The Portuguese Empire and Its Colonies

The Portuguese Empire is best understood as the world’s first seaborne trading empire, and the longest-lived of all European colonial systems, but the standard story understates how improvised it was. C.R. Boxer’s The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (1969), still the indispensable one-volume treatment, makes clear that the empire was not the product of a grand design. It was the cumulative result of a small kingdom’s strategic bet on the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, backed by a remarkable series of navigators and by a banking and commercial system that moved money as efficiently as it moved ships. The empire worked because the Portuguese were, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the best-organized long-distance merchants in Europe, not because they had the most soldiers or the most settlers.

That bet produced a political structure without parallel. Unlike the Spanish American empire, which was a continental territorial state run by viceroys and bishops, the Portuguese empire in Asia was a string of fortified trading posts — the Estado da Índia — supported by naval power, gunpowder artillery, and a thin layer of administrators in Goa. The Atlantic side, especially Brazil, came later and was more conventionally colonial. The two halves of the empire barely knew each other, and that fact explains both the empire’s flexibility and its slow, regionally uneven decline. It also explains why the empire, even after the catastrophic loss of Brazil in 1822, persisted in fragments until 1999, when Macau was returned to China.

The Atlantic Foundation

The Portuguese voyages down the West African coast in the fifteenth century were the original engine of European overseas expansion. Henry the Navigator, who sponsored many of them, has been mythologized as the founder of a “school of navigation” at Sagres, a story most modern historians, including Peter Russell and Luis Adão da Fonseca, treat with skepticism. What is clear is that, between 1415 and 1488, the Portuguese crown financed a sustained program of Atlantic exploration that produced the voyages to Madeira, the Azores, the Gold Coast, and the Cape Verde Islands, the rounding of the Cape by Bartholomeu Dias in 1488, and, in 1498, Vasco da Gama’s arrival in Calicut.

The strategic logic was simple. The Portuguese wanted to bypass the trans-Saharan and Red Sea routes that brought gold, slaves, and spices to Mediterranean Europe via Muslim middlemen. Ceuta, captured in 1415, was the first step. The feitorias (trading forts) on the Gold Coast — São Jorge da Mina, built in 1482 — were the second. By the time of Vasco da Gama’s voyage, the Portuguese had spent nearly a century learning the Atlantic and the African coast. That head start, more than any technological marvel, explains the speed with which they reached India.

The Atlantic islands of Madeira, São Tomé, and Príncipe became laboratories of the plantation system. Madeira, colonized from 1420, was producing sugar in commercial quantities by the 1460s. São Tomé, colonized in the 1480s, became the first major slave-based sugar economy in the tropics and the model for the later Brazilian and Caribbean systems. The sugar economy needed labor, and the labor came from Africa, where the Portuguese had been trading for slaves since the 1440s. The Atlantic slave trade was, as Boxer put it, born in the same decade as the Portuguese Atlantic empire, and the two grew up together.

Brazil: The American Exception

Brazil was, in the early sixteenth century, the least important part of the Portuguese empire. Pedro Álvares Cabral’s fleet made landfall on the coast in 1500, and for the next thirty years Portugal was too busy with India to do much about it. The coast was exploited for brazilwood, a red dye, by traders operating out of small coastal forts. The indigenous Tupi peoples, organized in chiefdoms, had no large states to ally with or to overthrow, and Portuguese settlement was slow.

The decisive shift came in the 1530s, when the Portuguese crown, alarmed by French and Spanish incursions, decided to colonize Brazil in earnest. The system of hereditary captaincies, granted to Portuguese noblemen on the model of the Madeira and São Tomé grants, was established in 1534. The introduction of sugarcane in the 1540s, combined with the systematic importation of enslaved Africans, made the captaincies of the northeast — Pernambuco, Bahia — enormously profitable. By 1600, Brazil was the world’s leading sugar producer, and Salvador and Recife were two of the largest cities in the Americas.

The discovery of gold in the Minas Gerais region in the 1690s and of diamonds in the 1720s triggered a second cycle of expansion. The bandeirantes — mixed-race frontiersmen from São Paulo — pushed deep into the interior, destroyed the Jesuit missions of the Guaraní, and built a continental Portuguese-speaking state. Stuart Schwartz’s Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society (1985) and his later Tropical Babylons (co-edited with Erik VanYoung) are the best treatments of the early modern economy. The social and demographic effect on the indigenous population was devastating; Portuguese America reproduced, on a smaller scale, the demographic catastrophe of Spanish America, although the African slave population was much larger relative to the indigenous one.

The Estado da Índia

The centerpiece of the Portuguese empire was the Estado da Índia, the network of fortified trading posts and naval bases that the Portuguese built in the Indian Ocean between 1500 and 1550. The key dates are 1505 (the first viceroy, Francisco de Almeida, with instructions to “make every possible effort to discover and capture Malacca”), 1510 (Afonso de Albuquerque’s conquest of Goa, which became the eastern capital), 1511 (the capture of Malacca, the choke point of Southeast Asian trade), and 1557 (the establishment of Macau, under Chinese permission). Hormuz, on the entrance to the Persian Gulf, was taken in 1507 and held until 1622. Sofala and Mozambique Island, on the East African coast, anchored the southern flank.

The Estado da Índia was not a territorial empire. It was a maritime commercial system, anchored by a few fortified cities and by heavily armed carracks, the most famous of which was the Flor de la Mar, lost off Sumatra in 1511 with the captured treasures of Malacca. Albuquerque’s policy, as Boxer and, more recently, Sanjay Subrahmanyam have shown, was to seize the chokepoints of Asian trade rather than to conquer large populations. The Portuguese lacked the manpower for territorial conquest, and Albuquerque was realistic about it. What they had, and what the Mamluk, Gujarati, and Ottoman merchants they were trying to displace did not, was shipboard artillery and oceangoing warships capable of projecting naval power across the Indian Ocean basin.

The result was a near-monopoly on the spice trade between the 1510s and the 1590s, when Dutch and English interlopers began to break it. Pepper, bought cheaply in Cochin and resold in Lisbon at enormous markups, was the most profitable commodity. The Casa da Índia in Lisbon, which handled the Asian trade, became the financial clearinghouse of the sixteenth-century European economy, and Portuguese merchants established communities from Antwerp to Nagasaki to distribute Asian goods. The system was more lucrative for the Crown and for the great mercantile families of Lisbon than it was for the Portuguese taxpayer; a substantial fraction of the spice trade profits was captured by Dutch, English, and Flemish intermediaries within Europe.

Slavery and the South Atlantic System

The Portuguese were, by a wide margin, the largest participants in the Atlantic slave trade. Eltis’s Atlantic History (1999) and his more recent Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (2007) put the total at around 12.5 million Africans transported across the Atlantic over four centuries; of these, the Portuguese (and, after 1822, the Brazilian) ships carried something close to 6 million — roughly 45 percent. The first transatlantic slave voyages, in the 1520s and 1530s, ran from West Africa to São Tomé and to Hispaniola. By the 1580s, the trade was being channeled through the feitorias of Angola and the West African coast, and most of the enslaved were being delivered to Brazilian sugar plantations. The South Atlantic system — Angola, Brazil, Portugal — was the most important part of the global slave economy until the British abolition of 1807.

The Middle Passage mortality in the Portuguese trade was comparable to other national carriers: 15 to 25 percent on average, higher on the early voyages. The social effect in West and Central Africa was profound, and the demographic effect in Brazil was transformative. By the early nineteenth century, enslaved and free Afro-Brazilians were the demographic majority of the colony. Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, in 1888, under the Lei Áurea of Princess Isabel.

The Iberian Union and the 17th-Century Crisis

In 1580, the Portuguese crown passed by force and inheritance to Philip II of Spain, beginning a sixty-year dynastic union known as the Iberian Union. The two empires retained separate administrations, currencies, and law codes — the union was personal rather than institutional — but the union drew Portugal into Spain’s long wars with England, France, and the Dutch Republic. The Dutch East India Company (VOC), founded in 1602, treated Portuguese Asia as a legitimate target. By the 1640s, the Dutch had captured Malacca, Ceylon, the Moluccas, parts of the Brazilian northeast (including Pernambuco), and numerous smaller posts. The Asian spice trade, which had been the empire’s financial foundation, was broken. The Dutch West India Company captured the Spanish silver fleet in 1628, and the Dutch seized Salvador briefly in 1624. Portugal’s commercial empire in Asia was, in effect, halved.

The Portuguese Restoration of 1640, which placed John IV of Braganza on the throne, ended the union with Spain but did not reverse the Asian losses. The Portuguese retained Goa, Macau, and Timor, and they slowly rebuilt a more modest position in the Indian Ocean. The 17th century was, in the older historiography, the century of decline; the more accurate framing, following Boxer, Schwartz, and Subrahmanyam, is that the Portuguese empire reinvented itself several times, and that the relative commercial primacy simply passed to larger, better-capitalized rivals. The Dutch East India Company at its peak was the most valuable corporation in the world; the Portuguese Crown’s Estado da Índia was a small operation by comparison.

The 18th and 19th Centuries: Reform, Loss, and Decolonization

The Portuguese eighteenth century was dominated by the Marquês de Pombal, chief minister to Joseph I from 1750 to 1777. Pombal’s program, modeled partly on the contemporary Bourbon reforms in Spain, was the most ambitious Portuguese reform effort of the early modern period. He expelled the Jesuits from Portugal and from the empire in 1759, reorganized the colonial administration, founded state monopolies, encouraged the production of new agricultural exports from Brazil (notably wine and sugar from new regions), and rebuilt Lisbon after the 1755 earthquake in a neoclassical style that still defines parts of the city. The reforms had measurable effects on Brazilian exports and on metropolitan revenues, but they did not reverse the long-term commercial decline.

The nineteenth century was the century of loss. The transfer of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro in 1807, in the face of the Napoleonic invasion, was the most dramatic moment of the entire empire: a European monarch ruling from a colonial capital. King João VI returned to Lisbon in 1821 and left his son Pedro behind as regent. In 1822, Pedro declared Brazilian independence, ending the Portuguese presence in the Americas. The loss of Brazil was an economic catastrophe; the empire that remained was a thin chain of African and Asian possessions — Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé, Goa, Macau, Timor — that survived largely because no other European power had a strong interest in taking them.

The twentieth century brought the final wave of decolonization. The Salazar dictatorship, which ruled Portugal from 1932 to 1974, fought three long and costly colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. The Carnation Revolution of April 1974 ended the regime and led to the rapid decolonization of the African territories. Goa had already been seized by India in 1961; East Timor, invaded by Indonesia in 1975, did not become independent until 2002. Macau, the last significant possession, was returned to China in 1999, ending the longest-lived European overseas empire in the world.

The Legacy

The Portuguese empire left a larger cultural than political legacy. The Portuguese language is now spoken by more than 250 million people, making it the most spoken Romance language in the Southern Hemisphere and the sixth most spoken language in the world. The Catholic Church is the dominant religion in former Portuguese territories, from Brazil to Angola to East Timor. The grid-pattern city, the praça and the rua, the mestiçagem (mixed-race) society of the Luso-Atlantic world — all are direct inheritances of the colonial period. So are the African musical and religious traditions of Brazil, the Creole Portuguese of Cape Verde and São Tomé, and the bureaucratic civil-law tradition that Portugal exported to its colonies.

What the Portuguese empire did not leave, in most places, was a foundation of long-term economic development. Brazil, the most important colony, is the partial exception; it inherited the plantation economy, the gold and diamond fields, and the slave system, and converted them, slowly and painfully, into the largest economy in Latin America. The African colonies, which received the smallest share of Portuguese administrative and capital investment during the colonial period, were left, on independence, among the poorest countries in the world. The empire was, in its economic effects, as Boxer’s title says, seaborne — it moved goods and people and money, and it left behind a deeply uneven set of postcolonial inheritances.