Drawing on unpublished materials from the Overseas Historical Archive, and other libraries in Portugal, this book considers Portuguese leadership and organization at home, where it pertained to the governance of the eastern colonies; as well as the formal and ‘soft’ instruments of state applied on the ground in these colonies in first half of the eighteenth century.

Drawing on unpublished materials from the Overseas Historical Archive, and other libraries in Portugal, this book considers Portuguese leadership and organization at home, where it pertained to the governance of the eastern colonies; as well as the formal and ‘soft’ instruments of state applied on the ground in these colonies in first half of the eighteenth century.

This book considers the background to the treatises, their content and significance, and what Grotius actually knew about Southeast Asian polities or Portuguese institutions of trade and diplomacy when he wrote them. --

While Spanish traders of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were mining the riches of the New World, the Portuguese continued to reap the lucrative Asian trade in spices and luxury items. Historians have long considered the Portuguese trade the exclusive enterprise of the kings of Portugal and a few privileged aristocrats, with only minimal participation by private merchants. But in fact, argues James C. Boyajian, actual capital investments by private Portuguese merchants were roughly ten times those of the Portuguese crown - and even exceeded those of the far larger Dutch East India Company. In Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, Boyajian reassesses the consequences of Portugal's flourishing private trade with Asia, including increased tensions between the growing urban merchant class and the still-dominant landed aristocracy. He also shows how Portuguese-Asian trade formed part of a global trading network that linked not only Europe and Asia but also - for the first time - Asia, West Africa, Brazil, and Spanish America. And he argues that, contrary to previous scholarly opinion, nearly half of the Portuguese-Asian trade was controlled by New Christians - descendants of Iberian Jews forcibly converted to Christianity in the 1490s. Ironically, Boyajian concludes, the vast wealth that flowed into Portugal between 1580 and 1640 did little to enrich the country. Landed aristocrats who controlled the church, the Inquisition, and the royal administration used their position to deny merchants the social standing that would encourage productive investments in Portugal. And by the seventeenth century, the Portuguese-Asian trade itself was doomed - the result, Boyajian argues, not of the much-heralded Dutch economic successes but of Dutch naval blockades that effectively severed Portugal's trading lifeline with Asia.

These articles deal with the functioning, and malfunctioning, of the Carreira da India, the round voyages made between Portugal and its possessions in India that began after Vasco da Gama had opened up the route round the Cape of Good Hope in 1497-99. On such voyages was the Portuguese colonial empire built, and these studies illustrate the conditions under which they operated - the ships, the crews, their navigation and their cargoes. For instance, details are given of the medicines carried on board and the hospital established at the way-station of Moçambique in an attempt to combat the perennial scourge of disease. The principal hazard, however, remained that of loss through shipwreck or enemy action, events all too common in the history of the Carreira, which are brought to life most vividly in the Portuguese literary classic, the História Trágico-Marítima; the early printed editions of such tales form the subject of two of the articles and the backdrop to much of the volume.