Academic literature has analysed in different terms the ideologies behind the government of the different populations belonging to imperial entities. Two main academic trends can be easily identified when we approach the historiography about this subject, and these trends somehow differentiate these works in geographical terms. This difference is deeply related with the reception of Orientalism (Said, 1978). Despite the already identified limits of his book, it opened up a new space for thinking the ideologies related with the government of difference, and the ways they were internalized by agents, bringing to the stage the concept of hegemony, which polarized many of this academic research; (see, for example, Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991, 1997). As a matter of fact, relevant works on the ways how, mainly in British imperial experiences in Asia and Africa, but not only, difference was thought, ordered, fixed (or dissolved), disseminated and naturalized, are related with these debates, and with the correlated impact of critical theory, deconstructionism, cultural studies, and post-colonial scholarship (important reflections about these paths can be found at Cooper, 2005) A different direction - until now less "politically engaged' - was followed by the research on the ideologies of imperial government of the American territories. This literature has been mainly shaped by the theoretical and methodological debates of intellectual history (see, for example, Pagden, 1995; Hernando Sanchez, 1996), and these matters have been discussed in more general (and discursive) terms. On the other hand, the literature that privileges the American experiences has developed comparative approaches, allowing a critical view of the similarities and differences of the instruments of government developed by different European powers (Elliott, 2006). This comparative approach has recently been complemented by the concept of connected histories, which intends to relate different imperial experiences, and the ways they shaped each, namely in what concerns the transactions between different political cultures (Subrahmanyam, 2007) The large scope of our project, and the multidisciplinary quality of the team, allow the meeting of these different academic worlds and the discussion of the relevant insights provided by these multiple forms of approaching imperial experiences. Therefore, it is not surprising that we can establish links between our proposals and of those that have discussed questions of citizenship in legal and political terms (Herzog, 2003), but also the questions related to social mixtures, conversion to Christianity, education, and other forms of cultural conversion in different imperial contexts (Gruzinski, 1988; Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991 and 1997), their relation with assimilative or segregationist policies, their interdependence of certain events (Metcalf, 1995) and their embedment with ‘indigeneous society' imaginations and expectations (Bayly, 1988; Gruzinski, 1988).  In what concerns the Portuguese imperial experiences, collective works (Bethencourt and Chaudhuri, 1998-1999; Marques and Serrão, 198-, and Bethencourt and Curto, 2007) addressed some of these questions, providing important information about them. Still, Portuguese historiography has not paid much attention to the question of how native populations were classified, and especially to the ways their government was thought as a theoretical issue. The justifications of imperial dominion, its models, and its goals were subject of important studies (Thomaz, 1990; Hespanha, 2001; Ferlini e Bicalho, 2005; Castelo, 1998; Matos, 2006). For 19th and 20th centuries, there are studies where rhetorical devices associated with rituals commemorating the Empire, as well as the imperial iconography, are explored, much of them including chapters on the representations of the colonial "other" (João, 2000). However, the literature directly focused on the ideologies behind the government of difference is rare, and the one that exists privileges Brazilian Indians (Domingues, 2000) and African slaves, studying the ideological aspects of abolitionism and pro-slavery doctrines (Alexandre, 1993). The investigation developed by the members of the research team had already made an important contribution in order to unveil different aspects of the problems referred and in order to cover some of the identified gaps in the research. Cardim, Xavier and Silva have been concentrated on the production of metropolitan discourses about the imperial condition, the main topoi associated with them, the ways they shaped imperial practices, and the tensions that resulted from the confrontation of different political cultures and, expectations. Roque has been interested in the 19th century imperial political culture, the connections between science and empire, the practices of constructing empire in situ, their relation with agency and with particular events (Roque, forthcoming). Another set of works have focused on the production of imperial memory, their dissemination, and the agents co-involved in these production, either in the display of political rituals (see Kantor e Jancsó, 2001) or in the production of history and of the memory of history (Ramos, 1997).