A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion 1400-1668 provides an accessible survey of how the Portuguese became so influential during this period and how Portuguese settlements were founded in areas as far flung as Asia, Africa and South America.

Malyn Newitt examines how the ideas and institutions of a late medieval society were deployed to aid expansion into Africa and the Atlantic islands, as well as how, through rivalry with Castile, this grew into a worldwide commercial enterprise. Finally, he considers how resilient the Portuguese overseas communities were, surviving...

This book summarizes five hundred years of the history of the societies that exist within the area that became Mozambique in 1891. It also takes the story up to the present, including the War of Liberation and Mozambique after independence. It is work of major scholarship that will appeal to experts and students alike.

The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415 1670 brings together a collection of documents all in new English translation that illustrate aspects of the encounters between the Portuguese and the peoples of North and West Africa in the period from 1400 to 1650. This period witnessed the diaspora of the Sephardic Jews, the emigration of Portuguese to West Africa and the islands, and the beginnings of the black diaspora associated with the slave trade. The documents show how the Portuguese tried to understand the societies with which they came into contact and to reconcile their experience with the...

Albino Manoel Pacheco was sent in 1861-2 to re-establish the Portuguese settlement at Zumbo at a time when Livingstone's Zambesi Expedition was still very active in the region. He wrote an account of his expedition which has long been recognised to be of exceptional importance, though it can only be found in obscure 19th century publications. In it he gives the first detailed description of the activities of the African spirit mediums and records the traditional history of the 'empire' of the Monomotapas. He also gives a history of the Zumbo settlement which draws on the traditions of the...

Today Portuguese is the seventh most widely spoken language in the world and Brazil is a new economic powerhouse. Both phenomena result from the Portuguese 'Discoveries' of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Catholic missions that planted Portuguese communities in every continent. Some were part of the Portuguese empire but many survived independently under other rulers with their own Creole languages and indigenized Portuguese culture. In the 19th and 20th centuries these were joined by millions of economic migrants who established Portuguese settlements in Europe, North America, Venezuela...

In 2004, a conference was held at King's College London to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Charles Boxer. The theme of the conference was the development of the culturally mixed 'Portuguese' societies in Asia, Africa and America, which reflected Boxer's own interest in the social history of Portugal's overseas empire. Although the conference papers were published by Bristol University, this volume is long out of print and the outstanding quality of many of the contributions has made it necessary for this collection to be republished. Portuguese overseas expansion over a period of...