Behind the practice of partnership: seventeenth-century Portuguese devotional ivories of West India

The present essay aims to investigate social and political patterns of interaction between Portuguese and South Asians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by focusing on historiography and the study of local devotional art in ivory. It will show how the early social plurality of the colonies was consequently disciplined by the Crown and the missionary orders through the patronage of devotional artworks created by local artists within a policy of religious conversion.