Bibliographic Essay

English-language readers suffer from a paucity of translations of Portuguese and Brazilian scholarship. Most works on indigenous and African slavery in Portuguese America consider violent episodes.

With few exceptions, only over the last generation have historians of Portuguese America taken up the challenge of studying indigenous peoples, a pursuit formerly consigned to anthropologists.

For studies focused more narrowly on specific regions or ethnic groups, notable for their examination of violence, yet sometimes situating it within a wider frame of relations cast as generally collaborative, see Alexander Marchant, From Barter to Slavery: The Economic Relations of Portuguese and Indians in the Settlement of Brazil, 1500-1580 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1942); Alida C. Metcalf, Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500-1600 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); John M. Monteiro, Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America, trans. James P. Woodard and Barbara Weinstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Hal Langfur, The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil's Eastern Indians, 1750-1830 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); and Mary C. Karasch, Before Brasilia: Frontier Life in Central Brazil (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016).

For an English-language entry point to the rich historiography of Afro-Brazilian slavery, see Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna, Slavery in Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). As with indigenous history, scholarship on Afro-Brazilian slavery comes into its own when it is regionally and locally focused. Notable contributions that examine the relations of violence, race and colour include, Stuart B.