GOA AND ITS EUROPEAN RIVALS

The second half of the seventeenth century is one of the most neglected periods in the history of the Estado da Índia. Until the publication in 2006 of the relevant volumes of the Nova história da expansão portuguesa almost nothing of substance had been written about it, aside from Glenn J Ames's pioneering monograph on the viceroyalties of the 1670s and a few specialist articles and papers. Such disinterest may be attributed largely to the devastating decline suffered by the Estado da Índia itself during the first half of the century – a decline much commented upon by those living at the time. Subsequently generations of Portuguese historians simply turned their backs on the period, while foreign scholars focused on the English, the Dutch and the French.

When hostilities between the Portuguese and their European rivals east of the Cape of Good Hope finally halted in the 1660s the Estado da Índia found itself reduced to just four widely-separated components. These were Macau, part of Timor, the Portuguese interests in East Africa and the enclaves in India. To what extent this shrunken entity could survive the next few decades was clearly going to depend heavily on relationships with the English and the Dutch.

A truce with the English had been signed at Goa as early as 1635, after which the Portuguese gradually came to see the Anglo-Portuguese alliance in Asia as essential.