The Portuguese Empire In Asia 1500 1700

Featuring updates and revisions that reflect recent historiography, this new edition of The Portuguese Empire in Asia 1500-1700 presents a comprehensive overview of Portuguese imperial history that considers Asian and European perspectives. Features an argument-driven history with a clear chronological structure Considers the latest developments in English, French, and Portuguese historiography Offers a balanced view in a divisive area of historical study Includes updated Glossary and Guide to Further Reading

Winner of the Dom João de Castro Prize for Portuguese History This is the story of the first and one of the greatest colonial empires: its birth, apotheosis, and decline. By approaching the history of the Portuguese empire thematically, A. J. R. Russell-Wood is able to pursue ideas and make connections that previously have been constrained by strict chronological approaches. Using the study of movement as a focus, Russell-Wood gains unique insight into the diversity, breadth, and balance between the competing interests and priorities that characterized the Portuguese culture and its expansion spanning four centuries' events on four different continents.

The four essays in this book examine aspects of Portugal's first overseas empire, the maritime and commercial empire that was founded in the fifteenth century and which, during the sixteenth century extended from Brazil to China.

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.

While the general outline of the history of Portuguese expansion in Asia is rather well-known, many areas that were hubs of trade and settlement have been only briefly studied. One of the most conspicuous of those is the Bay of Bengal, where the Portuguese had an important official and unofficial presence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The product of extensive research in Indian, Portuguese, and Netherland archives, this collection of essays is the first substantial treatment of the Portuguese presence in the Bay of Bengal. The work of an economic historian, the volume offers important insight into the nature of early modern European expansion and imperialism, urban history, and colonial social history.

A comprehensive overview and reinterpretation of Portugal's formation and history up to 1807 and of its acquisition of a wide-flung maritime empire from the early fifteenth century.

While Spanish traders of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were mining the riches of the New World, the Portuguese continued to reap the lucrative Asian trade in spices and luxury items. Historians have long considered the Portuguese trade the exclusive enterprise of the kings of Portugal and a few privileged aristocrats, with only minimal participation by private merchants. But in fact, argues James C. Boyajian, actual capital investments by private Portuguese merchants were roughly ten times those of the Portuguese crown - and even exceeded those of the far larger Dutch East India Company. In Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, Boyajian reassesses the consequences of Portugal's flourishing private trade with Asia, including increased tensions between the growing urban merchant class and the still-dominant landed aristocracy. He also shows how Portuguese-Asian trade formed part of a global trading network that linked not only Europe and Asia but also - for the first time - Asia, West Africa, Brazil, and Spanish America. And he argues that, contrary to previous scholarly opinion, nearly half of the Portuguese-Asian trade was controlled by New Christians - descendants of Iberian Jews forcibly converted to Christianity in the 1490s. Ironically, Boyajian concludes, the vast wealth that flowed into Portugal between 1580 and 1640 did little to enrich the country. Landed aristocrats who controlled the church, the Inquisition, and the royal administration used their position to deny merchants the social standing that would encourage productive investments in Portugal. And by the seventeenth century, the Portuguese-Asian trade itself was doomed - the result, Boyajian argues, not of the much-heralded Dutch economic successes but of Dutch naval blockades that effectively severed Portugal's trading lifeline with Asia.