Whilst being a period of consolidation for the Portuguese right-wing dictatorship known as Estado Novo, the 1930s and 1940s were marked by geopolitical change and major redefinition of mental maps about colonial order. This dissertation explores the intertwined dynamics between imperial and national identity discourses in Portugal during these turbulent decades, departing from the idea that they were mutually constitutive in metropolitan culture and were negotiated on an everyday basis to adjust to different challenges. In order to contest the idea that the Portuguese 1930s and 1940s were marked by a monolithic imperial-based nationalism stemming from the state apparatuses, this study moves beyond the investigation of major nationalist events and colonial propaganda. Instead, it explores the interplay between Nation and Empire through the lens of the contemporary debates about the Empire and Portuguese colonial status in the world that stood out in the public discussion during this period. Therefore, it looks at representations of Portugueseness and Portuguese colonialism’s exceptionalism in five main themes: 1) the question of native forced labour in the Portuguese empire around the 1930 Forced labour convention, 2) European colonial claims for a new partition of Africa on the eve of the Second World War, 3) Portugal and its empire as a united nation, 4) colonial migration and settlement and 5) the specificity of the Portuguese national character and its impact on the national methods

Beyond the 'imperial mystique' : empire and national identity in the Portuguese Estado Novo (c. 1930-1951)

As representacoes da historia medeiam as relacoes sociais e os processos identitarios, sendo instrumentais na criacao e gestao identitaria, ao determinar, de forma fundamental, que projectos e perspectivas sao vistos como legitimos e validados atraves de actos de memoria. As lutas pelas memorias no reconstituir de sentidos e de novos espacos geopoliticos continuam marcadas pelos impactos da fractura abissal colonial moderna. Numa leitura que privilegia Mocambique como espaco de referencia, este artigo, que se conjuga na interseccao entre a antropologia e a historia, procura questionar continuidades coloniais no presente, revisitando, ao espelho, os complexos debates que formatam a intervencao colonial portuguesa a partir da Republica.

https://journals.openedition.org/eces/pdf/403

O ‘indígena’ africano e o colono ‘europeu’: a construção da diferença por processos legais

Programa Interuniversitario de Doutoramento em Historia
 Tese de doutoramento, Historia, Universidade de Lisboa, com a participacao do ISCTE- Instituto Universitario de Lisboa, Universidade Catolica Portuguesa, Universidade de Evora, 2018

Robusta empire : coffee, scientists and the making of colonial Angola (1898-1961)

In the early 1900s, an obscure Portuguese colony in the equatorial Atlantic rose as the world’s leading cocoa producer. Cocoa from the island of Sao Tome was grown on large plantations with indentured labor and high technological inputs. This technoscientific system, to control both plants and people, became the model for making an industry-suited cocoa, and the material evidence of the moral and economic virtues of the colonial plantation. Experts played a crucial role in building and putting into circulation such a system. Sao Tome’s cocoa expertise, along with its labor and racial relations, landscape patterns, and imperial imaginaries, contributed to the colonization of other African territories, namely the German Cameroons. This article agues that commodities and their technological histories can help bring to light the transnational and transcolonial features that are embedded at the core of empire building.

Standard Cocoa: Transnational Networks and Technoscientific Regimes in West African Plantations.

IntroductionThe economic and political history of former Portuguese colonies in Africa still needs to be written, above all for the last century of imperial rule.2 This chapter intends to fill a number of lacunae with regard to the economic and financial developments that shaped colonial Angola, Mozambique and Guinea from the late 1800s to the 1950s, with a particular focus on fiscal policies and their impact. The analysis of these developments presented here takes into account not only the ongoing debate on the economic aspects on Portuguese colonial administration, but also takes its cue from studies on British and French colonialism in sub- Saharan Africa for the same period. Over the years, fiscal issues have come to form an essential part of this discussion, given the centrality of taxation for the imperial project. The distinction between indirect and direct taxation is given particular relevance here, given the implications for the question of the exercise of sovereignty over African subjects as tax payers. It raises key issues such as registration, collection and accounting, the important distinction between the gatekeeper state and the sovereign, extractive state, and the nature of citizenship which were to shape the perceptions of the vast majority of African populations that were expected to directly contribute to the colonial project. The question of direct taxation which began to form a major source of colonial revenue in most African colonies between the early 1900s and the 1920s includes a broad gamut of issues, from the question of internal revenue generation, its organization and efficiency, associated with the notion of mise en valeur, to that of the social and political aims of administration, often likened to social engineering, generally summarized by the concept of the civilizing mission. In between, a less visible spectrum of policies and practices associated with colonial governance and the impact of its quest for revenue on African populations and the latter's reactions come into view. The questions raised here intend to go beyond much debated questions such as (compulsory) labor recruitment and crop production, to the no less important fiscal aspects of empire, which have been largely neglected in the Portuguese case. A fresh look at public accounts and colonial economies is warranted, not in the least in view of recent research on taxation in former British, French and Belgian Africa.3In the Portuguese context, the case of Portuguese Guinea (currently Guinea Bissau) has already been studied in some detail for part of the period under consideration,4 as have certain aspects of taxation in Mozambique for the early 1900s,5 while Angola continues to largely remain a neglected region despite its importance for empire.6 A recent attempt to put the relevance of fiscal policy, into perspective for former Portuguese Africa - above all with regard to direct "native" taxation - looked at the changes that occurred in Portuguese West Africa during the 1930s against the background of the global economic crisis.7 The emergence of the Estado Novo regime in Portugal which curbed colonial autonomy and imposed measures to balance colonial budgets while reducing debts to the metropolis, led to increased pressures on administrations and tax payers in order to increase internally generated revenue by all possible means. In addition, the question of colonial administration and fiscal revenue was approached from the angle of empire in order to assert to what extent Portuguese colonial administration Angola, Mozambique and Guinea in the twentieth century merits reassessment.8 The debate on the issue of economic development in Portugal's former African colonies from the 1960s onwards, involved a number of scholars such as Castro,9 Hammond,10 Henriksen,11 Clarence-Smith,12 Alexandre,13 Pedreira,14 Lains15 and Ferreira.16 Although they put the economic relations between Portugal and its colonies on the map, their contributions to the debate tend to bypass or make scant reference to the generation of public revenue through direct taxation on "native" African populations in these regions, which represented a crucial source of colonial income for most of the colonial period during the 1900s. …

Hugo Gonçalves Dores

Papers

Livros Brancos, Almas Negras: A 'Missão Civilizadora' do colonialismo português c. 1870-1930