A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, Volume I: From Beginnings to 1807: Portugal

The Kingdom of Portugal was created as a by-product of the Christian Reconquest of Hispania. With no geographical raison d' tre 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. The 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.

Author: A. R. Disney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 11/06/2009
Pages: 418
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.55lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.10w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780521843188

About the Author
Disney, A. R.: - A. R. Disney was educated at the University of Oxford and Harvard University and has taught history at Melbourne and La Trobe Universities. His publications include Twilight of the Pepper Empire (1978) and numerous articles, papers, and essays, published variously in the Economic History Review, Studia, Indica, Mare Liberum, Anais de Historia de Alem-mar, and other journals and proceedings.