Topic
6 books about Madeira tagged “social history”.
An extensively researched account of nearly two centuries of British commercial and social influence on Madeira, tracing how resident merchant families informally “colonised” the island as a key staging post in transatlantic trade.
The illustrated travel journal of Isabella de França, wife of a London merchant of Madeiran origin — lost for nearly a century, then rediscovered — offering a vivid writer’s and watercolourist’s portrait of island life in 1853–54.
An illustrated history of the Madeiran Portuguese in British Guiana, who began arriving in 1835 to work on sugar plantations and later became a prominent merchant community.
The memoir of Maria Mendonça, who grew up in the 1960s–70s in one of Madeira’s remotest villages — no gas, electricity, running water or proper road — recorded over daily teatimes by her employer to preserve a vanishing world.
Part of the "Of Islands & Women" series — a literary and historical exploration of Madeira through the lives of its women and the accounts of women travellers and writers who visited or lived on the island.
An illustrated study of Madeira’s historic quintas — the grand manor-house estates of Funchal built by Portuguese aristocrats and British wine-merchant families — documenting their architecture, history and decline.