The early modern period

This History of Portugal has the advantage of presenting in one single volume a comprehensive vision of the past, from the foundation of the kingdom to contemporary history. It is not a history written by one single author, and thus follows a different approach from that of Oliveira Marques, who clearly stands as the previous most professional and efficient historian engaging with this genre. The decision was the right one: each of the three authors knows his period of specialization well. It is increasingly difficult nowadays for one single author to assimilate all the bibliography covering nine centuries. In general, this History of Portugal integrates the most recent bibliography well. But it suffers from two problems: the crucial issues of collective identity and nation building, with their plural forms, continuities and discontinuities, are neither clearly raised nor addressed in a systematic way, while they remain the object of constant reflection by philosophers, anthropologists, writers and historians; the initial promise to combine political, economic, social and cultural history is not fulfilled. I understand that there were constraints of space – the Middle Ages received 182 pages, the early modern period 240 and modern history 340 pages – but structure is always a matter of choice. The most balanced section is the modern one: Rui Ramos’s text reads very well, combining political, economic, social, demographic and cultural data in an efficient way. The main issues are present. The only problem, which is not a minor one, is the conservative bias of his political approach: popular movements do not really exist in his account, all political changes or continuities are analyzed from the perspective of political factions, the manipulation of the disorganized population, or the internal feuds of the power elite. One wonders how these manipulative elites were generated in the first place, and how they managed to exercise their power over such an inorganic population. The section written by Bernardo Vasconcelos e Sousa is also efficient, covering the main issues of the organization of the monarchy, addressing the different powers involved and searching for the origins of the expansion. The distribution of the population and the definition of its structure are other topics touched upon, although the question of its ethnic origins might have been more fully addressed, due to the significant number of studies on this issue in Portugal and Europe, perhaps one of the most recently developed fields in medieval studies (Wolfram, Pohl, Gillett, Noble, Hen). Although the crisis or revolution of 1383-5 is tackled well, history from below might have been better integrated into this section. But this is really the main problem concerning the vision of the early modern period presented by Nuno Monteiro. I have to concentrate on this period, since this was specifically requested from me. The model of analysis is almost exclusively political and institutional, contradicting the initial promise. This is not the acclaimed British narrative model, which has accommodated the theoretical and methodological acquisitions of the Annales, Past and Present and German Sozialgeschichte, not to mention gender studies, and linguistic and psychoanalytic turns. It is sufficient to read authors so ideologically diverse as Christopher Bayly, Tim Blanning or Richard Evans to perceive the shared purpose of a comprehensive approach in the different scales they deal with. The concentration of this section on the architecture of powers is overwhelmingly structured by the relationship between the king and the aristocracy (reduced to the titled nobility), which was the focus of Nuno Monteiro’s major work on the ‘Big Noble Houses’ in Portugal.