Kirkus Best Book of 2025
How the early Portuguese Empire facilitated the modern slave trade.
The Portuguese conquered the challenges of sailing the unforgiving Atlantic Ocean, extending their colonial empire along Africa's western shores. With their dedication to developing new sailing techniques and groundbreaking new knowledge of weather patterns and ocean currents, Portuguese mariners set the tone for the Age of Exploration. But their navigational achievements had horrific consequences for the people of western Africa: subjection to the slave trade.
Patricia Seed examines the historical and climatic odds that Portuguese seafarers overcame to be the first Europeans to tame the Atlantic. Using insights from fields ranging from oceanography to ethnography, she recounts how the Portuguese rapidly innovated and achieved profound new understandings of the ocean and sailing. At the same time, she foregrounds the reality that these innovations enabled them to inflict unimaginable cruelty as, against sometimes violent resistance, they forged what became their spoils of empire: the lucrative trade in human cargo that enslaved millions across Africa and beyond. Sails and Shadows is a history of incredible ingenuity outweighed and overshadowed by the horrors it wrought.
Patricia Seed is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. She is the award-winning author of To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico; American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches; and Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640.
"Sails and Shadows is the first account of Portuguese voyaging ever to incorporate data and insights from modern sciences as well as from aged texts. Based on an impressive engagement with original sources in multiple European languages, it should stand (for a very long time) as the definitive English-language account of its subject, which is an important one for world history, maritime history, and European history."—J. R. McNeill, author of Mosquito Empires
"Patricia Seed has produced an outstanding and truly original account of early Portuguese seaborne exploration down the west coast of Africa and to India. The book's great innovation is its deep and learned engagement with the growing field of climate history, which contextualizes Portuguese navigation, colonization, and settlement."—Jerry Brotton, author of Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction
"Scrupulously researched, elegantly written, and, most importantly, unfailingly fascinating, Seed's fine book reminds us of the sheer tenacity and bravery of the early Portuguese blue-water navigators. She is especially good at telling of the heroic sailor Gil Eanes, who managed to weave his caravels around the shoals and treacherous currents that blocked passage past West Africa's notorious Cape Bojador, thereby finally opening the Atlantic—and thence the Indian and Pacific Oceans—to those deep-water mariners who would help bend much of the sixteenth-century planet to Lisbon's command. As with most European colonial expansion, the subsequent years were marked by excess and cruelty. But about the skillful early seamanship there can be no argument. Such adventuring, whatever the human consequences, also left Portugal with a uniquely maudlin aphorism, still to be heard muttered in dockside bars today: So small a country to live in, but the whole world to die in."—Simon Winchester, author of Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge from Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic
256 pp.6 x 9Illus: 14 b/w maps and 1 b/w figure
9780520415874$29.95|£25.00Hardcover
Jan 2026