private maritime trade. Her study brings private traders more clearly into the picture, thereby changing our understanding of the forces that pushed Xavier's mission forward. Chapter 2 provides an overview of Nanban trade that builds off the pioneering work of Takase Kōichirō. It moves...

Michele Da Colle’s account books (1462-63): the first example of double entry in Portugal?

The title of this article puts forward the research question: can the books of the merchant Michele Da Colle be considered as the oldest example of the use of the double entry method in Portugal? Michele was a Tuscan merchant and agent to the Pisan Salviati-Da Colle firm, established in Lisbon as of the second half of the fifteenth century. The first years of his business activity in Portugal are recorded in two account books that are kept today at the Salviati Archive, in the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. To answer the research question, this article thoroughly examines the characteristics of these documents. The aim is to determine if these records follow the general principles of double entry bookkeeping proposed by different scholars. This investigation thus seeks to contribute to the debate on the introduction of double entry in Portugal via Italian influence. The preliminary analysis of these books shows that we are, indeed, in the presence of double entry records. The example does contain formal imperfections, but it has strong similarities with the context of Tuscan accounting of the time, which can arguably mean that it represents a stage of evolution and development of the double entry method. Since we do not have any other examples, Michele Da Colle’s account books can be considered the earliest records in double entry in Portugal. Evidence also suggests that Italian merchants exerted influence on Portuguese merchants for the adoption of this method, although it didn’t last in the centuries to come. This explains why several Portuguese works on arithmetic from the sixteenth century fail to mention the double entry system, which was only regularly applied in Portugal as of the mid-eighteenth century.

A quinta, a capela e o portal: análise do potencial de uma paisagem histórica inserida no conjunto arquitetônico da cidade de São Luís do Maranhão

Quinta das Laranjeiras, owned by the merchant and military José Gonçalves da Silva, is part of the landscape of the outskirts of the city of São Luís do Maranhão from the time of its construction, in 1789, until the present day. Located at the end of the old Caminho Grande, now Oswaldo Cruz street, the Quinta has a private chapel and an imposing portal decorated with lioz stones, which reproduces the coat of arms of the Portuguese merchant. Functioning as landmarks of the boundaries of this site, these architectural elements remained during the 19th and 20th centuries as a reference for the urban evolution of São Luís, even after the various stages of the uncharacterization of the Quinta and its surroundings. In this sense, this article intends to discuss the concept of historical urban landscape attributing to Quinta das Laranjeiras the necessary patrimonial potential for a case study that understands the derivations of this category. Using UNESCO and IPHAN definitions of cultural land‑ scape as parameters, we will analyze the formation of a stratification of meanings that have been accumulated through the historical and economic processes, in addition to punctuating the effects of the toppling of Quinta das Laranjeiras

New Information on Yom Tob Atias (alias Alvaro Vargas), Co-publisher of the Ferrara Bible

Según la tradición, la Biblia de Ferrara (1553) salió a la luz gracias a la labor artística de Abraham Usque (alias Duarte Pinel) y al apoyo finaciero de Yom Tob Atias (alias Jerónimo Vargas). Gracias a una escritura notarial de 1556 sabemos que Yom Tob y Jerónimo no son la misma persona: Yom Tob Atias (alias Álvaro Vargas) era el padre de Jerónimo. Éste último se definía como español en el colofón de la Biblia, pero en sus relaciones comerciales se declaraba mercader portugués o lusitano. Aunque no haya duda de que volvió al judaísmo, no sabemos cuándo tuvo lugar. Todavía se desconoce su nombre judío.

Early Acceptance of Western Music in Indonesia and Japan

Indonesia and Japan shared a rather similar historical background in their contact with Western music. Sixteenth-century Indonesia and Japan, upon which this investigation would be based, marked the beginning of the early Western music acceptance, mainly through the Portuguese merchants and missionary activities in both countries. It was especially the spice trade on the Straits of Mallaca that brought the Portuguese ships to land and noticed about what they called the 'spice island' (formerly Mollucas, now Maluku) of Indonesia in 1511. It was also in Mallaca that the Jesuits met the Japanese named Yajiro, who told about his country, became the first Japanese Christian and brought the Jesuits to Japan in 1549. Amongst so many kinds of the Christianity impacts, the introduction of Western music would become the main concerns in this paper. Sixteenth-century Gregorian songs can still be found in Maluku and Flores of Indonesia and in Kyushu of Japan, even though, for the time being, its texts have become very corrupted. Current musical life situation in Japan is said to be comparable with that of Western countries, as there are fine orchestras almost in every large city in Japan. In Indonesia, on the contrary, there is no single professional orchestra yet even in Jakarta today. Keywords: Acceptance of Western music; Current musical life; Indonesia and Japan.

El retorno de los judeoconversos portugueses en época del conde duque de Olivares

The judeoconverso community in Portugal increased its influence and wealth during the sixteenth century to such an extent that the Count Duke of Olivares conceded them access to the kingdom. Olivares, favourite of Philip IV, made this controversial decision as one of the efforts to end a continuous state of economic decline by taking advantage of their low interest loans. Thus they became the Portuguese bankers in the Peninsula settling down in the metropolis and integrating in the local life. Olivares resorted to this solution trying to reduce government dependence on Genoese bankers and to boost trade and commerce using the networks already established by the rich Portuguese merchants. However, these measures were affected by the religious question and its enormous social weight. The Jewish origin of the bankers caused a serious conflict between the political government and the religious authority.

Conexões Negreiras: contrabandistas de escravos no Atlântico Sus (Rio da Prata, 1730-1752)

O artigo procura mostrar como se construiu a hegemonia portuguesa no contrabando de escravos para o Rio da Prata durante a primeira metade o século XVIII. Na década de 1730 inicia-se um nova conjuntura, marcada por mudanças no contexto político e nova guerra anglo-espanhola que interrompeu as operações da South Sea Company no rio da Prata. Isso abriu caminho para o predomínio português, sendo que os traficantes luso-brasileiros passaram a tomar conta paulatinamente do negócio negreiro estabelecendo as conexões atlânticas necessárias para formação de uma rede de agentes envolvidos no comércio ilícito de cativos. O contrabando trans-imperial de escravos conectou os traficantes luso-brasileiros que operavam na Colônia do Sacramento aos dois principais portos negreiros da América portuguesa (Rio de Janeiro e Salvador).

Conflict management in western Europe: the case of the Portuguese merchants in England, Flanders and Normandy, 1250–1500

ABSTRACTRecent historiography argues that the legal autonomy of municipal governments created the necessary conditions for successful commercial transactions and economic growth in certain parts of Europe in the later Middle Ages, and that these features attracted foreign merchants. This article uses empirical data from England, Flanders and Normandy to test the following questions: were there significant differences in rules, laws and institutions between one place and another in late medieval western Europe? Were the Portuguese merchants drawn to markets that hypothetically had more effective institutions? The findings demonstrate that legal institutions and conflict management were very similar across western Europe, and that there is no evidence that the Portuguese opted for trading in a certain market because of its effective institutions. Moreover, the article claims that the merchants seemed to prioritise protection and privilege while trading abroad, and it highlights the role of commercial diplomacy in conflict management.

Financing the Luso-Atlantic Slave Trade, 1500–1840

Between 1500 and 1840, ships under Portuguese colors embarked more than 5 million enslaved men, women and children from the coasts of Africa. Despite its position as the preeminent slave trading empire in the Atlantic World, no studies have systematically traced the evolution in maritime investment practices in Portugal and its American colonies which propelled this massive forced transportation of captive Africans. Beginning with Portuguese merchants’ earliest forays into Atlantic trade, on the West African island of Cabo Verde in the fifteenth century, maritime cargoes were collectively owned through the distribution of small shares. Drawing on medieval Mediterranean precedents, these collective, legally constructed partnerships opened early transoceanic trading opportunities to a diverse group of traders, colonists, and mariners, creating a decentralized mercantile trade which diffused profits throughout slave trading communities. Slaving merchants in Salvador da Bahia adopted this collectivist model of investment by the early eighteenth century, converting commercial disadvantages into a prosperous and durable trade which wove together the economic interests of a heterogeneous cross-section of Salvador’s inhabitants—including merchants, their families and slaves, and mariners—within the business of slaving. This article traces the persistence of this financial strategy, and argues that it enabled the longevity of the transatlantic slave trade in Salvador.

The Dream of Christian Nagasaki: World Trade and the Clash of Cultures, 1560–1640 by Reinier H. Hesselink

Reviewed by: The Dream of Christian Nagasaki: World Trade and the Clash of Cultures, 1560–1640 by Reinier H. Hesselink Lane R. Earns The Dream of Christian Nagasaki: World Trade and the Clash of Cultures, 1560–1640. By Reinier H. Hesselink. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2016. 300pages. Softcover $49.95. Reinier Hesselink’s book represents a prodigious effort to confront the complexity of issues involved in writing a history of early Christian Nagasaki and demonstrates the multifarious skills required to do so effectively. To accomplish his ambitious task, it was necessary for Hesselink to research Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian missionaries (Jesuit, Franciscan, Augustinian, and Dominican) and traders who came to Japan via India, Southeast Asia, China, the Philippines, and Mexico to spread word of the [End Page 76] Catholic Reformation and gain riches by filling a void in the lucrative world and regional silver trade. And this work was just on the European side; the author, of course, also had to navigate numerous contemporaneous Japanese documents generated at the central and local levels. The introduction of Christianity into Japan, and specifically Nagasaki, depended on Jesuit missionaries serving as trade and cultural intermediaries between southern European traders on the one hand and Japanese political, military, and merchant officials on the other. This strategy proved to be dangerous in the long run, however, as it resulted in the exile, torture, and sometimes death of not only European missionaries but many of their Japanese Christian followers as well. While it took less than a century for the Christian vision to end in tragedy for the missionaries and converts, for Japanese leaders the Christian encounter ultimately endowed them with primacy over the country’s foreign trade and political, military, and administrative dominance over the territory of Nagasaki. It also led to Japanese control measures that eliminated Christianity in the port town and sent surviving Japanese Christians underground into rural hamlets, coastal towns, and sparsely populated islands in the region. Hesselink lays out the book’s theme in the opening statement of his introduction: “This is the story of the birth of the city of Nagasaki, where two different worlds [Japan on one side and Portugal and Spain on the other] intersected in a prolonged and intensive manner” (p. 1), most intensely in the arenas of trade and religion (and possibly political administrative control). Through military might, the Portuguese established trading posts and administrative centers for their sea-based empire in Arabia, India, Southeast Asia, and China before making their way to Japan in search of a trading entrepôt in Kyushu. They eventually established a port town at Nagasaki, which allowed them to fill the vacuum of trade for Chinese silk and Japanese silver that had been opened up following the Ming government’s crackdown on rampant piracy in the area. The Society of Jesus, then recently established, took the lead in spreading Catholicism to Asia and, as in Europe and the Americas, had considerable early success converting the upper classes, who in turn forced the conversion of others in their territories. In Japan, this meant that the Jesuits not only tried to convert the samurai, especially the daimyo, but at times even behaved as samurai themselves. To Hesselink, the Jesuits “became the founders of a military colony, called Nagasaki” (p. 4). Soon, however, their strategy presented problems, in that the “Society of Jesus ostensibly [was] dedicated to spiritual goals and its priests in Japan [had] founded a strategic stronghold dedicated to monopolizing the China trade brought by the Portuguese merchants. Without the China trade, it was impossible for the mission to survive in Japan” (p. 5). This contradiction, between faith and trade, eventually led to the Society’s downfall in Japan. It also contributes to one of Hesselink’s primary challenges in the book: he claims the Jesuits’ positioning between economic and religious interests makes their records ultimately historically unreliable because they tried to deny, or at least dramatically downplay, their role in the temporal affairs of Kyushu and Nagasaki. [End Page 77] Hesselink organizes the book into three overarching chronological parts, each composed of subsections assigned a topical title and a representative individual. While this framework offers a structured and personalized approach...

Medicinal Mercury in Early Modern Portuguese Records: Recipes and Methods from Eighteenth-Century Medical Guidebooks

Abstract This chapter will present and explicate rare information regarding circumstances and techniques for the application of medicinal mercury in the Portuguese medical context during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through the use of Portuguese medical texts (including translated excerpts), the chapter will provide insight into how early modern Portuguese practitioners processed and employed mercury to treat various ailments. Of interest, too, will be that these remedies were developed at several disparate locations throughout the Portuguese imperial world (China, India, Angola, Brazil, and Portugal), and often drew upon, and blended, indigenous medical substances from the region where each remedy originated. Regarding the use of mercury in South Asian medicine, medical scholars have noted that, from the sixteenth century onwards, much of the intra-Asian (and global) mercury trade was conducted through Portuguese merchants and agents. This work asserts that Portuguese merchants and shippers had unique access both to mercury at the commodity’s main sources in Spain and Peru (Almadén and Huancavelica, respectively), but also to established, developed colonial trade routes throughout the eastern hemisphere. Most of the information presented here is excerpted from two little-known eighteenth-century Portuguese primary sources: a Jesuit compilation medical and apothecary guide in manuscript, and a published physician’s treatise regarding fevers and other illnesses encountered during a posting of nearly a decade in Angola.

Si hay moreras hay cristianos nuevos: Los Duques de Pastrana y la industria de la seda en la formación de un espacio de conflicto (Pastrana, c. 1569- c. 1609)

Due to the support of the Dukes of Pastrana, during the last decades of the 16th century the moriscos controlled the silk industry and commerce and the municipal power in Pastrana. This article deals with the creation of a locus of hate in Pastrana because of the social competition between the old christians and the moriscos. One result of this social hate was, especially since 1572, the process of characterization of the moriscos as evil suspicious new Christians. This stigmatizing experience was the precedent of the same process against the Portuguese merchants in the early decades of the 17th century. After the expulsion of the moriscos, the Portuguese took their place in the Pastrana silk industry and municipal offices. As a result, the old Christians came to develop a narrative of demonization around the identification of Portuguese as criptojews.

Repercusiones de la Unión Ibérica en el sur de Brasil: el caso de Santa Catarina

When the Spaniards conquered Santa Catarina Island in 1777 it had already been a long time since they had lost their chances to control this important port along the route to the Rio de la Plata estuary. It was during the period of Iberian Union (1580-1640) when the Castilians abandoned their plans to propel an Atlantic outpost to shorten the communications between Spain and Asuncion, and also when the Bandeirantes in the Guairá region and the Portuguese merchants in Buenos Aires were operating. These three elements were to be decisive in the subsequent and definitive inclusion of the territories located south of the São Vicente captaincy in the Luso-Brazilian colonial context.