A history of Portugal and the Portuguese empire
By: A. R. Disney.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 418
ISBN-13: 9780521843188; 9780521603973
Subjects: Portugal -- History; Portugal -- Colonies -- History
Description: "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. 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."--Publisher's web site.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.