Empire: History of Global Empires

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.

This selective history of Portugal reflects the author's fascination with his own Portuguese/Madeiran heritage. The work tracks the nation's rise and fall as a world power, drawing from the author's travels and archival research. "Dos Passos," writes historian J. H. Plumb, "brings to his material a novelist's acute eye for human character and a narrative skill that any historian might envy; and he has produced one of the most readable books on the subject that I know."

History of Portugal encompasses the stretch from her earliest times to her first empire in South America, and to her decline in the early nineteenth century, before the rise of her third empire in Africa.

A unique overview of Portuguese oceanic expansion between 1400 and 1800, the essays in this volume treat a wide range of subjects - economy and society, politics and institutions, cultural configurations and comparative dimensions - and radically update data and interpretations on the economic and financial trends of the Portuguese Empire. Interregional networks are analysed in a substantial way. Patterns of settlement, political configurations, ecclesiastical structures, and local powers are put in global context. Language and literature, the arts, and science and technology are revisited with refreshing and innovative approaches. The interaction between Portuguese and local people is studied in different contexts, while the entire imperial and colonial culture of the Portuguese world is looked at synthetically for the first time. In short, this book provides a broad understanding of the Portuguese Empire in its first four centuries as a factor in world history and as a major component of European expansion.