Description
Book SynopsisA History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire offers readers a comprehensive overview and reinterpretation of the history of Portugal and its empire up to the start of the nineteenth century. Volume I concerns the formation and subsequent history of Portugal itself from pre-Roman times to the climactic French invasion of 1807.
Trade 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
Table of Contents1. Hunter-gatherers to Iron Age farmers; 2. The Roman experience; 3. The Germanic kingdoms; 4. Gharb al-Andalus; 5. The medieval kingdom; 6. The fourteenth century; 7. The making of Avis Portugal; 8. The golden age; 9. The tarnished age; 10. Habsburg Portugal; 11. Restoration and reconstruction; 12. The age of gold and baroque splendour; 13. The age of Pombal; 14. The late eighteenth century: finale of the old regime.
