The Portuguese Empire was one of the largest empires of the European age of exploration and colonization. It was also the kingdom which discovered the sea route around Africa to Asia at the end of the fifteenth century and so opened up a vista of new colonial opportunities for the European states in the process. Portuguese colonialism was based on mercantilist colonialism rather than settler colonialism, meaning that it prioritized the establishment of trading bases in key locations rather than the sending out of large numbers of settlers to colonies. Trading colonies were established in the early sixteenth century at a number of key locations around the coast of Africa, in several locations on the coast of India and in the East Indies. Later it was realized that Brazil also fell within Portugal’s sphere of control according to the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494. The Brazilian Gold Rush, which began late in the seventeenth century and lasted into the nineteenth century, led to the greatest wave of Portuguese settler colonialism seen. By then Portugal had largely been eclipsed by the British in India and the Dutch in the East Indies. Nevertheless, it was one of the last countries to decolonize and Angola, Mozambique, the Cape Verde Islands and East Timor did not become independent until 1975 after the Carnation Revolution at home in Portugal.[1]
Portuguese Empire chronology of eventsPortuguese Empire chronology of events
Portugal emerged as the pioneer of European overseas exploration in the fifteenth century. It was a young nation at that time. The County of Portugal had been founded in northern Portugal in the ninth century as one of the Christian states of the Reconquista of Iberia from the Muslim Moors. The rulers of it gradually conquered more and more land and in the middle of the twelfth century a Kingdom of Portugal was proclaimed. Lisbon was conquered a few years later in 1147, while the Algarve in the south was captured in a last major campaign in the middle of the thirteenth century, thus completing the creation of the modern-day nation of Portugal. There is an argument that the Christian states of Iberia like Portugal and later Castile and Aragon, that united to form the Kingdom of Spain at the end of the fifteenth century, viewed overseas exploration and the reconnoitring of West Africa as an extension of the Reconquista. Thus, by the beginning of the fifteenth century, Portuguese explorers were making both military forays to Muslim Morocco and exploring down the coast of the African continent.[2]
This process occurred slowly at first. In 1415 the Portuguese captured the port town of Ceuta in Morocco. In the half century that followed they progressed down the coast as far as modern-day Sierra Leone and discovered island chains like the Azores, Madeira and the Cape Verde Islands. These were established as Portugal’s first colonies and Madeira and the Azores remain overseas parts of Portugal to the present day. In the second half of the fifteenth century, as Portuguese explorers became more experienced and their navigational and cartographic methods more sophisticated, they began making quicker progress and in 1488 Bartolomeu Dias led the first expedition to reach the Cape of Good Hope and to look out at the Indian Ocean. A decade later Vasco da Gama led the first European expedition to reach India by sailing around Africa.[3]
The Portuguese developed the first truly global empire thereafter. In 1494 Pope Alexander VI had divided the world beyond Europe into Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence, kindly bequeathing Africa, Asia and what turned out to be Brazil in South America to the Portuguese. Over the next several decades the Portuguese were able to establish stations at Angola and Mozambique in Africa as supply stations in voyages around Africa, while in India they captured Goa and Bombay, as well as acquiring trading concessions and bases in several coastal cities. By the start of the early 1510s they had advanced to their ultimate destination, the Moluccas or Spice Islands in the East Indies. They conquered a large part of the Malay Peninsula, realizing, as the British later would, that this was the gateway into the East Indies. Over the next half a century they continued to expand, acquiring control over several of the islands of the East Indies and making contact with China and Japan. In the former they were granted a major trading concession at Macau.[4]
The Portuguese Empire was at its peak around the time that the concession at Macau was acquired. What changed things quite dramatically at the end of the sixteenth century was a war between the Dutch and the Spanish in the Low Countries. In the late 1560s, the Dutch Protestants of Holland, Zeeland and several other northern provinces of the Low Countries had rebelled against Spanish rule, Spain having acquired control over the region earlier in the sixteenth century. The resulting war would become known as the Eighty Years’ War, as it lasted down to 1648. By the 1590s the Dutch Republic was well and truly established as an independent state, but the Spanish continued to try and capture their territory.[5] At this juncture, the Dutch, the greatest mariners and traders of the age, decided to strike indirectly at King Philip II of Spain, who had inherited the throne of Portugal in 1580, by trying to replace Portugal as the pre-eminent colonial power in the East Indies. They were extremely successful. Under the aegis of the Dutch East India Company, the Dutch muscled into the East Indies and by the middle of the seventeenth century had largely superseded the Portuguese here.[6] Britain eclipsed Portugal as the main colonial power in India after Goa was given to England as the dowry when Catherine of Braganza married King Charles II of England in 1662.[7]
These developments left Portugal in control of Angola and Mozambique in Africa, the island of Timor and one or two other enclaves in the East Indies, Macau in China and Brazil. Colonial activity from the seventeenth century focused almost exclusively on Brazil where gold was discovered late in the century. This brought immense wealth to Portugal in the eighteenth century and also led to a major wave of settler colonialism as hundreds of thousands of Portuguese emigrated to South America. Brazil eventually became independent in 1822, following which Portugal, which by then was a second-tier European power, concentrated on developing its colonies in Angola and Mozambique.[8] During the Scramble for Africa of the late nineteenth century, Portuguese colonial advocates promoted the idea of establishing the so-called ‘Pink Map’, a plan to colonize the region around modern-day Zimbabwe and so unite Angola and Mozambique by forming a continuous Portuguese colony running from west to east across southern Africa. The plan was foiled by British expansion into what they termed Rhodesia.[9]
Despite having been a minor colonial and imperial power for centuries, Portugal was the last European power to decolonize in the twentieth century. The British, French and Belgians, for instance, had generally granted independence to their African colonies in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Estado Novo authoritarian government in Portugal refused to do so. It took the Carnation Revolution of 1974 and the development of democracy again in Portugal before they granted independence all at once to Angola, Mozambique, the Cape Verde Islands and East Timor in 1975. Macau was returned to China in 1999.[10]
Demographic impact of the Portuguese EmpireDemographic impact of the Portuguese Empire
For all that Portugal developed a global empire with offshoots in Africa, South America, India, China and the East Indies, it did not engage in settler colonialism for the most part. This meant that colonial administrators and soldiers were sent around Africa to India or the East Indies and served there for several years. However, large communities of Portuguese colonists were not developed. As soon as Portugal lost control of places like Goa and the islands of the East Indies, the Portuguese presence there largely evaporated.[11]
The exceptions to this pattern came in Brazil and the Cape Verde Islands, Madeira and the Azores, and to a lesser extent Angola and Mozambique later on. Madeira and the Azores have become permanent parts of Portugal as a result. While communities of hundreds of thousands of Portuguese people developed in Angola and Mozambique, there was a mass exodus of these people from Angola and Mozambique following the Carnation Revolution and the granting of independence. Therefore, the greatest lasting impact of Portuguese imperialism on the demography of a part of their former empire has been in Brazil. A very large proportion of the population here has Portuguese heritage to one extent or another, while the Portuguese were also responsible for forcibly transplanting millions of African slaves into Brazil in colonial times. Hence, the demography of Brazil today is largely a by-product of Portuguese imperialism.[12]
See alsoSee also
Explore more about the Portuguese EmpireExplore more about the Portuguese Empire
- Portugal, Baptisms, 1570-1910 records collection on MyHeritage
- Portugal, Marriages, 1670-1910 records collection on MyHeritage
- Portugal, Deaths, 1640-1910 records collection on MyHeritage
- Portugal, Madeira Passport Applications records collection on MyHeritage
- Portugal, Madeira, Index of Marriages, 1574-1940 records collection on MyHeritage
- Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Immigration Cards, 1900-1965 records collection on MyHeritage
- Brazil, São Paulo Immigration Cards records collection on MyHeritage
References
- ↑ A. R. Disney, A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire (Cambridge, 2009).
- ↑ Jonathan Wilson, ‘Tactics of Attraction: Saints, Pilgrims and Warriors in the Portuguese Reconquista’, in Portuguese Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2014), pp. 204–221.
- ↑ https://www.history.com/news/portugal-age-exploration
- ↑ Roger Crowley, Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire (London, 2015).
- ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/Eighty_Years%27_War/
- ↑ Oscar Gelderblom, Abe de Jong and Joost Jonker, ‘The Formative Years of the Modern Corporation: The Dutch East India Company VOC, 1602–1623’, in The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 73, No. 4 (December, 2013), pp. 1050–1076.
- ↑ Clyde L. Grose, ‘The Anglo-Portuguese Marriage of 1662’, in The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 10, No. 3 (August, 1930), pp. 313–352.
- ↑ Manoel Cardozo, ‘The Brazilian Gold Rush’, in The Americas, Vol. 3, No. 2 (October, 1946), pp. 137–160.
- ↑ Eduardo Moreira, ‘Portuguese Colonial Policy’, in Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 17, No. 3 (July, 1947), pp. 181-191.
- ↑ Alex Fernandes, The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal’s Dictatorship Fell (London, 2024).
- ↑ Crowley, Conquerors.
- ↑ Dauril Alden, ‘The Population of Brazil in the Late Eighteenth Century: A Preliminary Study’, in Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 43, No. 2 (1963), pp. 173–205.
[{Category:Portugal]] [{Category:Brazil]]