Portugal is an established member of the European Union, one of the founders of the euro currency and a founder member of NATO. Yet it is an inconspicuous and largely overlooked country on the continent's south-west rim. In the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Age of Discovery the Portuguese led Europe out of the Mediterranean into the Atlantic and they brought Asia and Europe together. Evidence of their one-time four-continent empire can still be felt, not least in the Portuguese language which is spoken by more than 220 million people from Brazil, across parts of Africa to Asia. Analyzing present-day society and culture, The Portuguese also considers the nation's often tumultuous past. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake was one of Europe’s greatest natural disasters, strongly influencing continental thought and heralding Portugal’s extended decline. The Portuguese also weathered Europe’s longest dictatorship under twentieth-century ruler António Salazar. A 1974 military coup, called the Carnation Revolution, placed the Portuguese at the centre of Cold War attentions. Portugal’s quirky relationship with Spain, and with its oldest ally England, is also scrutinized. Portugal, which claims Europe’s oldest fixed borders, measures just 561 by 218 kilometres . Within that space, however, it offers a patchwork of widely differing and beautiful landscapes. With an easygoing and seductive lifestyle expressed most fully in their love of food, the Portuguese also have an anarchical streak evident in many facets of contemporary life. A veteran journalist and commentator on Portugal, the author paints an intimate portrait of a fascinating and at times contradictory country and its people.

This book can be read in two different ways: as an introductory synthesis on Modern Portugal, or as a collection of twelve studies focusing on familiar aspects of the State formation of any modern nation throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this second reading, each chapter opens comparative perspectives on specific topics within some key fields of studies and international debates on modernity, including population, police, empire, technology, bureaucracy, social sciences, rural life, education, religion, nationalism, communism, and economy. Such a wide range of subjects, however, proves comprehensive enough to create a narrative where the reader may also locate the chief trends and dynamics developing in Portuguese history and society during the last two centuries. From this perspective, Portugal emerges as a country traversed by social conflict and struggling for modernization. Granted, this is not a very surprising picture, especially if we consider it in the historical context of European modernity. And yet, it is precisely this familiarity, one might argue, that allows The Making of Modern Portugal to become a useful tool for inserting the Portuguese case into the debates of a wide range of fields and disciplines in Europe and beyond.

Demonstrates the wealth of political thought from early modern Portugal and its empire through a selection of writings by Portuguese and Luso-Brazilian authors.

For thousands of years, Portugal has been the point of arrival and departure for peoples, cultures, languages, ideas, fashions, behaviours, beliefs, institutions and produce. While its miscegenation and global multimodal activity enriched the world in many ways, it also provoked violence, war, suffering and resistance. The Global History of Portugal contains 93 chapters grouped into five parts: Pre-history, Antiquity, Middle Ages, Early Modern period and Modern World. Each chapter begins with an event, interpreted in the light of global history. Each part opens with an introduction, offering a perspective of the period in question. The three Editors, five Scientific Coordinators (João Luís Cardoso, Carlos Fabião, Bernardo Vasconcelos e Sousa, Catia Antunes and António Costa Pinto) and ninety Contributors offer a critical and analytical synthesis of the history that originated in Portuguese territory or passed through it, stimulating the process of encounter and dis-encounter in todays global world. The history presented gives special attention to the world that moulded Portugal and the Portuguese, and to the ways Portugal configured the world. It seeks to identify and understand the transversal entanglements of historic impact and the impulses these gave to the construction of Portugal and the world. Contemporary reflection and academic scholarship on the global history of leading nations has stimulated a rethinking of the past and a more comprehensive recognition of legacy. Historians can no longer overlook the wider world with which their country of investigation has interacted. Portugal's role in the dynamic circulation of peoples and ideas makes it global history not only unique by way of what took place but also in terms of a potential academic template for better understanding of how the past shapes the present, and more particularly the importance of acknowledging a country's past historic mis-steps and how these are dealt with by contemporary populations.

Despite its modest size, Portugal has played a major part in the development of Europe and the modern world. In Portugal in European and World History Malyn Newitt offers a fresh appraisal of Portuguese history and its role in the world—from early Moorish times to the English Alliance of 1650–1900 and through the country’s liberal revolution in 1974. Newitt specifically examines episodes where Portugal was a key player or innovator in history. Chapters focus on such topics as Moorish Portugal, describing the cultural impact of contact with the Moors—one of the oldest points of contact between Western Europe and Islam; the opening up of trade with western Africa; and the explorations of Vasco de Gama and the evolution of Portugal as the first commercial empire of modern times. Newitt also examines Portugal’s role in the Counter-reformation, in Spain’s wars in Europe, and in the Anglo-Portuguese alliance. Finally, Newitt analyzes the fall of fascism and the Portuguese decolonization within the context of larger global empires and movements. This new account of a country with a rich historyshows how Portugal has moved from being the last colonial power to one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the modern European ideal.

This book will examine the gradual assembly and consolidation of Portuguese fiscal policy in the second half of the fifteenth century, providing a comparative analysis of the Portuguese State’s finances and fiscal dynamics with other Western European monarchies. This book examines relevant aspects of the Portuguese Royal finances, particularly the different instruments employed to provide income and the rubrics involving all types of expenditure between the reigns of Afonso V and Manuel I at the dawn of Modern Ages. The analysis of Portugal’s case will also serve as a main conducting wire to a broader fiscal examination of other Latin-rooted Mediterranean and North Atlantic kingdoms. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of economic history, fiscal history, economic theory and history of economic thought, as well as students of Medieval History, the history of the Western Europe and the Iberian Peninsula.

Despite worldwide interest in the Portuguese Revolution of 1974, Portugal remained for most people a little known and poorly understood country, neglected for years by social scientists. Editors Graham and Makler brought together for the first time in one substantive volume most of the leading social science experts on Portugal. The contributors' highly original research represents the best work generated by the International Conference Group on Modern Portugal at its two major conferences held in 1973 and 1976. The result is a comprehensive collection of essays discussing in detail the events leading up to the revolution, the causes of the military coup, and the movement of a society on the brink of revolutionary upheaval toward open, democratic parliamentary elections. As the first interdisciplinary study to span fifty years of Portuguese history from the Estado Novo of 1926 to the eventual social democratic republic, this book stands alone in its field. The specialist as well as the general reader will find insights into the dynamics of Portugal's people, politics, and economics.

Jesuit Science and Education: A Brief History -- The Pombaline Expulsion and the Building of Anti-Jesuitism -- Carlos Rademaker and the Restoration of the Society of Jesus in -- Portugal -- For the Greater Credibility: Science and Education in Modern Portugal -- The Republican Exile and the Confiscation of the Natural History Collections -- The Journal Brotéria, the Book of Nature, and the Greater Glory of God -- The Journal Brotéria: Vulgarização científica and the Popularization of Science, Technology, and Medicine -- Taxonomy, Cytogenetics, and Plant Breeding in the Early Years of Estado Novo -- New Lenses to Read the Book of Nature: Biochemistry, Molecular Genetics, and Bioethics.

This title was first published in 2002. Portugal experienced rapid and dramatic change over the final decades of the twentieth century. After the turbulence that followed the 1974 revolution, the 1980s and 1990s provided a period of unprecedented political stability and economic modernization during which Portugal converged rapidly with the wealthier member states of the European Union. This important new volume offers a timely focus on this recent period. Written for a wide audience by a multidisciplinary team of experts, the book provides an accessible overview and analysis of the key dimensions of recent economic and political change in Portugal and identifies the tensions and policy challenges that rapid change has produced. In so doing the book reveals something of the complexity of contemporary Portugal: an outward looking modern, democratic and European state, but one where the legacy of its recent traditional, colonial and often inward looking past continues to influence and shape its development in the twenty-first century.