Portugal, a tiny nation with around a million inhabitants, created a world empire between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries which left vestiges in Africa and Asia as late as the 1970s. To illuminate the Asian dimension of this empire -- to show how it came into being and how it changed over time -- Dr Subrahmanyam explores the interaction of international and local factors in Europe, Asia and East Africa alike. This is a major contribution to the early modern history of Asia, as well as to the study of European expansion.