A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire
From Beginnings to 1807

A comprehensive overview and reinterpretation of Portugal's formation and history up to 1807 and of its acquisition of a wide-flung maritime empire from the early fifteenth century.

A. R. Disney (Author)

9780521409087, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 April 2009

482 pages, 19 maps
23.4 x 15.6 x 3 cm, 0.79 kg

'A remarkable achievement, combining rigour with lucidity and offering expert guidance across a complex and varied historical terrain.' The Times Literary Supplement

The Kingdom of Portugal was created as a by-product of the Christian Reconquest of Hispania. With no geographical raison d'être and no obvious roots in its Roman, Germanic, or Islamic pasts, it for long remained a small, struggling realm on Europe's outer fringe. Then, in the early fifteenth century, this unlikely springboard for Western expansion suddenly began to accumulate an empire of its own, eventually extending more than halfway around the globe. A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, drawing particularly on historical scholarship postdating the 1974 Portuguese Revolution, offers readers a comprehensive overview and reinterpretation of how all this happened - the first such account to appear in English for more than a generation. Volume 1 concerns the history of Portugal itself from pre-Roman times to the climactic French invasion of 1807, whilst this volume traces the history of the Portuguese overseas empire.

1. North Africa
2. Exploring the coasts of Atlantic Africa
3. Engaging with Atlantic Africa
4. The Atlantic islands and fisheries
5. Breakthrough to maritime Asia
6. Empire in the East
7. Informal presence in the East
8. Brazil: seizing and keeping possession
9. Formation of colonial Brazil
10. Late colonial Brazil
11. Holding on in India: the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
12. Eastern empire in the late colonial era: peripheries.

Subject Areas: European history [HBJD], General & world history [HBG]