Portuguese Atlantic World
- LAST REVIEWED: 25 January 2023
- LAST MODIFIED: 10 March 2015
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0044
- LAST REVIEWED: 25 January 2023
- LAST MODIFIED: 10 March 2015
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0044
Introduction
The development of Portuguese navigation, trade, colonization, and intercultural exchange played a key role in the shaping of an Atlantic world. Beginning in the first half of the 15th century, small streams of merchants, migrants, and missionaries issued from the small kingdom at the extreme southwestern edge of Christendom, establishing footholds among native peoples along the Atlantic coast of Africa and settling several previously uninhabited islands. By the mid-17th century, the rapid expansion of sugar production along the Atlantic coast of Brazil and the corresponding growth of the transoceanic slave trade laid the foundations of a South Atlantic system, binding together South America and parts of Central and Southern Africa in an ongoing circulation of peoples, objects, plants, styles, religious practices, and forms of knowledge. At the close of the 17th century, the discovery of gold in Brazil sent new waves of migrants across the Atlantic, both voluntary (from Portugal) and forced (from Africa). In 1808 Napoleon invaded Portugal and the Portuguese monarchy set sail for Rio de Janeiro, shifting the center of the Lusophone Atlantic to South America. Following Brazilian independence in 1822, in spite of the force of Abolitionism throughout the Atlantic, the slave trade between Portuguese Africa (especially Angola and Mozambique) and Brazil reached alarming levels before finally coming to an end, shortly after the Eusébio de Queiroz Law of 1850. In this sense, while much of the current bibliography emphasizes transatlantic connections, interaction, and exchange, it should be remembered that a large part of Portuguese Atlantic history involves brutal processes of separation, exploitation, and destruction. After all, Portuguese overseas activities and policies contributed directly to two of the greatest demographic catastrophes in human history: the vertiginous decline of Amerindian populations and the mass deportation of millions of slaves from Africa to a new world. Nonetheless, as scholars of Portuguese expansion to Africa, Asia, and America have shown, the history of the Lusophone world is also that of diverse peoples and polities who engaged the Portuguese as allies, enemies, and colonial masters. They, too, contributed in significant ways to shaping the Portuguese Atlantic world, which rarely resulted in the form prescribed or even imagined by the Portuguese themselves.
General Overviews
The Portuguese Atlantic world often is treated as part of a broader construct: the Portuguese overseas empire, extending in spatial terms from the Maghreb to the Moluccas (in Charles Boxer’s memorable phrase), and in chronology from the capture of Ceuta in 1415 to the cession of Macau to China in 1999. A long colonialist tradition (which reached its heights under Salazar in the mid-20th century) emphasized the spread of a Portuguese cultural and institutional matrix to Africa, Asia, and America, but this approach lost a great deal of its appeal with the tragic debacle of Portuguese colonialism in Africa and Asia in the 1970s. More recent scholarship has underscored the discontinuous and informal character of Portuguese overseas activities. In this literature, the objectified “other” has become a conscious agent of social action; commercial monopolies have been displaced by networks of diaspora traders; the triumphant view of spiritual conquests has been replaced by manifestations of native Christianity; centralized royal policy has given way to a decentered focus on local and regional elites. In effect, scholars of Portuguese expansion increasingly have adopted a view from the shore rather than from the ship. The cumulative effect of these critical studies appears especially in Newitt 2005 and Disney 2009, both of which offer important suggestions for the Atlantic world from their respective authors’ experiences as researchers in the Lusophone Indian Ocean. Boxer 1969 remains useful as a sweeping introductory overview, while Russell-Wood 1998 also provides a readable single-volume study, with an original thesis on spatial and social mobility. Bethencourt and Curto 2007 includes a solid sampling of recent Portuguese and Brazilian scholarship in translation. Finally, the encyclopedic contributions (in Portuguese) Serrão and Marques 1986–2006 and Bethencourt and Chaudhuri 1998–2000 interweave more traditional institutional approaches with recent scholarship on informal aspects of Portuguese expansion.
Bethencourt, Francisco, and Kirti Chaudhuri, eds. História da Expansão Portuguesa. 5 vols. Lisbon: Círculo dos Leitores, 1998–2000.
Launched between the quincentennial celebration of Vasco da Gama’s journey and the cession of Portugal’s last colonial holding to China, this collection draws together top colonial scholars from Portugal, Brazil, and the United States in a comprehensive coverage of Portuguese imperial expansion. Atlantic history receives greater attention in Volumes 1, 2, and 3, from the early settlement of uninhabited islands to the full development of a South Atlantic system.
Bethencourt, Francisco, and Diogo Ramada Curto, eds. Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Excellent set of essays by leading specialists in Portuguese expansion studies, covering a broad gamut of themes in a comparative scope, placing the Atlantic in a broader context.
Boxer, Charles Ralph. The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1815. The History of Human Society Series. New York: Knopf, 1969.
Classic overview of Portuguese overseas expansion to Africa, Asia, and America, written with an eye for biographical detail, picturesque anecdotes, and sweeping conclusions. Although superseded in many respects by subsequent research and theoretical approaches to colonialism, Boxer includes useful insights to race relations, colonial administration, religion, and several other themes fleshed out in other works. This book was reissued by the Gulbenkian Foundation in 1991.
Disney, A. R. A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Written by a leading specialist in Portuguese India, an informative, well-organized, and readable synthesis of the literature covering Portugal from the early hunter-gatherers to 1807, and its empire from the taking of Ceuta (1415) to the early 19th century, with several chapters on the Atlantic.
Newitt, M. D. D. A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400–1668. London: Routledge, 2005.
Sweeping overview by a specialist in the history of Mozambique, with an excellent focus on informal aspects of Portuguese expansion, which include mestiço communities, trade diasporas, and other phenomena beyond the reach of formal empire.
Russell-Wood, A. J. R. The Portuguese Empire, 1414–1808: A World on the Move. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Paperback edition with a new preface. In this ambitious overview, Brazil and the Atlantic are projected into the wider context of Portuguese overseas expansion. Includes insightful chapters on the circulation of people, commodities, plants, styles, and ideas.
Serrão, Joel, and A. H., de Oliveira Marques, eds. Nova História da Expansão Portuguesa. 12 vols. Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1986–2006.
Organized chronologically, geographically, and thematically, this collection includes broad syntheses by leading (mostly Portuguese) scholars. Volume 3 (recently published) covers the Atlantic Islands from the 15th to the 20th century, Volumes 6, 7, and 8 treat the “Luso-Brazilian Empire” from 1500 to 1822, and Volume 10 covers the Portuguese in Africa during the 19th century. Curiously, Volume 1 (presumably an overview) and Volume 9 (Africa before the 1825) have not appeared yet.
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Article
- Abolition of Slavery
- Abolitionism and Africa
- Africa and the Atlantic World
- African American Religions
- African Religion and Culture
- African Retailers and Small Artisans in the Atlantic World
- Age of Atlantic Revolutions, The
- Alexander von Humboldt and Transatlantic Studies
- America, Pre-Contact
- American Revolution, The
- Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Popery
- Argentina
- Army, British
- Arsenals
- Art and Artists
- Asia and the Americas and the Iberian Empires
- Atlantic Biographies
- Atlantic Creoles
- Atlantic History and Hemispheric History
- Atlantic Migration
- Atlantic New Orleans: 18th and 19th Centuries
- Atlantic Trade and the British Economy
- Atlantic Trade and the European Economy
- Bacon's Rebellion
- Baltic Sea
- Baptists
- Barbados in the Atlantic World
- Barbary States
- Benguela
- Berbice in the Atlantic World
- Black Atlantic in the Age of Revolutions, The
- Bolívar, Simón
- Borderlands
- Brazil
- Brazil and Africa
- Brazilian Independence
- Britain and Empire, 1685-1730
- British Atlantic Architectures
- British Atlantic World
- Buenos Aires in the Atlantic World
- Cabato, Giovanni (John Cabot)
- Cannibalism
- Capitalism
- Captain John Smith
- Captivity
- Captivity in Africa
- Captivity in North America
- Caribbean, The
- Cartier, Jacques
- Castas
- Catholicism
- Cattle in the Atlantic World
- Central American Independence
- Central Europe and the Atlantic World
- Charleston
- Chartered Companies, British and Dutch
- Cherokee
- Childhood
- Chinese Indentured Servitude in the Atlantic World
- Chocolate
- Church and Slavery
- Cities and Urbanization in Portuguese America
- Citizenship in the Atlantic World
- Class and Social Structure
- Climate
- Clothing
- Coastal/Coastwide Trade
- Cod in the Atlantic World
- Coffee
- Colonial Governance in Spanish America
- Colonial Governance in the Atlantic World
- Colonialism and Postcolonialism
- Colonization, Ideologies of
- Colonization of English America
- Communications in the Atlantic World
- Comparative Indigenous History of the Americas
- Confraternities
- Constitutions
- Continental America
- Cook, Captain James
- Cosmopolitanism
- Cotton
- Credit and Debt
- Creek Indians in the Atlantic World, The
- Creolization
- Criminal Transportation in the Atlantic World
- Crowds in the Atlantic World
- Cuba
- Currency
- Death in the Atlantic World
- Demography of the Atlantic World
- Diaspora, Jewish
- Diaspora, The Acadian
- Disease in the Atlantic World
- Domestic Production and Consumption in the Atlantic World
- Domestic Slave Trades in the Americas
- Dreams and Dreaming
- Dutch Atlantic World
- Dutch Brazil
- Dutch Caribbean and Guianas, The
- Early Modern France
- Economy and Consumption in the Atlantic World
- Economy of British America, The
- Edwards, Jonathan
- Elites
- Emancipation
- Emotions
- Empire and State Formation
- Enlightenment, The
- Environment and the Natural World
- Ethnicity
- Europe and Africa
- Europe and the Atlantic World, Northern
- Europe and the Atlantic World, Western
- European, Javanese and African and Indentured Servitude in...
- Evangelicalism and Conversion
- Female Slave Owners
- Feminism
- First Contact and Early Colonization of Brazil
- Fiscality
- Fiscal-Military State
- Food
- Forts, Fortresses, and Fortifications
- France and Empire
- France and its Empire in the Indian Ocean
- France and the British Isles from 1640 to 1789
- Free People of Color
- Free Ports in the Atlantic World
- French Army and the Atlantic World, The
- French Atlantic World
- French Emancipation
- French Revolution, The
- Gardens
- Gender in Iberian America
- Gender in North America
- Gender in the Atlantic World
- Gender in the Caribbean
- George Montagu Dunk, Second Earl of Halifax
- Georgia in the Atlantic World
- German Influences in America
- Germans in the Atlantic World
- Giovanni da Verrazzano, Explorer
- Glasgow
- Glorious Revolution
- Godparents and Godparenting
- Great Awakening
- Green Atlantic: the Irish in the Atlantic World
- Guianas, The
- Haitian Revolution, The
- Hanoverian Britain
- Havana in the Atlantic World
- Hinterlands of the Atlantic World
- Histories and Historiographies of the Atlantic World
- Honor
- Huguenots
- Hunger and Food Shortages
- Iberian Atlantic World, 1600-1800
- Iberian Empires, 1600-1800
- Iberian Inquisitions
- Idea of Atlantic History, The
- Impact of the French Revolution on the Caribbean, The
- Indentured Servitude
- Indentured Servitude in the Atlantic World, Indian
- India, The Atlantic Ocean and
- Indigenous Knowledge
- Indigo in the Atlantic World
- Insurance
- Internal Slave Migrations in the Americas
- Interracial Marriage in the Atlantic World
- Ireland and the Atlantic World
- Iroquois (Haudenosaunee)
- Islam and the Atlantic World
- Itinerant Traders, Peddlers, and Hawkers
- Jamaica in the Atlantic World
- Jefferson, Thomas
- Jesuits
- Jews and Blacks
- Labor Systems
- Land and Propert in the Atlantic World
- Language, State, and Empire
- Languages, Caribbean Creole
- Latin American Independence
- Law and Slavery
- Legal Culture
- Leisure in the British Atlantic World
- Letters and Letter Writing
- Lima
- Literature and Culture
- Literature of the British Caribbean
- Literature, Slavery and Colonization
- Liverpool in The Atlantic World 1500-1833
- Louverture, Toussaint
- Loyalism
- Lutherans
- Mahogany
- Manumission
- Maps in the Atlantic World
- Maritime Atlantic in the Age of Revolutions, The
- Markets in the Atlantic World
- Maroons and Marronage
- Marriage and Family in the Atlantic World
- Maryland
- Material Culture in the Atlantic World
- Material Culture of Slavery in the British Atlantic
- Medicine in the Atlantic World
- Mennonites
- Mental Disorder in the Atlantic World
- Mercantilism
- Merchants in the Atlantic World
- Merchants' Networks
- Mestizos
- Mexico
- Migrations and Diasporas
- Minas Gerais
- Miners
- Mining, Gold, and Silver
- Missionaries
- Missionaries, Native American
- Money and Banking in the Atlantic Economy
- Monroe, James
- Moravians
- Morris, Gouverneur
- Music and Music Making
- Napoléon Bonaparte and the Atlantic World
- Nation and Empire in Northern Atlantic History
- Nation, Nationhood, and Nationalism
- Native American Histories in North America
- Native American Networks
- Native American Religions
- Native Americans and Africans
- Native Americans and the American Revolution
- Native Americans and the Atlantic World
- Native Americans in Cities
- Native Americans in Europe
- Native North American Women
- Native Peoples of Brazil
- Natural History
- Networks for Migrations and Mobility
- Networks of Science and Scientists
- New England in the Atlantic World
- New France and Louisiana
- New York City
- News
- Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World
- Nineteenth-Century France
- North Africa and the Atlantic World
- Northern New Spain
- Novel in the Age of Revolution, The
- Oceanic History
- Oceans
- Pacific, The
- Paine, Thomas
- Papacy and the Atlantic World
- Paris
- People of African Descent in Early Modern Europe
- Peru
- Pets and Domesticated Animals in the Atlantic World
- Philadelphia
- Philanthropy
- Piracy
- Plantations in the Atlantic World
- Plants
- Poetry in the British Atlantic
- Political Participation in the Nineteenth Century Atlantic...
- Polygamy and Bigamy
- Port Cities, British
- Port Cities, British American
- Port Cities, French
- Port Cities, French American
- Port Cities, Iberian
- Ports, African
- Portugal and Brazile in the Age of Revolutions
- Portugal, Early Modern
- Portuguese Atlantic World
- Poverty in the Early Modern English Atlantic
- Pre-Columbian Transatlantic Voyages
- Pregnancy and Reproduction
- Print Culture in the British Atlantic
- Proprietary Colonies
- Protestantism
- Puritanism
- Quakers
- Quebec and the Atlantic World, 1760–1867
- Quilombos
- Race and Racism
- Race, The Idea of
- Reconstruction, Democracy, and United States Imperialism
- Red Atlantic
- Refugees, Saint-Domingue
- Religion
- Religion and Colonization
- Religion in the British Civil Wars
- Religious Border-Crossing
- Religious Networks
- Representations of Slavery
- Republicanism
- Rice in the Atlantic World
- Rio de Janeiro
- Rum
- Rumor
- Russia and North America
- Sailors
- Saint Domingue
- Saint-Louis, Senegal
- Salvador da Bahia
- Scandinavian Chartered Companies
- Science, History of
- Scotland and the Atlantic World
- Sea Creatures in the Atlantic World
- Second-Hand Trade
- Settlement and Region in British America, 1607-1763
- Seven Years' War, The
- Seville
- Sex and Sexuality in the Atlantic World
- Shakers
- Shakespeare and the Atlantic World
- Ships and Shipping
- Signares
- Silk
- Slave Codes
- Slave Names and Naming in the Anglophone Atlantic
- Slave Owners In The British Atlantic
- Slave Rebellions
- Slave Resistance in the Atlantic World
- Slave Trade and Natural Science, The
- Slave Trade, The Atlantic
- Slavery and Empire
- Slavery and Fear
- Slavery and Gender
- Slavery and the Family
- Slavery, Atlantic
- Slavery, Health, and Medicine
- Slavery in Africa
- Slavery in Brazil
- Slavery in British America
- Slavery in British and American Literature
- Slavery in Danish America
- Slavery in Dutch America and the West Indies
- Slavery in New England
- Slavery in North America, The Growth and Decline of
- Slavery in the Cape Colony, South Africa
- Slavery in the French Atlantic World
- Slavery, Native American
- Slavery, Public Memory and Heritage of
- Slavery, The Origins of
- Slavery, Urban
- Smuggling
- São Paulo
- Sociability in the British Atlantic
- Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts...
- Soldiers
- South Atlantic
- South Atlantic Creole Archipelagos South Atlantic Creole A...
- South Carolina
- Sovereignty and the Law
- Spain, Early Modern
- Spanish America After Independence, 1825-1900
- Spanish American Port Cities
- Spanish Atlantic World
- Spanish Colonization to 1650
- Subjecthood in the Atlantic World
- Sugar in the Atlantic World
- Technology, Inventing, and Patenting
- Textiles in the Atlantic World
- Texts, Printing, and the Book
- The American West
- The French Lesser Antilles
- The Fur Trade
- The Spanish Caribbean
- Theater
- Time(scapes) in the Atlantic World
- Tobacco
- Toleration in the Atlantic World
- Transatlantic Political Economy
- Tudor and Stuart Britain in the Wider World, 1485-1685
- Universities
- USA and Empire in the 19th Century
- Venezuela and the Atlantic World
- Violence
- Visual Art and Representation
- War and Trade
- War of 1812
- War of the Spanish Succession
- Warfare
- Warfare in Spanish America
- Warfare in 17th-Century North America
- Warfare, Medicine, and Disease in the Atlantic World
- Weavers
- West Indian Economic Decline
- Whitefield, George
- Whiteness in the Atlantic World
- Wine
- Witchcraft in the Atlantic World
- Women and the Law
- Women Prophets