Results by title
57 books match the query 'Portugal' and 3 start with s
Slavery and Religious Conversion in Portugal's Indian Empire, 1500-1700
Stephanie Hassell
Ohio University Press, 2025
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, enslaved Africans and Asians were part of the larger Portuguese project of building and maintaining a Catholic empire in the Indian Ocean. Both the Church and the Crown influenced the owner-slave relationship across households, the most basic organizational unit of power over the populace. Responsible for their enslaved dependents’ conversion to Catholicism, slaveholders became religious stewards whose spiritual duties toward their slaves helped expand the Christian population. This converted population was part of the imperial security apparatus, which conceptualized enslaved Catholics as loyal allies against neighboring Muslim states. They became members of the broader colonial community in which Catholicism also conveyed rights, enabled agency, and provoked household struggles between owners and slaves. Thus, the making of a Catholic empire was a contested process tied to the complex relationships between enslaved individuals, their enslavers, and the Church. The Portuguese Inquisition was a hybrid ecclesiastical and state institution, and its records detail the Crown’s commitment to the creation of a worldwide Catholic empire. Accordingly, inquisitorial encounters brought conversion, slavery, and empire into one field of vision. The Portuguese Inquisition had only one overseas tribunal, located in Goa, India. While most trial records of the Goa Tribunal were destroyed, author Stephanie Hassell has utilized extant sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cases featuring enslaved defendants and witnesses. Her use of thousands of case summaries provides a broader inquisitorial context by showing how prosecutorial trends reflected the anxieties of the Portuguese imperial state. Parish records, ecclesiastical council records, and municipal council records likewise emphasize the significance of religious conversion.
Spain and Portugal in the New World, 1492-1700
Lyle N. McAlister
University of Minnesota Press, 1984
Spain and Portugal in the New World, 1492-1700 was first published in 1984. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Spanish and Portuguese expansion substantially altered the social, political, and economic contours of the modern world. In his book, Lyle McAlister provides a narrative and interpretive history of the exploration and settlement of the Americas by Spain and Portugal.
McAlister divides this period (and the book) into three parts. First, he describes the formation of Old World societies with particular attention to those features that influenced the directions and forms of overseas expansion. Second, he traces the dynamic processes of conquest and colonization that between 1492 and about 1570 firmly established Spanish and Portuguese dominion in the New World. The third part deals with colonial growth and consolidation down to about 1700. McAlister's main themes are: the post-conquest territorial expansion that established the limits of what later came to be called Latin America, the emergence of distinctively Spanish and Portuguese American societies and economies, the formation of systems of imperial control and exploitation, and the ways in which conflicts between imperial and American interests were reconciled.
This comprehensive history, with its extensive bibliographic essay and attention to historiographic issues, will be a standard reference for students and scholars of the period.
Spain
The Rise of the First World PowerJohn Fraser Ramsey with a Foreword by James D. Mixson
University of Alabama Press, 2026
Before Britain. Before America. There was Spain.
In Spain: The Rise of the First World Power, John Fraser Ramsey traces the evolution of Spain from a battleground of Romans, Visigoths, Moors, and Christians to the most formidable empire of its age. Not merely a chronicle of kings, battles, and dynasties, the book reveals how institutions, beliefs, ambitions, and accidents combined to propel a stubborn and quarrelsome people onto history’s center stage.
In his memorable, avuncular style, Ramsey shows how nations are a mix of virtues and flaws, complicated human communities held together by ingenuity, conviction, and occasional luck. His Spain is not populated solely by monarchs in brocade and generals on horseback. Merchants, clerics, adventurers, bureaucrats, and visionaries all take their places in the procession, forming the untidy pageant from which great powers invariably emerge. The effect is less a lecture than a guided expedition through the machinery of history.
This reissue of Ramsey's longest work arrives at an opportune hour. Amid fissiparous debates about identity, borders, religion, and power, Ramsey supplies the rarer commodity of perspective. Readers interested in Spanish history, European civilization, empire, exploration, military affairs, political institutions, religious history, and cultural exchange will find a rich larder of insight. It is especially suited to those who suspect that the past is more instructive than the slogans with which moderns so industriously replace it.