ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the possibilities and limitations of current scholarship on race, slavery, and religion in the early modern Portuguese world. It explores the methodological tensions between culturalist and structuralist approaches to historical interpretation, identifies fundamental differences between Portuguese approaches to African and Native American enslavement, highlights the pervasiveness of dissent rather than consensus in Jesuit perspectives on slavery, and insists on the importance of global—rather than narrowly Atlantic—perspectives for understanding local formations of slavery and race-thinking in the early modern world.
