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 wide-flung maritime empire.

A. R. Disney (Author)

9780521843188, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 April 2009

418 pages, 8 maps
23.4 x 15.6 x 2.7 cm, 0.7 kg

'The history of the Portuguese world is barnacled with accretions: traditional errors, apparently ineradicable myths, partisan controversies, irrational passions. Anthony Disney has scraped the bottom and set the ship to rights. His book is sober but engaging, meticulous but well paced, comprehensive but concise: a monument of scholarship and discernment, which everyone interested in the subject will want to hand.' Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Tufts University

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 political 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 I concerns the history of Portugal itself from pre-Roman times to the climactic French invasion of 1807, and Volume II traces the history of the Portuguese overseas empire.

1. Hunter-gatherers to Iron Age farmers
2. The Roman experience
3. The Germanic kingdoms
4. Gharb al-Andalus
5. The medieval kingdom
6. The fourteenth century
7. The making of Avis Portugal
8. The golden age
9. The tarnished age
10. Habsburg Portugal
11. Restoration and reconstruction
12. The age of gold and baroque splendour
13. The age of Pombal
14. The late eighteenth century: finale of the old regime.

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