This paper discusses the transfer (migration) of European-based models of property rights in land to other parts of the world. More specifically, it focuses on the Portuguese colonial experience in the Indian Ocean, as it developed in India (Goa and the Northern Province), Sri Lanka and Mozambique during the early modern period. Although the Portuguese made use of some legal and customary templates of property rights they brought from home, those institutions were actually recreated overseas in different ways, intended to accommodate as much as possible to the native institutional frameworks already in place. Moreover, the institutional solutions implemented in each context were in turn re-appropriated and used by social actors differing in political status, social rank, race, ethnicity, and gender, who endeavoured to capture or modulate property and land rights according to their own interests, out of which evolved a variety of institutional, social and economic outcomes.

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African History,Colonialism,History of India,Indian Ocean History,Institutional Economics,Mozambique,Portuguese Empire,Property,Property Rights,South Asian History,Sri Lanka

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