ABSTRACT
Portuguese overseas expansion extended to many places around the globe. Different cultures from America, Africa, and Europe encountered each other during the colonisation of Brazil, one part of the Portuguese Empire. Recent developments in feminist legal history, women’s history, and postcolonial theory focus on women’s agency and seek to transcend the description of women within fixed racialised stereotypes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on primary sources from Portuguese and Brazilian archives, an interdisciplinary approach to legal history in respect to women during the colonisation of Brazil is adopted here, comparing these documents with the norms in force during colonisation. The archival sources, such as donation charters and requests of royal confirmations, reveal that women were owners and administrators of land. This mere fact compels us to expand the traditional image of the colonial northeast of Brazil, seemingly occupied only by large mills and their purported solely male owners. In some captaincies (administrative units), the number of requests for royal confirmations of women’s land possessions was as common as those made by men. In addition, wills demonstrate that women were owners not only of land but also of various movable goods and especially of slaves. The latter counted neither as a mobile nor an immobile good but formed a third category of property – semoventes, “half-movables”.
