An Economic History Of Portugal 1143 2010

A fascinating exploration of the evolution of the Portuguese economy over the course of eight centuries, from 1143 to 2010.

This book follows the renovation of European economic history towards a more unified interpretation of sources of growth and stagnation. It looks at Portuguese agricultural development across the second Millennium, showing a sector that was often adaptive and dynamic. Portugal’s economic backwardness was not overcome at the end of the period, but that is now only part of the story.

This book offers insights into the behaviour of the Portuguese economy in relation to economic growth from the twentieth century to the present. How did the 1891-92 crisis and World Wars impact Portugal economically? How did the Portuguese economy behave during the 'Golden Age' of economic growth in postwar Europe? What have the effects of the European Monetary Union been? Amaral examines long-running trends in the development of the modern Portuguese economy in order to help us understand various growth phases of the modern period. This title is important reading for economic historians and economists researching economic growth, crises, stablisation and monetary unions.

The Oxford Handbook of Portuguese Politics brings together the best scholars in the field offering an unrivalled coverage of the politics (broadly defined) of the country over the past 50 years. The Handbook includes eight sections. First, it looks at the past and present by making an overview of Portuguese political developments since democratization in the 1970s. Second, it looks at political institutions as the building blocks of Portuguese democracy. The third section examines mass politics and voters, that is, a thorough analysis of the demand-side of mass politics. The fourth section turns to the supply side of mass-politics by looking at parties and the party system. The fifth section looks at the Portuguese society by unpacking a plethora of societal aspects with direct implications for politics. The sixth section examines governance and public policies, with a view to understanding how a constellation of public policies has an impact on the quality of governance and in fostering well-being. The seventh section looks at Portugal and the European Union. The eighth and final section unpacks Portuguese foreign policy and defence.

Why was early modern Europe the starting point of the economic expansion which led to the Industrial Revolution? What was the state’s role in this momentous transformation? A History of States and Economic Policies in Early Modern Europe takes a comparative approach to answer these questions, demonstrating that wars, public finance and state intervention in the economy were the key elements underlying European economic dynamics of the era. Structured in two parts, the book begins by examining the central issues of the state–economy relationship, including military revolution, the fiscal state and public finance, mercantilism, the formation of commercial empires and the economic war between Britain and France in the 1700s. The second part presents a detailed comparison between the different economic policies of the most important European states, looking at their unique demographic, economic, military and institutional contexts. Taken as a whole, this work provides a valuable analysis of early modern economic history and a picture of Europe’s global position on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. This book will be useful to students and researchers of economic history, early modern history and European history.

For thousands of years, Portugal has been the point of arrival and departure for peoples, cultures, languages, ideas, fashions, behaviours, beliefs, institutions and produce. While its miscegenation and global multimodal activity enriched the world in many ways, it also provoked violence, war, suffering and resistance. The Global History of Portugal contains 93 chapters grouped into five parts: Pre-history, Antiquity, Middle Ages, Early Modern period and Modern World. Each chapter begins with an event, interpreted in the light of global history. Each part opens with an introduction, offering a perspective of the period in question. The three Editors, five Scientific Coordinators (João Luís Cardoso, Carlos Fabião, Bernardo Vasconcelos e Sousa, Catia Antunes and António Costa Pinto) and ninety Contributors offer a critical and analytical synthesis of the history that originated in Portuguese territory or passed through it, stimulating the process of encounter and dis-encounter in todays global world. The history presented gives special attention to the world that moulded Portugal and the Portuguese, and to the ways Portugal configured the world. It seeks to identify and understand the transversal entanglements of historic impact and the impulses these gave to the construction of Portugal and the world. Contemporary reflection and academic scholarship on the global history of leading nations has stimulated a rethinking of the past and a more comprehensive recognition of legacy. Historians can no longer overlook the wider world with which their country of investigation has interacted. Portugal's role in the dynamic circulation of peoples and ideas makes it global history not only unique by way of what took place but also in terms of a potential academic template for better understanding of how the past shapes the present, and more particularly the importance of acknowledging a country's past historic mis-steps and how these are dealt with by contemporary populations.

This book showcases the wide variety of commercial cosmopolitan practices that arose from the global economic entanglements of the early modern period. Cosmopolitanism is not only a philosophical ideal: for many centuries it has also been an everyday practice across the globe. The early modern era saw hitherto unprecedented levels of economic interconnectedness. States, societies, and individuals reacted with a mixture of commercial idealism and commercial anxiety, seeking at once to exploit new opportunities for growth whilst limiting its disruptive effects. In highlighting the range of commercial cosmopolitan practices that grew out of early modern globalisation, the book demonstrates that it provided robust alternatives to the universalising western imperial model of the later period. Deploying a number of interdisciplinary methodologies, the kind of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ that Ulrich Beck has called for, chapters provide agency-centred evaluations of the risks and opportunities inherent in the ambiguous role of the cosmopolitan, who, often playing on and mobilising a number of identities, operated in between and outside of different established legal, social, and cultural systems. The book will be important reading for students and scholars working at the intersection of economic, global, and cultural history.

A groundbreaking history of how the Black Death unleashed revolutionary change across the medieval world and ushered in the modern age In 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbours. The Black Death was a human tragedy that abruptly halved entire populations and caused untold suffering, but it also brought about a cultural and economic renewal on a scale never before witnessed. The World the Plague Made is a panoramic history of how the bubonic plague revolutionized labour, trade, and technology and set the stage for Europe’s global expansion. James Belich takes readers across centuries and continents to shed new light on one of history’s greatest paradoxes. Why did Europe’s dramatic rise begin in the wake of the Black Death? Belich shows how plague doubled the per capita endowment of everything even as it decimated the population. Many more people had disposable incomes. Demand grew for silks, sugar, spices, furs, gold, and slaves. Europe expanded to satisfy that demand—and plague provided the means. Labour scarcity drove more use of waterpower, wind power, and gunpowder. Technologies like water-powered blast furnaces, heavily gunned galleons, and musketry were fast-tracked by plague. A new “crew culture” of “disposable males” emerged to man the guns and galleons. Setting the rise of Western Europe in global context, Belich demonstrates how the mighty empires of the Middle East and Russia also flourished after the plague, and how European expansion was deeply entangled with the Chinese and other peoples throughout the world.