Portuguese Imperial Science, 1450–1800: A Historiographical Review

Even a cursory perusal of a map immediately shows the most salient and remarkable fact of the Portuguese maritime expansion of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: its staggering magnitude. Starting in the first decades of the fifteenth century with a territorial expansion to North Africa, in the next decades Portuguese seamen rapidly advanced all through the Atlantic, along the western coast of Africa and then the coast of Brazil. In the first decades of the sixteenth century, this expansion intensified and spread from the east coast of Africa and the Indian Ocean, to Southeast Asia and the seas of China.