Portuguese colonial cities : local dynamics, global flow (c. 1500-1900)

Abstract

This book is focused on the study of the Portuguese Empire’s colonial cities from a long-term perspective. It seeks to highlight the multiple geographies and the various levels of interaction between overseas territories. The authors show how inland parishes, towns and port cities – places characterised by widespread slave trade, indigenous labor, circulation of goods and plagues, and a multicontinental judicial system – were integrally related to the global economic system of the modern world. These dynamic territories were not peripheral, but instead comprised an “entanglement of cities” they helped to shape. This simultaneous approach sees the historical past of Atlantic cities as being intertwined, thus revealing diversities, social hierarchies, inequalities, local autonomies and broad trans-imperial exchanges. These relations, in turn, mutually shaped modern urban structures, some of which would later receive the title of city.