Victory Lap or Hasty Retreat? King Manuel in the Early Modern World

Abstract

Essays appearing in this issue, authored by scholars who gathered at the University of Coimbra in 2021-22, display a range of approaches to historicizing the emergence of the global Portuguese empire in the passage from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The present introduction contextualizes their contributions by tracing a shift in the Portuguese and international historiography over the last half century. By and large, scholars have moved away from narratives of exceptionalism concentrated on elite figures such as King Manuel I of Portugal, and gravitated instead to grappling with how the early modern Portuguese empire was co-created with the wider world through vectors of violence, exchange, and reciprocity. These new scholarly imperatives prompt an adoption of novel spatial and disciplinary frameworks for tracing critical transformations in early modern global history.