Introduction

Historical scholarship of the last decades has sought to fill the enormous chronological gaps in the knowledge of the Portuguese colonial presence in Mozambique, endeavouring to investigate a set of themes of the greatest relevance and complexity of colonial relations with Africa. Mozambique was part of the Indian trading networks long before the Portuguese had settled in the region. In the early sixteenth century, the wide-ranging coast from Sofala to Mogadishu was crowded with numerous Muslim trading posts whose inhabitants, of mixed Bantu, Persian, and Arab origin, were usually referred to as Swahili. Kilwa, the capital of the most important sultanate, took benefit of the gold and ivory from the Lower Zambezi and maintained, like other Swahili settlements, a strong commercial link with a variety of Arabic and Indian ports, from where luxury products and a large quantity of multicoloured cotton textiles of different qualities and prices were imported. The Portuguese presence on the East African coast then altered the correlation of forces in the region in favour of the Portuguese, but their presence did not cause substantial changes in commercial routes, traders involved, or the goods traded with foreign markets. The Portuguese established control over trade, however, they were not able to take over the economic dominance of the Swahili. In the mid-eighteenth century, the period under study in this chapter, the Portuguese presence was limited to the coastal area between Lourenço Marques (currently Maputo) and Cabo Delgado, as well as the Lower Zambezi region. At the same time, the mercantile supremacy of Indian traders and their textile products was nearly all-encompassing in Mozambique. Apart from this, everything else remained essentially the same; from the ways of negotiating, the players involved and products exchanged, to agricultural methods and artisanal techniques of producing Indigenous cloths.