Portugal: The First Global Empire (2015)
historytoday.com26 points by Thevet 14 hours ago
26 points by Thevet 14 hours ago
Spain facepalm.
World powers change and shift with changes of technology, climate and needs for resources. Countries rise to power because they are in the right place at the right time, even if monarchs and nationalists will always attribute it to God preference or other self-serving reason.
> The first century of Portuguese discoveries saw a successive stripping away of layers of medieval mythology about the world and the received wisdom of ancient authority – the tales of dog-headed men and birds that could swallow elephants – by the empirical observation of geography, climate, natural history and cultures that ushered in the early modern age.
Technology brings societal change. The world has been becoming smaller with help of each new technological step. Societies can fight it, but it is unavoidable. So, I hope that we focus more on building a good world for us all using technology to improve all our lives.
It would be interesting to imagine a uchronic world where Portuguese has become the lingua franca of the world.
You would first have to imagine portuguese being the lingua franca of the iberian peninsula. Hard to imagine.
Passing that hurdle, then you'd have to imagine portuguese being the lingua franca of western europe. Hard to imagine that.
Then of europe as a whole and so on. Almost a joke now.
Portuguese was never the major power of it's immediate vicinity, let alone the world. Portugual, like the netherlands, was a glorified trading network rather than a legitimate empire. And portugual, like the netherlands, were minor powers within europe. Neither were major global powers as we understand the term and neither were powerful nor significant enough to produce a lingua franca of anything.
I think the comparison with the Netherlands is generally appropriate, but we must recognize that what they did in Brazil was exceptional (meaning not comparable to their former possessions in Asia and Africa, a difference from the mere trading nodes) and the NL never did achieve anything like it.
The Portuguese managed to maintain territorial integrity and make their religion and language dominate it entirely, in what's today the 5th largest nation state by area. They also had to defend the longest coastline.
The Portuguese Empire did exist but AFAIK never did aspire to world hegemony like the U.K. Their idea of empire was best represented by something they briefly had which was the combined union with Brazil after its promotion from colony in 1815.
So, not an empire like the U.K. and never wanting to be an empire like the U.K. but also not a total failure to achieve some version of it, however short lived that was.
> Portugual, like the netherlands, was a glorified trading network rather than a legitimate empire.
nothing more than a glorified crew in New Jersey
> Information was fed back into a central hub, the India House in Lisbon, where everything was stored under the crown's direct control to inform the next cycle of voyages. This system of feedback and adaptation was highly effective. It was accompanied by a rapid expansion in cartographic knowledge.
This almost feels like state-sponsored R&D, 500 years ago.
Historically, what R&D there was, was often done by the state; simply because of being the entity with the most spare capacity to do so. It goes a long way back, Egyptian pharoes and Chinese emperors had written in their histories about how they invented things or made economic improvements. These were most likely done by people under their sponsorship, but nevertheless they saw it as part of their role.
As a Brazilian, the whole improbable (and beautiful) history of Portugal raised by the "Navegações" and how badly they bottled the whole imperium (especially after the Brazilian independence, but one can argue that João VI opened the ports) and the sheer amount of lack of vision in not investing in production is something that will always amaze me.
One can say that it was one of the longest imperiums in history (ending in 1999 with Macau???), but every time that I spend some time in Portuguese cities, I feel just bad. The good thing is that Brazil will carry its tradition for posterity nevertheless.