A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, Volume 2 : From Beginnings to 1807

A 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 2 concentrates on the history of Portugal's empire, which extended into North, West, and East Africa; the Atlantic islands; maritime Asia; and Brazil.

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 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 1 concerns the history of Portugal itself from pre-Roman times to the climactic French invasion of 1807, whilst this volume traces the history of the Portuguese overseas empire.