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'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
'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
Product 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.
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Portugal is a small country of just 92,000 square kilometres - approximately the size of Hungary, a little larger than Austria or marginally smaller than Greece. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
Portugal is a small country of just 92,000 square kilometres - approximately the size of Hungary, a little larger than Austria or marginally smaller than Greece. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I started reading this knowing a little of Portuguese history from several visits to the country. I found it a good account of the history through to 1807 - obviously written by a professional historian but very accessible and even quite gripping in an understated way.
Disney explains how portugal was born in the eleventh century - not from any cultural, linguistic or geographical separateness from the rest of the Iberian peninsula - but from wrangling for territory between Christian nobles as Muslim Hispania crumbled. The survival of this accidental county through to the twenty first century owes much to one spectacular stroke of good fortune: Portugal's golden age of discovery in the fifteenth century, and the opportunities that provided for ongoing colonial explotation, particularly of Brazil.
Given that the colonies became the major souce of political and economic power for this small marginal country, how to tell the story of Portugal, without getting irretreviably sidetracked into the history of Brazil, of Africa, of India? This author solves the problem by focusing only on the history of mainland Portugal for this first volume, focusing on the Portuguese Empire for the second volume. This works - Disney is able to maintain a narrative that otherwise would become far too confusing. But it leads to some strange effects as you read through the first volume: characters are prone to suddenly appear and disappear off the narrow Portuguese stage. It also means that the account of the Golden Age itself is somewhat muted.
Other than that, its a fascinating book, and I wish Mr Disney would write the rest of the story - from 1807 to the end of fascism in 1975 - an account of which doesn't seem to exist in English.
Disney explains how portugal was born in the eleventh century - not from any cultural, linguistic or geographical separateness from the rest of the Iberian peninsula - but from wrangling for territory between Christian nobles as Muslim Hispania crumbled. The survival of this accidental county through to the twenty first century owes much to one spectacular stroke of good fortune: Portugal's golden age of discovery in the fifteenth century, and the opportunities that provided for ongoing colonial explotation, particularly of Brazil.
Given that the colonies became the major souce of political and economic power for this small marginal country, how to tell the story of Portugal, without getting irretreviably sidetracked into the history of Brazil, of Africa, of India? This author solves the problem by focusing only on the history of mainland Portugal for this first volume, focusing on the Portuguese Empire for the second volume. This works - Disney is able to maintain a narrative that otherwise would become far too confusing. But it leads to some strange effects as you read through the first volume: characters are prone to suddenly appear and disappear off the narrow Portuguese stage. It also means that the account of the Golden Age itself is somewhat muted.
Other than that, its a fascinating book, and I wish Mr Disney would write the rest of the story - from 1807 to the end of fascism in 1975 - an account of which doesn't seem to exist in English.
2 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you wish to purchase Volume 2, please see: ISBN-10: 0521738229
A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire 2 vol. PB Set: A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire 2 volume Set: A History of Portugal and ... Empire - From Beginnings to 1807: Volume 2
A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire 2 vol. PB Set: A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire 2 volume Set: A History of Portugal and ... Empire - From Beginnings to 1807: Volume 2
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Well-executed history
19 April 2010
Format:Paperback
I much enjoyed this history of Portugal to 1807 (when the royal family makes its way to Brazil). Disney writes in an easy-to-read style that is not at all academic and is simple to digest. This is very much a political narrative -- not too much on social history. I don't know enough about Portuguese history to evaluate the contents, but Disney seems to have considered the relevant sources and opposing points of view and drawn fair conclusions. As stated in the TLS review of a few months ago, Disney might have made a mistake in dividing his history into two volumes, since the history of Portugal is difficult to separate from that of her colonies. But in any case, I'm looking forward to reading Volume 2 on the overseas empire.
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