A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire: From Beginnings to 1807: Volume 1
Author(s): A. R. Disney (Author)
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication Date: 11 Jun. 2009
Edition: Illustrated
Language: English
Print length: 416 pages
ISBN-10: 0521603978
ISBN-13: 9780521603973
Book Description
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.
Editorial Reviews
Review
‘In response to the global turn in scholarship on colonial and early modern history, this book provides a fresh and much-needed perspective integrating metropolitan and colonial Portuguese histories. In fact, this analytical combination of national and imperial dimensions is totally original in the panorama of Portuguese histories where almost all the works available in English tend to concentrate exclusively on overseas expansion.’ Diogo Ramada Curto, European University Institute, Florence and Universidade Nova de Lisboa
‘Anthony Disney has provided in this impressive two-volume survey of the history of Portugal and its overseas empire to the beginning of the nineteenth century a work of synthesis that has long been needed. Up-to-date in its scholarship, lucid and coherent in its exposition, his account, skillfully blending narrative and analysis, will immediately take its place as the essential starting-point for all those interested in the origins and character of the first truly global empire in world history.’ Sir John Elliott, Regius Professor Emeritus of Modern History, University of Oxford
‘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
Book Description
A comprehensive overview and reinterpretation of Portugal’s formation and history up to 1807 and of its wide-flung maritime empire.
About the Author
A. R. Disney was educated at the University of Oxford and Harvard University and has taught history at Melbourne and La Trobe Universities. His publications include Twilight of the Pepper Empire (1978) and numerous articles, papers, and essays, published variously in the Economic History Review, Studia, Indica, Mare Liberum, Anais de Historia de Alem-mar, and other journals and proceedings.
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