Buch, Englisch, 180 Seiten, Format (B × H): 125 mm x 190 mm, Gewicht: 219 g
From Empire to Modern Nation (Pocketbook Edition)
Buch, Englisch, 180 Seiten, Format (B × H): 125 mm x 190 mm, Gewicht: 219 g
ISBN: 978-3-565-07090-9
Verlag: epubli
You have to choke down the sour truth that Portugal's history isn't a sun-kissed saga of seafaring saints, but a jagged ledger of plunder masked as piety, where spice lords sailed on slave backs and crowned heads bartered souls for gold that bought silence on the screams. "The History of Portugal" doesn't varnish the voyages; it vivisects them, from the Reconquista's holy hacksaw carving Iberia into fiefdoms to the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas slicing the globe like a pie for papal pals, dooming millions to the hold. This is no postcard chronicle—it's a cold autopsy of a nation that birthed the first world-eater, feasting on African ivory and Brazilian blood while Lisbon's bells rang hymns to hypocrisy.
Threaded through the turmoil are the telltale stains they airbrush in azulejo tiles: the Avis dynasty's dragon-chasing crusades that ignited inquisitions at home, the Salazar regime's iron-fisted fado that strangled colonies in the name of "civilizing" chains, and the 1974 Carnation bloom that wilted into debt-drowned democracy. No laurels for the Lusitan poets who penned epics of empire while ignoring the gauchos' ghosts; just the grim geometry of how fado's melancholy wail echoes the widows of Goa and the gutted guts of Goa. Detractors decry it "defeatist," but the manifests and mass graves murmur otherwise: Portugal's prowess was predation in pearls, a blueprint for every bully's ballad since.
As 2025's decolonization dust-ups dredge old docks, why swig the saudade swill when the real vintage's vintage venom? This volume vends no vintage valor; it vents the vaulted vices, handing you the hold manifests to mock the myths before they metastasize into monuments. Plunge if the past's piquancy piques you; pass if polished prose pleases. The caravel creaks; crew or cargo?
