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THE TEAM
CONTACT
A remarkable book, once again, raising problems, seeking answers to a clear complexity where structure, conjuncture, and events combine and are valued by the social scientist historian according to a plethora of very rich explanatory reasonings. Portugal a emergência de uma Nação was not to be the final publication in his long fruitful career. He produced other works disseminating ideas even beyond his 90th birthday, which was celebrated by the Jornal de Letras, Artes e Ideias, whose director José Carlos de Vasconcelos was always open to Godinho’s collaboration both as historian and citizen. His collaboration with Jornal de Letras comprehends the publication of several of his interviews.
In 2008, A expansão quatrocentista portuguesa was released, the first edition of which dates back to 1945, with an enriched re-edition in 1962 (with the title A economia dos descobrimentos henriquinos). This edition – which took the title of the first edition – was retouched to feature many updates, as well as substantial additions in a structurally identical design. This is Vitorino Magalhães Godinho’s masterpiece, key to understanding why Portugal went to the Atlantic and overseas; why a small kingdom from the European Finisterre launched itself into the discoveries and then into the colonisation of vast spaces on several continents; how its location – between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, not far from the Islamic world with which it was confronted and fought – can help understand this movement towards other places; how its commercial activity triggered its curiosity and decision to seek other worlds; how the need for precious metals and cereals led to conquest and war; how the strategic situation in developing businesses in the late Middle Ages led to Portugal’s insertion in the major defining lines of Modernity. Old and new pages, using and reusing, where some chapters may represent an opening for new studies on the maritime discoveries as the material viability of the navigations and their technical apparatus call for explanation. All this in light of reinterpreted sources not a farfetched, hunch-based imagination. The nautical experience in the Atlantic needs to be considered, that “technical humanism that stands between the world of more or less, or even of the arbitrary, of the absence of a distinction between what is possible and what is impossible, of the predominance of bookish authority over inquisitive research, and the era of modern science – experimental mathematics […].” With empirical observation and the dawn of science, economy must be placed in the centre “but an economy perceived as a cultural and technical domain, not a self-contained parlance.”
