Four Centuries of Portuguese Expansion, 1415-1825 (1969)
Charles R. BoxerThe following pages contain the text of a series of four public lectures delivered by me as Visiting Professor at the Ernest Oppenheimer Institute of Portuguese Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in the months of May and June, 1960.
I thought that this subject would be appropriate in the year during which the Portuguese are commemorating the 500th anniversary of the death of the Infante Dom Henrique ( 13 November 1460) and the overseas expansion of Europe which began in his day and generation. I also had in mind the series of lectures given by the first Visiting Professor at the Oppenheimer Institute, Father Antonio da Silva Rego, published under the title of « Portuguese colonization in the sixteenth century: a study of the royal ordinances » (Witwatersrand University Press, 1957).
My distinguished predecessor's aim was, in his own words: «to gather from these remote royal ordinances, lessons regarding human relations between the Portuguese on the one side and Indians, Africans and Brazilians on the other.»