Quotes from Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Designated mouros or Moors, in view of their association with Mauritania (the Roman name for the Maghreb), these antagonists became the "straw men" for Portuguese nationalist ideologues for many centuries. For, in a sense, the mouros were the midwives attendant on the birth of the nation of Portugal, and once in adolescence the nation still felt the need to define its identity in contradistinction to them.

The VOC was interested in Sri Lanka because of its cinnamon production and strategic location, since control of Sri Lanka implied an improved ability to check navigation between the western Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. In

The term casado then, even when applied to Asian inhabitants of the Estado, obviously preserved a sense in which it indicated a claim to bourgeois status, and in this manner was also a precursor to the category of burgher that the Dutch were to employ in Sri Lanka.