CONCLUSION

In spite of the omnipresence of a universalist approach to Portuguese citizenship until the last years of the nineteenth century, uncertainty and controversy also surВrounded the question of the legal status of indigenous people.

Several factors can explain this uncertainty. In the first place, it concerned conflicting visions for the governance of the Empire, conflicts whose rationale cannot be understood without methodological approaches that reject simple oppositions between colonizers and colonized. Different narratives about the legal status of indigenous people coexВisted, expressing contrasting interests and ideological visions. Sa da BandeiraвЂ™s leВgal documents, for instance, were directly related to his ideological position. But, as discussed above, they were also linked with concrete situations that he faced and had to resolve, such as the enforcement of the abolitionist legislation that he got approved in the Parliament. Another example was the maintenance of good relaВtions with the Muslim sheiks whose support Sa da Bandeira needed in order to preserve Portuguese вЂњsemi-sovereigntyвЂќ over strategic Mozambican ports, and who could, in that situation, negotiate their вЂњPortuguese citizenshipвЂќ with Portuguese authorities.

Both these uncertainties and instabilities were also a result of the geography of the Portuguese empire, which was largely composed of tiny dispersed settlements in the interior, trading posts on the coast, and some shifting areas of shared soverВeignty with African and Asian authorities. After the independence of Brazil, the empire lost the bulk of its territory and its colonial possessions were reduced to a few towns and commercial enterprises, most of them near the coasts of Africa and Asia. The weakness of the administrative appropriation of the hinterland or the abВsence of even a minimal infrastructure in these territories is attested in contempoВrary documents as well as in historiographic texts (Alexandre 1998, 46ff.). As in other empires, this configuration of the overseas territories had consequences for the application of metropolitan law and the legal status of at least part of the indigВenous people: geographically discontinuous territories and patterns of legal variaВtion gave rise to different and shifting categories of subjects, some of them occupyВing вЂњ[...] positions simultaneously within and without the imperial legal orderвЂќ (Benton 2010, 226).

In the first years of the twentieth centuries the establishment of the indigenato system tried to solve this problem of uncertainty in an anti-universal- istic and nationalistic way. This was the context that explains why the universalistic Roman model, that in the legal doctrine of the early nineteenth century was a digВnifying one, came to be identified in the first years of the next century as the cause of a mistaken tendency to cultural, political and legal вЂњassimilation,вЂќ a tendency that should be contradicted by the positive and scientific colonial approaches that were being discussed and theorized in national and international Colonial ConВgresses promoted all over Europe. It was now believed that вЂњScienceвЂќ would corВrect the colonial mistakes introduced by the вЂњLatin characterвЂќ of the Portuguese nation. Future Portuguese colonial policies would be shaped by scientific knowlВedge of the variety of local circumstances and peoples. As a result, вЂњmetaphysical principlesвЂќ that had favored previous forms of Latin universalism and assimilation as well as their Roman sources of inspiration would be definitively set aside.^[630]

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Source: Ando Clifford (ed.). Citizenship and Empire in Europe, 200-1900: Antonine Constitution after 1800 Years. Franz Steiner Verlag,2016. вЂ” 261 p.. 2016

CONCLUSION

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