Impact

The Portuguese Empire had a diversified impact not only on Africa, Asia, and the New World, but also on Europe itself. Portuguese cartography, established by the families Reinel and Homem, played a crucial role in modifying the European image of the world.

The exploration of the coasts of other continents was immediately recorded and information constantly updated. Mapping of the western and eastern coasts of Africa reached a good level of accuracy by the early sixteenth century, followed by the mapping of the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the western coast of India between the 1510s and the 1540s. The eastern coast of South America was mapped over the course of the sixteenth century, followed by the mapping of the eastern Indian Ocean and western Pacific, and was assisted by reference to local cartography. The Far East reached a relatively accurate level of representation on European maps by the late sixteenth century. Portuguese cartographers such as Diogo Ribeiro worked as master cartographers in Spain, while others, such as Diogo Homem, worked in London and Venice.^[2068] In the meantime, Tome Pires and Duarte Barbosa (ca. 1515) provided a geographic description of the lands, goods, political regimes, and markets around the Indian Ocean. Their reports were integrated into the main compilations of European surveys and travel accounts. Further reports were produced by missionaries and merchants regarding other areas of Asia, particularly the Far East. This constant flow of information between Portugal and other European countries helped to make possible the first significant treatise of global geography, written by Giovanno Botero in the 1590s, Relation! Universal!. Extraordinary visual representations of the peoples of Africa and Asia were used in maps, proto-ethnographies, and travel accounts, such as Linschoten’s Itinerario (1596), written while he served as secretary of the archbishop of Goa.

The Portuguese Garcia de Orta (ca. 1501-1568) and Cristovao da Costa (ca. 1525-1594) provided significant information on Indian flora, which was translated into Latin by the famous botanist Clusius. Meanwhile in Brazil, Pero de Magalhaes Gandavo, Gabriel Soares de Sousa, and Fernao Cardim described many plants and animals unknown in Europe. Portuguese experiences overseas were also absorbed into political thought. First, Jean Bodin presented his reflection on the Ethiopian model of political control without royal urban headquarters, based on Francisco Alvares’s description of the country. Next, Giovanni Botero, in Della Ragion di Stato (1589), discussed the advantages of a discontinuous territorial empire. The impact of Portuguese travels on literature was prominently marked through the character of Raphael Hytloday, who was created by Thomas More in 1516 to describe the habits, values, and forms of government of the people living on Utopia. Meanwhile, Francois Rabelais in his Pantagruel (1532) followed a typical Portuguese journey to India in order to present his own port of Utopia in the Indian Ocean. And Tommaso Campanella used a century's worth of information on Asia and the New World to write La Citta del Sole (1602). The systematic study of world languages was dramatically shifted by the Portuguese expansion, which produced the first European grammars and dictionaries of Japanese, Chinese, Tamil, and Tupi.^[2069] Imperial culture was confronted by local resistance, but it revealed also a powerful exchange with local men of letters, healers, cartographers, sailors, translators, and interpreters, who provided information on fauna and flora, markets and political systems.^[2070]

The most visible impact of the Portuguese expansion on other continents was through ethnic, economic, and social change. The African slave trade was dramatically increased by new maritime routes created by the Portuguese between West Africa and Iberia, and later between West, Central, and Southeast Africa and the New World.

Once the organizational culture related to maritime slave trade was established during the second half of the fifteenth century, it was easy to redirect it to the New World, where the first European wave of colonization had caused an extraordinary decline of native populations due to war and disease. The transatlantic slave trade involved 12.5 million Africans from the beginning of the sixteenth century to 1860. The Portuguese were responsible for the transport of over 5.8 million slaves, nearly half of the total, from which more than 5 million were disembarked in Brazil. In addition, more than 600,000 slaves were transported by the Portuguese to Iberia, until the government of Pombal forbade slave trade to Europe in 1761.^[2071] The impact of this enormous trade was threefold: it created a colonial society in Brazil from scratch, a society based upon a vast slave majority under the control of a white minority, with a significant buffer of mixed-race people. This contributed to a permanent system of warfare, necessary to support the predominant mode of slave acquisition in Africa. This meant the stagnation of the African population for three centuries. Finally, it defined the template for unequal social and ethnic relations for societies based on slavery, contributing to the theories of race of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.^[2072]

The Portuguese expansion significantly impacted material culture and its transfer across continents. Different types of mills were transferred to the Atlantic islands and Brazil, while tables and chairs were imported throughout India. Gold from West Africa (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) and from Brazil (eighteenth century) was extensively exported to Europe. Silver from Spanish America was exchanged for salt and slaves, and was used to finance trade in Asia, mainly in China and India. Cowries from the Maldives were carried as ballast of the ships and traded in Africa, where they circulated as currency.

Sugar cane was introduced in the Atlantic islands, mainly in Madeira and Sao Tome, and then in Brazil, whence it was taken to the Caribbean by the Dutch. Manioc and cacao were transferred from America to Africa, maize, tomato, and tobacco from America to Europe and Asia, coconut trees and coffee from Asia to America. The spice trade from Asia to Europe intensified. Chinese silk, porcelain, and tea, as well as Indian cottons, were broadly diffused. The impact on food habits, tableware, clothing, coffee, tea, and tobacco consumption on different continents is obvious.^[2073] Taxation on addictive products such as tobacco was crucial to the Portuguese Empire: directly and indirectly it represented over 20 percent of the state's income from the second half of the seventeenth century to the first decades of the twentieth. The Estado da India used taxes on tobacco imported from Brazil to survive during the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth century.

The cultural impact of the Portuguese Empire on religion and law was long lasting. Catholicism was diffused under favorable political conditions in the New World, and for a long time it became the sole formally recognized religion in Brazil. In Japan, the existence of perhaps 300,000 converted natives led the Tokugawa regime to prohibit Christianity and expel missionaries in a string of decisions from 1614 to 1639. The regime felt threatened by their religious, and possibly political, allegiance to a foreign power. In China, the slower successes of Christianity in southern regions and in the main cities of the South and East were not sufficiently important to provoke any significant response.^[2074] Jesuits struggled to retain a significant position in the long run and were targeted by other religious orders, namely the Dominicans and the Franciscans, who challenged the Jesuit policy of accommodating local culture.^[2075] The Chinese Rites Controversy was part of this conflict: while the Jesuits argued that Confucianism and rituals to honor the ancestors were secular and compatible with Christianity, the opponents eventually obtained the prohibition of the Chinese rituals by Pope Clement XI in 1704, a decision reaffirmed by the Pope Benedict XIV in 1742.

In Ethiopia, after a century of troubled alliances, the project of converting the Coptic Church to Catholicism collapsed with the expulsion of the Portuguese in 1634.^[2076] In Africa, Christianization of the kingdom of Kongo eroded during the eighteenth century, while the growth of Portuguese control in the hinterlands of Angola and Mozambique during the first decades of the twentieth century, primarily by military means, opened up new possibilities for evangelization. The empire's legal impact was also significant in the long run, despite the coexistence of the colonial legal framework with local traditions and customary law, mainly in Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Macau, and the Portuguese enclaves in India.^[2077]

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

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