The Estado da India and the Estado do Brasil. Opportunities for Research in Portuguese Overseas History

In this year marking the sexcentenary of the birth of Prince Henry, known erroneously to the English speaking world as ‘the Navigator’, and the 450th anniversary of the Portuguese arrival in Japan, it is fitting to take stock of what has been achieved and what remains concerning research on Portuguese overseas history. In November 1969 a conference was held at the Newberry Library in Chicago to ‘stimulate in the United States scholarly interest in research on Brazil's colonial past’. In November 1978 an International Seminar on Indo-Portuguese History was held in Goa occasioned by ‘an awareness of a relative stagnation in the field of Indo-Portuguese historical studies, especially in India’. This was prompted by the feeling of a dearth of new interpretations, shortage of studies in English, and neglect of political history, biography and social and economic history. Whereas the tone of the Newberry Library meeting was upbeat as to what junior scholars were achieving, and Charles Boxer pointed with pride to scholarly accomplishments since 1950, by 1984 a lecture to mark the occasion of the centennial of the American Historical Association noted grounds for concern regarding studies in the United States on colonial Brazil and this situation has deteriorated further during the decades of the 80s and early 90s. By way of contrast, in 1981 Charles Boxer noted the vitality of the Estado da India in its broadest geographical meaning as a subject for historical research by Portuguese and how ‘after years — I might even say centuries – of neglect by foreigners, the history of the old Estado da India has lately come into its own in the wider world’. This was seconded by M.N. Pearson who noted that ‘Goan historiography seems to be on the verge of a renaissance’.