| Summary: | Despite many instructions of the charitable institutions named as “Holy Houses of Mercy” , most of them, scattered between Lisbon and Manila mentioned specific social and material needs of the prisoners and poor Christians, the “ashamed” poor, the orphan girls and the widows, in reality they played an important role in the marriage market, a very important activity for reproducing resources for colonial control till the nineteenth century. The author analyses this feature with the help of the “gift” theory of Marcel Mauss, to show that even the charity roles served for colonial discrimination y favouring some privileged sections of the colonial populations. What was given out as charity was recovered as religious, political and social conversions.
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