Bankrolling an Empire

Their abode was the sea. Their raison d’être commerce, their nationality Portuguese, their consciousness transnational. Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert has written A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640, a fascinating and page-turning account of the Portuguese trading community, which contained some Catholics but was largely composed of Jewish and New Christian merchants, traders, bankers, mariners, wholesalers and shopkeepers from Portugal and the Atlantic Portuguese expatriate collectivity who formed what became known as the “Nation.” They operated largely within the imperial world of the Spanish Hapsburg monarchy during what Pieter Emmer and others called the First Atlantic System, that is, the period dating from 1492 to 1640.

As the Hapsburgs consolidated their power in the Indies, merchants and investors of the Portuguese Nation took advantage of the opportunities that imperial expansion...