In an article about Prince Henry the Navigator published in 1894, a correspondent in the London Times referred to Portugal as ‘this interesting little country’. The article was written when Portuguese and British interests in southern Africa were on a collision course, but the writer's magnificent condescension is not a product of the age of imperialism only. Not taking the oldest ally seriously is an endemic British disease.

Disney does take Portugal seriously, but then, though he was partly educated at Oxford, his professional career has been spent mostly in Australia and perhaps that experience is necessary for a historian whose work ranges very widely in space, as well as time. His two-volume history, 700 pages of narrative, is the most ambitious yet to have been attempted in English. H. V. Livermore, the author of the previous Cambridge history (1966), had less space at his disposal, and also tried to bring the story down to the present day. Other writers of single-volume histories – Boxer, Russell-Wood, Newitt – have concentrated exclusively on the Portuguese colonial experience. Disney, however, gives almost exactly equal coverage to Portugal as a European country, albeit one much involved in developments overseas, and to the empire itself, divided between Africa, west and east, the Atlantic islands (Madeira, Azores, Cabo Verde), Asia, from India to Japan, and the great American colony of Brazil. He finishes in 1807, the year when King João vi, faced with a French invasion of the home country, moved the capital of the empire from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro and thus, according to Disney, brought Portugal's ‘old regime’ to a symbolic close.

The balanced division of material between the two volumes of the history is an indication of Disney's authorial method. He is a notably fair-minded historian. Just as the different parts of the empire – even remote and tiny outposts – receive due attention, so does every period of the history of the geographical space now known as Portugal, from the Lower Palaeolithic to the late eighteenth century. An intelligent use of footnotes allows him to comment on controversies without becoming excessively bound up in them – the debate about the supposed ‘bourgeois revolution’ of 1383–5 being a good example. Disney writes consistently well, and although his book will probably be consulted via its indices rather than read through, doing so is rewarding. His narrative is basically political, but it includes economic developments, about which he is lucid and consistently interesting. Throughout he avoids the benefits of hindsight and strives to present problems in the way that they were faced by the men on the ground, but he has a special sympathy for the monarchs and statesmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is a period on which Disney himself has published an important monograph (Twilight of the pepper empire, 1978), and one which has been the butt of sometimes ill-judged humour on the part of British commentators. These – even the great Boxer – Disney puts firmly in their place.

Readers of this Journal will naturally wish to learn about the contribution of the Portuguese to the history of Christianity, the low point being probably the inquisition and the high point the Jesuit missions, particularly those to Japan and to Brazil. Here too Disney retains his sense of balance. He does not hide the brutality and unfairness of the inquisition, but also asks himself why it could survive so long, concluding that Old Christians, always a majority, gave it their support because ‘they could not themselves Judaize – and Judaizing was the Inquisition's principal preoccupation’. In the popular imagination the Jesuit settlements, aldeamentos, of Brazil and other parts of South America have become a model of humane colonisation. Here Disney is notably cautious. As he explains, though the Jesuits sometimes succeeded in repelling slave-raiders, ‘the aldeamentos had a high death rate … resulting in a heavy turnover of residents with much insecurity and instability’.

Disney avoids the myths by which the Portuguese have at different periods tried to understand their history. He shows how the voyages of private traders, and sub-colonisation – expansion into new territories from existing ones – were just as important as official expeditions, launched with great fanfare in Lisbon. According to him, miscegenation – so much commented upon by visitors to various parts of the empire – is not a national characteristic of the Portuguese, but was the inevitable consequence of a scarcity of white women. In Brazil, plantation society, believed by Gilberto Freyre to define a whole nation, ‘was never representative’.

Such scepticism is entirely appropriate in a book which for many years will be most English readers' introduction to the history of Portugal. But that history is a remarkable one which raises general questions which Disney might have considered, even if no definitive answer is possible. If Portugal was ‘one of the first European kingdoms to establish stable borders’, why did that happen, and how was it that ‘a relatively small and struggling frontier kingdom’ has survived until the present day, when so may others, like Catalonia, for instance, have not? Disney is excellent on Portuguese foreign relations, and indeed is properly appreciative of the many unsung achievements of Portuguese diplomacy, whereby remote and weak outposts of empire, like Macau or East Timor, were able to maintain themselves for centuries. But he never compares the Portuguese experience with that of other European countries, whether in Europe or in the wider world of empire. In what ways was the Portuguese experience of the Middle Ages different from that of other western countries of similar size? Were the Portuguese better or worse colonialists than the Castilians, or the Dutch, or the British, all of whom they outlasted? Were they the first global power, and what might that mean?

Disney may not tackle those questions, but he has written an excellent narrative history. It is supported by a large number of maps, and is based on wide and up-to-date reading. And as he traces the course of events, sometimes very strange events, all round the globe he is never condescending.