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

by A. R. Disney

• ISBN13: 9780521409087
• ISBN10: 052140908X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-04-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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. The 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.

Table of Contents

North Africa

Exploring the coasts of Atlantic Africa

Engaging with Atlantic Africa

The Atlantic islands and fisheries

Breakthrough to maritime Asia

Empire in the East

Informal presence in the East

Brazil: seizing and keeping possession

Formation of colonial Brazil

Late colonial Brazil

Holding on in India: the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Eastern empire in the late colonial era: peripheries

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