Beyond the immeasurable political and economic changes it brought, colonial expansion exerted a powerful effect on Portuguese culture. And as this book demonstrates, the imperial culture that emerged over the course of four centuries was hardly a homogeneous whole, as triumphalist literature and other cultural forms mingled with recurrent doubts about the expansionist project. In a series of illuminating case studies, Curto follows the history and perception of major colonial initiatives while integrating the complex perspectives of participating agents to show how the empire's life and culture were richly inflected by the operations of imperial expansion.