This book explores and analyzes developments in the military institution, military engagements as well as the larger security environment of (including non-war violence and maritime regions linking to) the Portuguese Empire in India. These developments occurred under the onslaught of the early modern globalization. The research shows that far from being dilapidated or archaic, the Portuguese colonial military there kept up with some developments in technology and organization in a competitive environment. Although the colonial military was not the most important reason in accounting for the survival of the Portuguese Estado da Índia, nor was the military profession the most lucrative occupation, the Portuguese experience gave indication of how a colonial state and society was able to survive against coalescing threats from the position of weakness. Located in the period and geographical region of the wax and waning of the Mughal and Maratha empires, Portuguese India was not necessarily a more violent place than the surrounding territories although resistance to and uprising against the Portuguese was usually underestimated. Beginning from the attempt at political and military centralization (and standardization) in the eighteenth century, the abolition of the army of the Estado da Índia in the nineteenth marked nominally the end of an era that may have a reverberation on the pacifist perception of Goa today.

Three lectures given at the University of Virginia in November, 1962.

Barkawi re-imagines the study of war with imperial and multinational armies that fought in Asia in the Second World War.

Steven I. Wilkinson explores how India has succeeded in keeping the military out of politics, when so many other countries have failed. He uncovers the command and control strategies, the careful ethnic balancing, and the political, foreign policy, and strategic decisions that have made the army safe for Indian democracy.

The studies brought together in this volume were published over the last thirty years and are concerned, directly or indirectly, with the Portuguese presence in India between about 1500 and 1650. They have been arranged into four groups of which the first, 'The Portuguese in India', includes pieces on the changing character of the empire in India, Goa in the 17th century, the Portuguese India Company of 1628-33, smugglers, the great famine of the early 1630s and the ceremonial induction process for new viceroys. A second group focuses on the life, career and background of the count of Linhares, before, during and after his term as viceroy at Goa. The third group consists of studies on travel and communications between India and Portugal, both by sea and by land. The collection concludes with studies under the heading of 'historiography and problems of interpretation', on Charles Boxer as a biographer, and on Vasco da Gama's reputation for violence.

This book charts the convergence of science, culture, and politics across Portugal's empire, showing how a global geographical concept was born. In accessible, narrative prose, this book explores the unexpected forms that science took in the early modern world. It highlights little-known linkages between Asia and the Atlantic world.