Casa da Índia, Lisbon

Assembled from 24 blocks · 1 evidence · 15 related

1. Story
2. The Portuguese crown's trading house, which did not merely regulate the India trade but was its owner. Where the Castilian Casa de Contratación administered and taxed a trade carried on by licensed private merchants, the Casa da Índia ran the carreira as a royal monopoly in the most valuable commodities — pepper above all — buying in Asia and selling in Europe on the king's account, with the Antwerp factory as the northern outlet. The two models are the clearest institutional contrast of the period and they produced different failure modes: the Portuguese system was chronically short of capital and dependent on foreign bankers, while the Castilian one leaked bullion through contraband it could not police. The Casa's records were largely destroyed in the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which is why Portuguese trade volumes of the sixteenth century are reconstructed indirectly and remain contested.
3. Knowledge
4. The Cape route (Carreira da Índia)
5. Lisbon
6. Casa da Índia, Lisbon
7. Connections
8. The Cape route (Carreira da Índia)
9. Lisbon
10. Volta do mar (the return by sea)
11. Cape of Good Hope
12. Goa
13. Pepper
14. Carrack (nau)
15. Lisbon
16. Casa da Índia, Lisbon
17. Dias rounds the southern tip of Africa
18. Vasco da Gama reaches Calicut
19. Cabral sights the coast of Brazil
20. Albuquerque takes Malacca
21. The Cape route (Carreira da Índia)
22. Casa da Índia, Lisbon
23. Evidence
24. The standard single-volume account of Portuguese expansion: Ceuta, the African coast, the Cape route, the carreira da Índia, the Estado da Índia and the institutions that ran them. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session. Boxer is a mid-twentieth-century imperial history and its framing has been substantially revised by later work, particularly on Asian agency and on the limits of Portuguese control; this pack uses it for structure, not for interpretation.