Sails and Shadows - by Patricia Seed (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

How the early Portuguese Empire facilitated the modern slave trade.

The Portuguese conquered the challenges of sailing the unforgiving Atlantic Ocean, extending their colonial empire along Africa's western shores. With their dedication to developing new sailing techniques and a groundbreaking new understanding of weather patterns and ocean currents, the Portuguese set the tone for the Age of Exploration. But their navigational achievements had horrific consequences for the people of western Africa: subjugation to the slave trade.

Patricia Seed examines the historical and climatic odds that Portuguese seafarers had to overcome to be the first Europeans to tame the Atlantic. Using scientific tools from fields ranging from oceanography to ethnography, she recounts how the Portuguese rapidly innovated and developed profound new understandings of the ocean and sailing. At the same time, she foregrounds the reality that these same innovations enabled them to inflict unimaginable cruelty as, against sometimes violent resistance, they forged what became their spoils of empire: the historic trade in human cargo that enslaved millions across Africa and beyond. Sails and Shadows is a history of incredible innovation outweighed and overshadowed by the horrors it wrought.

From the Back Cover

"Sails and Shadows is the first account of Portuguese voyaging ever to incorporate data and insights from modern sciences as well as from aged texts. Based on an impressive engagement with original sources in multiple European languages, it should stand (for a very long time) as the definitive English-language account of its subject, which is an important one for world history, maritime history, and European history."--J. R. McNeill, author of Mosquito Empires

"Patricia Seed has produced an outstanding and truly original account of early Portuguese seaborne exploration down the west coast of Africa and to India. The book's great innovation is its deep and learned engagement with the growing field of climate history, which contextualizes Portuguese navigation, colonization, and settlement."--Jerry Brotton, author of Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction

About the Author

Patricia Seed is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. She is the award-winning author of To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico; American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches; and Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640.