Almost entirely surrounded by the sea, the Iberian Peninsula witnessed voyages that would change the face of the known world forever. Travellers crossed the Mediterranean and Atlantic, undertook journeys to Mecca and the Holy Land, to the Near and Far East, to Europe and Africa. In 1492, the New World was discovered when Christopher Columbus reached the Americas, and in 1500 Brazil was claimed for the Portuguese by a fleet heading for India commanded by the diplomat Pedro Álvares Cabral. Travel writers from Iberia departed from a place with a fluid geographical and cultural identity in its own right. Playing host over the course of its history to people of different ethnicities, religions, and languages, Iberia has always been a place of cultural interchange and political flux. Travel writing is also a key part of medieval Iberia’s rich narrative tradition in which it presents universal and particular experiences which are contingent on the delicate relationship between fact and fiction.

West Africa is rarely included in standard studies of travel as a viable destination of medieval Europeans in its own right. It appears as a sideshow; part of a teleological narrative of exploration that had India as its target and modern imperialism as its long-term inevitable consequence. Perhaps as a result, pre-colonial Africa is often viewed through the lens of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British colonialism, something that is perpetuated today by continued Anglophone reliance on Hakluyt Society translations made during the colonial period. The texts to be discussed below originally involved layers of Castilian, Italian, French, Portuguese, or Latin; viewing them only from the British imperialistic perspective of these older translations can be very misleading. A result of this limited approach to West Africa is that several early accounts of European visits have been neglected. This chapter will explore some of accounts of West Africa, focusing on the vast coastlines of Upper and Lower Guinea (between modern Senegal and modern Ghana).

A brief overview of the themes of the study shows that the quest for land upon which to erect defensible settlements and from which to raise necessary revenue determined much of the course of Company endeavour. Without land there was nowhere to erect Company factories and accommodation, without land there was no security from the predations of indigenous and rival European forces, without land there was no settlement of indigenous artisans and traders generating revenue, without land there was no revenue from tenant peasants and without land there was no empire. This legitimacy of this quest and the sovereign authority the Company sought depended in part on the administration of justice. Following haphazard attempts to impose English law, the unification of jurisdiction after 1726 provided a degree of coherence across the three presidencies. Accompanied by all the trappings and pageantry of court proceedings, and the assimilation into its ranks of leading figures from the various communities, the mayor’s courts commanded legitimacy and thus a broad acceptance; this despite the persistence of corruption and a failure to render the courts wholly independent from Company influence.

The chapter begins with a review of the historical and current socio-political context for sexual minority and gender diverse (SMGD) individuals living in Portugal, followed by relevant research on the associations between minority stress and well-being. A particular focus is devoted to presenting data collected as part of the SMGD-MN study. The chapter concludes with recommendations for future psychological research with SMGD communities in Portugal.

The discovery of a consignment of books of Protestant propaganda in Seville in the autumn of 1557 convinced the Spanish inquisitors of the existence of clandestine circles that promoted doctrines that contradicted Catholic orthodoxy as redefined between 1547 and 1552 during the first sessions of the Council of Trent. The discovery of a second community of religious dissidents in Valladolid a few weeks later, followed by the arrest on suspicion of Lutheranism of Bartolomé de Carranza y Miranda, archbishop of Toledo, on 22 August 1559 created the impression in the royal court of Philip II that Spain had escaped an odious heretical conspiracy hatched by foreigners and supported by members of its own nobility and senior clergy. Some of the outstanding figures among the Seville and Valladolid dissidents cannot, contrary to what historiography has long maintained, be characterised simply as Erasmists; many of them subscribed to the doctrinal core of Protestantism. There were several networks of Lutherans in Spain, as well as among the communities of exiled Spaniards throughout Europe. The Reformation made a greater impression in Iberia than has long been assumed.

Southern European Fascist regimes claimed to be ruled by a higher concept of ‘social justice’. While the propagandistic nature of this claim is clear, this chapter argues that behind it lies a coherent (if at times paradoxical) ideal that directed the action of states and institutions. Drawing on the cases of Italy and Portugal, this chapter charts the roots of fascist ‘social justice’ and how it reflected a core set of ideas about the relationship between the individual and the state where hierarchy and the primacy of the nation shaped a deeply anti-egalitarian idea of justice.

Between 1500 and 1800, Iberian society was characterized by high inequality of income and wealth, low real wages that stimulated working relatively long hours and days, and some expansion consumption focused on low-quality manufactures. Despite the high levels of wealth of the upper groups living in large urban centers such as Madrid, Lisbon or Seville, Iberian consumption patterns did not experience a consumption revolution as they were highly conditioned by relatively low living standards. Although the second half of the eighteenth century was a turning point in Portugal and Spain – due to a reduction in the price of manufactured goods and greater openness to cultural foreign influences – economic and social changes excluded many disadvantaged groups of low-income earners, women, young children and poor people.

This chapter surveys the economic growth experience of Iberia since the early nineteenth century. After more than a century dominated by sluggish growth and divergence from Western Europe, there was a substantial acceleration in GDP and per capita GDP growth of both Iberian economies c. 1950. As a result, in the very long term, Iberia has partially closed its initial gap with the Western European core. The chapter also shows that, in the case of Spain, the early 1950s represent a divide between a hundred years of moderate growth dominated by factor accumulation, and half a century of fast growth led by total factor productivity (TFP). By contrast, this intensive model of growth was not shared by Portugal, where per capita GDP increases so far have been mainly associated to factor accumulation, rather than to TFP increases. Finally, new estimates of regional historical GDPs show that regional inequality emerged after the first long wave of modern economic growth and market integration. By 1950, the geographical patterns of regional inequality were well established, and since then they have just been consolidated. As a result, a poor Iberia has emerged that spreads over a continuous area around the border between Spain and Portugal.

This chapter analyses the reasons behind changes in the intensity with which inventions and other changes in production took place in early modern Iberian polities. Rather than quantifying the impact of science on the economy and determine the direction of causality – two processes that were interconnected – this chapter studies the developments in science, knowledge and technology in relation to what is known about the economic performance of the Iberian economy. It analyses first the improvements in the agrarian sector, before showing some technological advances in the non-agrarian part of the economy. The chapter describes especially the innovations in specific areas of manufacturing like shipbuilding, textiles (woollens, silk and cotton) and mining. The last section discusses the role played by the institutional framework, and it explains how the Iberian monarchies promoted technology and knowledge in different ways.

To say that good institutions are a fundamental condition to foster economic growth is close to platitude. However, it is important to explain how it happens, and therefore the main aim of this chapter is to present and discuss the role played by both private and public institutions in decision making processes related to the implementation of economic policies encouraging economic growth. By discussing the lessons from the Iberian experience throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the chapter tries to disclose the similarities and differences between both countries, with a main focus on the way how the institutional environment helps to explain the circumstances that favour or hinder economic performance. This comparative approach begins with the age of the liberal revolutions in the early years of the nineteenth century and closes with the processes of democracy building and European integration in the two last decades of the twentieth century. The study of institutional changes and continuities in Spain and Portugal during this long period offers multiple opportunities to better understand the articulation between the economic and business environment, the dynamics of the markets and the economic policies designed or implemented by the state, in fulfilment of its regulatory role.

This chapter collects the historical threads about the economic growth of the two Iberian nations. From a disappointing nineteenth century, during which they fell behind the rest of Europe, and the conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century, the two nations quickly caught up from the 1950s. Growth was mostly extensive and pulled by physical capital accumulation, with small contributions from human capital or productivity. The Iberian divergence from its European peers has often been blamed on natural endowments, modest domestic markets and savings, as well as on second-nature geography (market access). However, this volume shows that all of these were endogenous to the growth itself, which requires looking for deeper explanations. Institutions and the political equilibria that underpin them loom large here. After a century of fragile liberal monarchies and radical republican regimes, the two nations stood out for their long authoritarian regimes. Inward-looking economic policies promoted by the dictators favoured domestic incumbents but harmed the growth potential of the two countries. Only their gradual reopening from the 1950s unleashed this potential. Nevertheless, the gains from growth have not been equally distributed and convergence stalled in the new millennium, with the adoption of the Euro.

This chapter covers the history of banking in the Iberian Peninsula from the early nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The narrative provides a complete, albeit brief, historical overview of how the financial structures of the two countries have evolved. It also offers a comparative perspective of the two financial systems, pointing out to their similarities and their differences. The first part of the chapter describes the formation of the Portuguese and the Spanish banking systems. Special attention is given to the main changes that took place since their early beginnings to the consolidation and modernization of the banking structure in both countries. The second part traces the history of the two Iberian central banks: the Bank of Portugal and the Bank of Spain. The last section compares the banking structure and development of the two Iberian nations, and brings out their similarities and differences. First the attention is focused on comparing the main features of the Portuguese and Spanish private commercial and investment institutions. The chapter finishes with a brief evaluation of the historical role played by the Bank of Portugal and the Bank of Spain.