THE GRADUAL, COMPLEX AND CONVOLUTED ‘TRANSITION’(as James Duffy termed it) from the Luso-Brazilian imperial configuration to an African-oriented imperial venture was significantly marked by the continuity and the resilience of slavery and other modes of forced or compulsory labour. 1 Contrary to what was and still is recounted by the persisting narratives, primarily based on a legalistic reasoning, which focus on the abolition of the slave trade as a major landmark in the transformation of the political and moral economy of the Portuguese colonial empire, the coercive use of the African workforce continued to be a crucial element in the new colonial economy, and indeed endured as a major foundation stone of the overall imperial project. The new imperial political imagination of colonial rule in the ‘decadent fragments’ of a ruined and almost non-existent empire (‘invaded and conquered by African Negroes’, as Sá da Bandeira stated) also preserved the longstanding racial ideologies that legitimised the secular existence of slavery as an institution, a mode of production, and the central element of a nefarious transatlantic trade. 2 The political and economic assessments which aimed to