As the colony that gave Europe its archetype of tropical cannibalism and consumed more African bodies than any other American slave system, Brazil warrants a central place in the history of early modern racial violence.
For its long-standing tradition of denying the salience of this violence, Brazil also merits attention. This chapter examines the history of violence in Portuguese America as an early transatlantic form of what I call ‘coercive pedagogy'.
It considers the ideas and methods refined by authorities to teach peoples of indigenous and African descent, as well as white settlers, about the parameters governing the permissible use of force. The chapter's objective is to clarify how colonisers came to accept violence organised along racial lines and how subsequent interpreters of the Brazilian past came to de-emphasise such violence. Analysis centres on the enslavement of Indians and blacks on the assumption that, as Trevor Burnard notes in Chapter i, violence ‘permeated every aspect' of slavery in its foundational role in the colonisation of the Americas.The Portuguese devised an array of practices intended to inflict physical and psychological harm on the majority non-white inhabitants of their sprawling and expanding American possession. The effort to establish new rules of violence to undergird the founding and consolidation of the tropical colony combined legal procedures, theological positioning, military and paramilitary campaigns, and communal and individual acts of corporal punishment. Authorities at the highest level of the imperial administration rationalised physical aggression as necessary, appropriately calibrated to the threats they perceived, virtuous, and just. They sanctioned broad categories of coercion as endorsed by their monarch and sanctified by God. They deemed violence indispensable as an instructional practice. Guided by a conviction of their own civil and religious pre-eminence, which they understood in increasingly racia- lised terms, the Portuguese devised forms of aggression intended to communicate and secure their dominant position atop the colony's emerging social hierarchy.
They did so by making biologised judgements about native, African and mixed-race peoples. They then translated these judgements into punitive acts orchestrated to achieve didactic effects.Evident in medieval chronicles of the Iberian Reconquista, such violence was refined over the centuries and promoted in the service of Portugal's early overseas conquests. It accompanied the kingdom's precocious imperial ventures along Africa's Atlantic seaboard in the fifteenth century. After the Portuguese Crown announced the discovery of Brazil in 1500, the work of devising a repertoire of effective violent methods extended to the Americas. There, concerns about territorial as opposed to seaborne expansion, the imperatives of religious conversion, the need to assemble a labour force and the push to guarantee the security and hegemony of white Christian colonists became increasingly urgent. The embrace of righteous brutality came to be seen as especially useful in conveying the lessons of subordination to peoples of non-European origins and physiognomies.
Classical philosophy, Roman and Muslim precedents, medieval theology, papal approbation and Iberian law and social practice honed during the Reconquista combined to define slavery as natural, just, honourable for captors, and morally and spiritually edifying for captives. Portuguese thinkers invoked these ideas to justify early shipments of sub-Saharan slaves to Iberia to work as domestic servants and to Africa's Atlantic islands to labour in sugar production. Buttressing these developments was a perspective on human difference that historian James Sweet has aptly called ‘racism without race' - that is, racist ideology and practice developed before the advent of pseudoscientific systems based on phenotype. This perspective associated dark skin and other disparaged bodily traits with peoples deemed naturally condemned to slavery and its attendant violence.1
Accounting for the pervasive application of physical and psychological punishment should not be confused with the question of its effectiveness.
Ceaselessly carving out spaces in which to achieve their own outcomes and shape their own lives, peoples of Amerindian and African descent did not readily conform to the dictates of force and its animating ideology. Resistance, both violent and non-violent, to harsh colonial impositions has been the [69] subject of assiduous study. It does not fall directly within the purview of the discussion that follows.[70] Instead, the focus throughout remains on the use of racial violence to advance Portugal's South Atlantic imperialism.After briefly examining long-standing denials of this blood-stained history, this chapter turns to the substance of coercive relations with Portuguese America's non-white peoples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first century of colonisation turned on efforts to dominate Amerindians; the second, on the creation and control of the largest enslaved African workforce in the Americas. By the eighteenth century, when many scholars of Atlantic imperialism posit the emergence of race-based hierarchies justifying colonial domination, Portugal's transatlantic enterprise had long since prepared the ground.