The First World Empire: Portugal/ War and Military Revolution | Heler Carvalhal, André Murteira e Roger Lee de Jesus

Croquis do sitio e ordem de batalha de Alcantara diante de Lisboa por mar e terra. Detalhe de capa de The First World Empire Portugal War and Military Revolution Imagem Wikipedia
Croquis do sítio e ordem de batalha de Alcântara diante de Lisboa, por mar e terra. Detalhe de capa de “The First World Empire: Portugal, War and Military Revolution” | Imagem: Wikipedia
1The theory that Early Modern Europe underwent a sort of “military revolution”1 has sparked debate amongst historians of the period ever since it was proposed.2 The military revolution has been proposed as an explanation both for changes in state-formation processes within Europe itself, and subsequently as an explanation for why European states controlled roughly one-third of the land surface of the world even before the onset of industrialization. Yet it is exactly in the role of the military revolution in the process of European expansion – and indeed the debate whether European states and non-state actors did indeed enjoy a military advantage over non-Europeans – that we encounter some strange lacunae in the (Anglophone) scholarship.3 The case of Portugal must perhaps be the most striking of these. Portugal was not only the first European state to engage in colonial expansion and trade, it was the last state to decolonize. Portuguese ships, soldiers and forts were present in Africa, the Americas and throughout littoral Asia, giving it a global footprint. In the case of Asia especially, the presence of Portuguese fleets and fortifications in India and beyond from the very start of the sixteenth century onwards, as the bastion-trace fortification was spreading through Europe, should give historians ample material to work with to test the thesis that European fortifications and siegecraft were superior and enabled European states to maintain a presence throughout the area.