The Portuguese with their bronze cannon and capable fleets both ruptured a self-sufficient system and joined up the world. They came as harbingers of globalisation and the scientific age of discovery. Their explorers, missionaries, merchants and soldiers fanned far across the world. They were in Nagasaki and Macau, in the uplands of Ethiopia and the mountains of Bhutan. They trudged across the Tibetan plateau and battled upstream the length of the Amazon. As they went, they mapped, they learned languages and they described, with a ‘pen in one hand, a sword in the other’.
