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In an article about Prince Henry the Navigator published in 1894, a correspondent in the London Times referred to Portugal as 'this interesting little country'. The article was written when Portuguese and British interests in southern Africa were on a collision course, but the writer's magnificent condescension is not a product of the age of imperialism only. Not taking the oldest ally seriously is an endemic British disease.
Disney does take Portugal seriously, but then, though he was partly educated at Oxford, his professional career has been spent mostly in Australia and perhaps that experience is necessary for a historian whose work ranges very widely in space, as well as time. His two-volume history, 700 pages of narrative, is the most ambitious yet to have been attempted in English. H. V. Livermore, the author of the previous Cambridge history (1966), had less space at his disposal, and also tried to bring the story down to the present day. Other writers of single-volume histories - Boxer, Russell-Wood, Newitt - have concentrated exclusively on the Portuguese colonial experience. Disney, however, gives almost exactly equal coverage to Portugal as a European country, albeit one much involved in developments overseas, and to the empire itself, divided between Africa, west and east, the Atlantic islands (Madeira, Azores, Cabo Verde), Asia, from India to Japan, and the great American colony of Brazil. He finishes in 1807, the year when King João vi, faced with a French invasion of the home country, moved the capital...