Slavery, Race and Renaissance Humanism in Early Modern Portuguese India
In order to build up a more complete picture of the slave trade in the early modern world, this paper examines a hitherto unstudied manuscript treatise by the Jesuit humanist Gomes Vaz (1542-1600), which treats the origins (African, South Asian, Chinese and Japanese) and legal statuses of the slaves owned by Christians in Portuguese India. As such, the manuscript offers a unique window onto the otherwise poorly-documented legal and intellectual history of the Iberian slave trade in Eurasia and its relationship to the better-known transatlantic slave trade.