Editorial

The current issue comprises three distinct sections.The first is a special issue focusing on Indigeneity in the Portuguese Speaking World(s), which seeks to conceptualise and analyse indigeneity over time across different geographies.The second sections consists of individual articles based on original primary source research, spanning the medieval and early modern periods.The issue concludes with current book reviews.Defining indigeneity in the Portuguese-speaking worlds necessitates an intellectual engagement with legal categories, politico-historical discourses, perceived economic imperatives, colonial strategies, post-colonial experiences, and, crucially, indigenous agency.The notion and mobilisation of indigeneity within various Portuguese imperial contexts were neither static nor universally applied.Rather, they emerged through a complex interplay of legal codification, economic interests, demographic shifts, colonial governance strategies, and indigenous responses within diverse imperial and colonial configurations.From the early modern period through to the late colonial era, the Portuguese empire constructed, and continually reconfigured, what it meant to be 'indigenous' , according to chancing political, economic, social, and ideological imperatives.Even within a single historical context, there was no singular, stable definition of indigeneity, despite the presence of formal legal categories.As the contributions in this issue demonstrate, legal codification was seldom rigid, allowing for multiple understandings of what it meant to be 'indigenous' (and later, 'native'), and permitting a significant degree of flexibility in the formulation and implementation of policies relating to indigeneity.In colonial aldeias, particularly in regions such as Rio de Janeiro, indigenous peoples were transformed into aldeados, Christian subjects of the Crown endowed with a distinct legal status.This status, while grounded in practices of subjection and expectations of resocialisation, also conferred specific rights that indigenous communities came to recognise, claim, defend, and utilise to their (limited) advantage.Far from being passive recipients of of colonial or imperial impositions, the aldeados appropriated Christian legal-cultural repertoires, including the use of baptismal names, references to service to the King,