portuguese empire

The idea of the Canary Islands being taken not by Spain/Castile but rather by the good ol' Portuguese bois has been floating around in my mind as of lately, especially as it seems that the Portuguese had a vested interest in them (and also discovered them outright). I've looked at this thread...

John VI ruled Portugal during an extremely difficult period, during which the country was wracked by foreign threats and internal crises he had no hope of subduing with the resources he had. He faced a Spanish invasion, a French one (which prompted his and the court's flight to Brazil), a...

Tl;dr: What changes in Spain’s history would need to take place before 1492 as well as what changes in its style of colonization in order for its colonies to be set up for success similar to Britain’s settler colonies I would like to make a distinction at the beginning of this scenario between...

Scenario: The Iberian peninsula is united under a single flag sometime before 1492. Main question: How does this affect the colonization of the New World? Without Portugal and Spain separated, there's no direct competition for those lands, Iberia would be the only empire in the world that can...

With a POD of 1480, besides Brazil and its African and Asian territories, could Portugal have other colonies? Before anyone talks about how they couldn't do that because of demographics, you're wrong, @Viriato has consistently shown that Portugal had an enormous amount of settlers and extremely...

How could Brazil have become independent at a much earlier date than in OTL? Is it possible for it to happen even before the Spanish colonies?

In this TL the Iberian Union survives for a lot longer, a few centuries at least. My question is what happens to some Portuguese colonies, specially Brazil. Without the competition between Spain and Portugal, would Brazil still expand westwards? Or does the crown make them respect the Line of...

Why didn't Spain and Portugal colonize more of Oceania and South East Asia during their peak power? And what would have to change for them to do it? Also, most of New Guinea was on the Spanish side of the world, so wouldn't it make more sense to colonize there instead of the Philippines?

A spin-off of the "At what points did Portugal screw up and how could we fix these?" thread, there have already been threads about this topic, but this one should be one reserved for any kind of possible Portuguese domination of Japan, be it via-puppet rulers, a small tip of Kyushu being under...

This below, which can be anachronistic, the real reason behind this AH scenario that I had in mind would be to make a smaller Brazil, in preference the smallest as possible, but without balkanizing it, or making it a tiny state, this diminished Brazil will still be enormous, but not as big as...

From 1570-1575, 9 regional coastal powers (Bijapur, Calicut, Ahmednagar, Garsopa, Ullal, Aceh, Kalianyamat, Ternate and Tidore) launched a series of near simultaneous wars against Portugal's early Asian footholds with the aim of expelling the Portuguese from the Indian Ocean basin. OTL, the...

Luís de Meneses, 3rd count of Ericeira, was a Portuguese noble and statesman who served as the king Pedro II's minister of finance from 1675 until his untimely death in 1690. During his time in office he pursued a mercantilist economic policy, banning or limiting the imports of certain products...

Bartolomeu de Gusmão was a Luso-Brazilian priest who, among other things, made the first serious attempt to create a hot air balloon in 1709, more than seventy years before the Montgolfier brothers' successful experiments. Unfortunately, not only did his demonstrations fail to impress the...

Spain invaded Portugal three times in 1762 as a part of the Seven Years' War, but their attempts to conquer their smaller neighbor failed miserably thanks to the scorched earth and guerrilla tactics adopted by the Portuguese. What if the invaders were able to protect their supply lines more...

While it would be a mistake to say that Brazil's independence was entirely peaceful, it was still thankfully much less violent than what took place in the rest of Latin America. A huge (perhaps the biggest) exception to that rule took place in Bahia, where the provincial capital of Salvador was...

If you don't know, the Marquis of Pombal was a major leader of Portugal in the mid-18th century. He made many reforms that reshaped Portugal, including rebuilding Lisbon following the 1755 Earthquake, banning the Jesuits from Brazil, stopped the Spanish from invading in 1762, ended the slave...

So I found out about this in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luso-Sundanese_padr%C3%A3o What if the Portuguese fulfilled their promise and built a fortress in Sunda Kalapa? Could they assist the Sunda kingdom in the war against the Sultanate of Demak, and if so, would it gradually fall...

Pretty much what it says on the title. How can we have a China that loves all things portuguese? Note that I DO NOT mean a european-dominated one or the conversion of the chinese to Christianity. Rather, the goal is to see how Portugal could cause a good impression, to the point there's a vast...

According to Wikipedia, Portugal had a short lived cod fishing colony in what is now Nova Scotia, more specifically on Cape Breton Island. What if that colony not only survived but gradually expanded over time, eventually covering the St. Lawrence river and Newfoundland at the very least? Could...

What would it take for Portugal to have more and stronger outposts throughout Asia, from Goa to Malacca and maybe Taiwan, in the 16th century? Could having them somehow not colonize Brazil help?