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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 July 2017
Among the more emphasised aspects of the Atlantic history are the mobility of ideas and goods but also the endless movement of peoples that linked the margins of the ocean and gave the Atlantic basin an indisputable cohesion. Within the theoretical framework of the subfield of Atlantic history, this study addresses the way the imperial perceptions shaped the migratory patterns of the Portuguese Atlantic, notably the transoceanic behaviour of the men who volunteered to defend its scattered territories. During a particularly difficult period in the mid-seventeenth century, the hierarchical ambiguities of Portuguese empire and its religiously charged military thought, in conjunction with the prevalent political culture of service, promoted a constant back and forth across the ocean that revealed the conceptual unity of the Portuguese Atlantic world. For these men, for a while, there were no alluring centres and unappealing peripheries; the Atlantic was conceived of as a wide circulation space essentially free from mental or emotional prejudices.
Miguel Dantas da Cruz is a post-doctoral researcher at Lisbon University, Instituto de Ciências Sociais. He is very grateful to Professors Mafalda Soares da Cunha, Filipa Vicente, Roquinaldo Ferreira, and Pedro Cardim for their insightful comments on previous versions of this study. He also would like to thank both referees of Itinerario for their critical advice and Lincoln Paine for his indispensable editing of this text. This work was only possible thanks to a research fellowship from Fundação para Ciência e a Tecnologia (SFRH/BPD/97974/2013) and from my institution’s strategic project (UID/SOC/50013/2013).