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The Portuguese seaborne empire, 1415-1825 (The History of human society)

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The band of historians working on the history of Portugal and its worldwide extensions has never been large. Many of the senior researchers today, especially in the English-speaking world, owe a great debt to one man, Charles Ralph Boxer, virtually the founding father of the field. This volume is his finest work, known and used by scholars everywhere since its publication in 1969. It is simply one of the great works of history in our times. By reading it, you will learn an enormous amount about how a small, unimportant kingdom on the Atlantic Ocean managed to construct a trading and military network that extended from Brazil to Africa to India, China, Japan, Indonesia and all points in between. Boxer discusses the motivating forces that led the Portuguese to dominate the spice trade. It is shown that with its small population, Portugal had to rely on slaves or mercenaries. Often their forces were composed of Africans, their pilots Jews or others, their sailors a mix of Asians and mestiços. He breaks two common myths: 1) that the cross closely followed the traders---it took several decades before even a start was made (by the Jesuits) in conversions; and 2) that the Portuguese, unlike other European colonial powers, were color blind. Several Brazilian socio-historians have written to emphasize this, but Boxer shows that it was untrue. After a chapter on sugar and slavery in Brazil, the rest of the book deals with the decline of Portugal's empire in Asia over the centuries from 1600 to 1800, when only a few tiny, misgoverned enclaves were left. The more efficient Dutch, among whom ability outweighed family background, challenged and defeated the Portuguese everywhere; Portugal itself stagnated and turned inwards. Brazil, however, grew and prospered, eventually outshining the mother country and providing a refuge for the royal family during Napoleonic times (it wasn't until 1821 that the Portuguese royal family returned to Lisbon---perhaps the only instance of a European country being ruled from America).

With the vast amount of social and economic information on a wide variety of subjects---the use of the Portuguese language, the rise of Oman along the African coast, Pombal's dictatorship in Portugal, intermarriage and color prejudice in the widely scattered empire, the quality of Portuguese seamen--- with its eminently well-written, clear prose, and its sweep of vision, THE PORTUGUESE SEABORNE EMPIRE deserves to be on the shelf of every person interested in history. If you are interested in Portugal or its offshoots in Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Goa, Malacca and Macau, this book is a must. I am stunned to see that I am the first to review it for Amazon.

The Portuguese empire extended more than half-way around the world, from the Amazonian jungle to the Macau peninsula and the Moluccas. Both a fabulous and a dismal adventure, its history is as difficult to tell as it is worthy of being told. Boxer, an expert on Portuguese colonial expansion, makes an excellent job of it: though he spent decades in Portuguese archives, he had the advantage of being an outsider. The Portuguese Seaborne Empire spans the period from 1415 to 1825, the empire's rise and heyday, and the beginnings of its fall. The story it tells is both exhilarating (on the early voyages of discovery, on Brazilian independence), and appalling (on slavery or the Inquisition). Boxer debunks the myth that the Portuguese empire was not racist, while perhaps admitting it was relatively less so than other European colonial systems. His book includes both a chronological section and thematic chapters, helping the reader both to a historical narrative and to an analysis of the Portuguese empire's ethnic, political, social, and religious moving features. This remains the definitive account on its subject.