1. 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.
A comprehensive overview and reinterpretation of Portugal's formation and history up to 1807 and of its wide-flung maritime empire.
A. R. Disney was educated at Oxford and Harvard 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.
'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
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