Portuguese Oceanic Expansion 1400 1800

A unique overview of Portuguese oceanic expansion between 1400 and 1800, the essays in this volume treat a wide range of subjects - economy and society, politics and institutions, cultural configurations and comparative dimensions - and radically update data and interpretations on the economic and financial trends of the Portuguese Empire. Interregional networks are analysed in a substantial way. Patterns of settlement, political configurations, ecclesiastical structures, and local powers are put in global context. Language and literature, the arts, and science and technology are revisited with refreshing and innovative approaches. The interaction between Portuguese and local people is studied in different contexts, while the entire imperial and colonial culture of the Portuguese world is looked at synthetically for the first time. In short, this book provides a broad understanding of the Portuguese Empire in its first four centuries as a factor in world history and as a major component of European expansion.

A comprehensive overview and reinterpretation of Portugal's formation and history up to 1807 and of its wide-flung maritime empire.

Empires of the Sea brings together studies of maritime empires from the Bronze Age to the Eighteenth Century. The volume aims to establish maritime empires as a category for the (comparative) study of premodern empires, and from a partly ‘non-western’ perspective. The book includes contributions on Mycenaean sea power, Classical Athens, the ancient Thebans, Ptolemaic Egypt, The Genoese Empire, power networks of the Vikings, the medieval Danish Empire, the Baltic empire of Ancien Régime Sweden, the early modern Indian Ocean, the Melaka Empire, the (non-European aspects of the) Portuguese Empire and Dutch East India Company, and the Pirates of Caribbean.

This book charts the convergence of science, culture, and politics across Portugal's empire, showing how a global geographical concept was born. In accessible, narrative prose, this book explores the unexpected forms that science took in the early modern world. It highlights little-known linkages between Asia and the Atlantic world.

A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion 1400-1668 provides an accessible survey of how the Portuguese became so influential during this period and how Portuguese settlements were founded in areas as far flung as Asia, Africa and South America. Malyn Newitt examines how the ideas and institutions of a late medieval society were deployed to aid expansion into Africa and the Atlantic islands, as well as how, through rivalry with Castile, this grew into a worldwide commercial enterprise. Finally, he considers how resilient the Portuguese overseas communities were, surviving wars and natural disasters, and fending off attacks by the more heavily armed English and Dutch invaders until well into the 1600s. Including a detailed bibliography and glossary, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion 1400-1668 is an invaluable textbook for all those studying this fascinating period of European expansion

This book traces the history and development of the port of Benguela, the third largest port of slave embarkation on the coast of Africa, from the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Benguela, located on the central coast of present-day Angola, was founded by the Portuguese in the early seventeenth century. In discussing the impact of the transatlantic slave trade on African societies, Mariana P. Candido explores the formation of new elites, the collapse of old states and the emergence of new states. Placing Benguela in an Atlantic perspective, this study shows how events in the Caribbean and Brazil affected social and political changes on the African coast. This book emphasizes the importance of the South Atlantic as a space for the circulation of people, ideas and crops.

This book follows the renovation of European economic history towards a more unified interpretation of sources of growth and stagnation. To better understand the diversity of patterns of growth, we need to look beyond the study of the industrialization of the core economies, and explore the centuries before it occurred. Portuguese agriculture was hardly ever at the European productivity and technological forefront and the distance from it varied substantially across the second Millennium. Yet if we look at the periods of the Christian Reconquista, the recovery from the Black Death, the response to the globalization of the Renaissance, to the eighteenth century economic enlightenment, or to nineteenth century industrialization, we may conclude that agriculture in this country of the European periphery was often adaptive and dynamic. The fact that economic backwardness was not overcome by the end of the period is no longer the most relevant aspect of that story. Contributors are: Luciano Amaral, Amélia Branco, Dulce Freire, António Henriques, Pedro Lains, Susana Münch Miranda, Margarida Sobral Neto, Jaime Reis, Ana Maria Rodrigues, José Vicente Serrão and Ester G. Silva.

Women in the Portuguese Colonial Empire: The Theatre of Shadows compiles an extensive collection of essays on the status of women throughout the vast Portuguese colonial space, from Brazil to the Far East, crossing Europe, Africa and India, between the 16th and the 20th century. Absent or mystified, silenced or victimized, women in the History of Portugal and its colonial venture are the living example of the part historiographical discourse, ideology and popular memory have played in the construction of identities, their practices and representations. The production and critical consumption of History have long revealed countless gaps and silences within its own discourse. This book questions the reason for such gaps and silences and wonders about the real role of all those who do not or have never had access to power and to the perpetuating word, those whose voices have been systematically erased from sources and documents because of past or present attending interests. Women in the Portuguese Colonial Empire: The Theatre of Shadows congregates a wide assortment of disciplines so as to provide multiple independent viewpoints, sources and methodologies. By bringing authors from around the world together, this work ensures that the various cultures and memories that are part of the global saga, as well as the various versions of the history of the Portuguese colonial empire, may be heard.