ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with the construction of the Portuguese and Spanish empires, approaching it as an entwined historical process across three continents, Africa, America, and Asia. Can we speak of an Iberian imperial pattern? To answer this question, I will examine the fifteenth-century backgrounds and the specific circumstances of the birth of the empires of Portugal and Spain in the early sixteenth century, their shared institutional, legal and social features, and the peculiarities of their respective transoceanic configurations up to the mid-seventeenth century, as well as the main characteristics of Portuguese and Spanish imperial thought.