Also want to ask if anyone has read good books detailing the spanish and portuguese empires from 1500-1650 (especially colonial development)? I know enough spanish to make it through spanish textbook, although i don't know if could read the original sources perfectly. Suggestions would be greately appreciated.
I recommended J.H. Elliott's
Empires of the Atlantic World, a comparative history of the Spanish and British American empires in an earlier post. You might start there, at least its bibliography. I've enjoyed Hugh Thomas, but gather some people are down on him. He's definitely more 'popular history.' For Portugal, I have the same question as you. I read A.J.R. Russell-Wood's
The Portuguese Empire, 1415-1808: A World on the Move several years ago, and concluded that while it was good enough as far as it went, it was very short given the magnitude of its subject. C.R. Boxer's "The Portuguese Seaborne Empire" is supposed to be good, but I haven't read it.
Shifting gears a bit, I'm working through Peter Brown's
The Rise of Western Christendom right now. I'm enjoying it a great deal, though I find his style offputting at times. He really likes the word "fierce" and its derivatives, for instance, and exclamation points, the use of which was pounded out of me at an early age and which is rather surprising in the work of such a heavily garlanded professor writing for an academic press. That's a minor quibble, though. His theme is the evolution of a Christian religious culture. Though his focus is on the Latin West, he ranges as far afield as Central Asia by way of showing the other Christendoms, if that is not too anachronistic a word, that developed at the same time. My concern with him, and this is probably not the place to discuss it, is his treatment of the fall of western Empire, something which he goes to great lengths to minimize, effectively denying that such a thing happened. Obviously the stereotypical idea of barbarian hordes smashing the empire to bits is simplistic in its own right, but I suspect Brown and other exponents of "Late Antiquity" go too far in the opposite direction. I wonder what others here think.