Portuguese perceptions of nature in the new worlds they encountered in Southeast Asia from the turn of the sixteenth century were a complex amalgam of inherited frameworks and the forging of a new gaze or vision. Grand claims that the Portuguese discoveries amount to the “construction of space” and the “invention of humanity” have been trumpeted, but are too overblown. From another perspective, Portuguese scholars have recently engaged in a philosophical debate around experiencialismo—the distinction between “scientific experience” and the supposedly pre- or non-scientific “lived” experience of the senses (experiência vivencial), suggesting that the Portuguese Discoveries fall at a critical juncture between these two hermeneutic paradigms. But what did this amount to in concrete terms?

I would prefer to turn to other scholars like the Belgian historian Albert Deman, who has stipulated that the perception of Indian nature in the European imaginary, was locked in three unchanging tropes that even first-hand experience could not easily undo. These tropes were exuberance, superabundance and luxury, and go right back to the first encounters between East and West in antiquity, notably Alexander the Great's adventures of the fourth century B.C., which impressed upon Westerners the East's “superior forms of life” and what Pliny, for example, dutifully acknowledged as “the wonder of the victorious expedition of Alexander the Great, when that part of the world was first revealed.” Why wonder, and what does Deman allude to when he writes of “superior forms of life”? The common impression was that everything grew more forcefully, and in greater profusion in the East. There were, for example, two flowerings a year of some plants; the colours and tastes were stronger; the smells were beguiling. What the Portuguese noted as “the fumos da India” merely drew on biblical reference in the Book of Proverbs to the “spicy breezes of the East”. From these basic conceptions had sprung compilations of all the fabulous stories of the East, texts such as those produced by Ktesias the Knidian and Megasthenes whose ideas were passed down through Pliny into the genre of the marvellous, or mirabilia, fanciful speculations and fables developed along the lines of half-truths reported by returning merchants and travellers, and sometimes fictions spread by Arab middlemen keen to retain their long-standing monopoly of purveyance to Christian consumers.

Domination is not hegemony, and no stable colonial system can survive on the basis of permanent physical violence over the local populations; a fiction of generosity has to be installed in order to create a bond between the rulers and the ruled. In order to establish a rhetoric based on disinterested giving, colonial powers had to make available to the colonised populations some “benefits” that could be claimed as being advantageous for the recipients and testify to the generosity of the givers. The “gift” on the part of the Portuguese in the Asian colonial context was their effort to convert the local populations to Christianity, a major enterprise that was undertaken with the help of the religious orders, and most especially the Jesuits. As a result of efforts to convert the masses, newly baptised populations could be granted some degree of integration in colonial society. One of such instances of integration was charity, although, as we shall see, converts were taken care of in a luminal social space that was well below that awarded to the colonists. The example of the Misericórdia of Goa can illustrate the point I am trying to make. The charity provided to the converted populations by this confraternity was directed mainly to the Portuguese-born elites, or their descendants, but did nevertheless include those willing to be integrated in the Catholic Church through conversion.

Architecture is testimony to the passage of time, to social relations and ways of doing things. Architecture is responsible for the morphology of cities; it constitutes a fundamental element in the city's image and of the urban landscape. In the context of Indo-Portuguese culture, architecture—emerging as the sedimentation of different ways of doing things—appears from a research perspective as a particularly delicate issue because of the shortage of specific documentary information. Given the difficulty of access to documentary support, the study of architecture often falls back on the descriptions and accounts of travellers which are almost inevitably constrained by an interpretive vision that speaks more of the observer's own mindset than of the object itself.

What I call the Jesuit “early modernity” is more or less an adapted translation of a concept recently used in France by historians of science who work on Jesuit materials. They call it in French “la première moderne” or “the first modernity” in order to talk about the precocious scientific interests generated within the Jesuit networks of knowledge. The “early” modernity should be taken here as an extension of the French concept in order to encompass a variety of innovative social and cultural practice.

“It is extraordinary, and almost like a dream”, wrote a Jesuit priest in Macau in 1589, “that a man can be carried for six whole months in a ship, where the accommodations cannot in any way be sufficient and spacious, and many other difficulties must be endured.” Imagining a conversation with the group of Japanese youths who were sent to Europe as the representatives of the “Kings of Japan”, the author made a blunt assessment of the conditions of the passage to India aboard the carracks that plied the Carreira da Índia: Being trapped on ship for so long was tantamount “to being shut in a prison”. Yet, as he contended, “certainly no one who was offered a house, even a regally appointed one, to live shut inside for six months, could stay detained or locked in for so long; much less on a ship replete with so many different kinds of inconveniences”. Anxious lest his readers misunderstand this verdict on the Cape Route, the Jesuit author qualified his judgment in the fictional reply to this assertion: “Indeed, the inconveniences on ship surpass even those of prison.”