Emigration and the Sea: An Alternative History of Portugal and the Portuguese

Abstract

Malyn Newitt has produced a compelling new work of scholarship, important for its innovative framing of Portuguese history on a global scale by exploring the multiple ways that, since initiating the era of European overseas expansion in 1415, a Portuguese demographic and cultural diaspora has influenced and contributed significantly to world history. The book has a novel approach, describing global Portuguese impact through complex patterns of immigration over six centuries. Newitt’s writing is strong (though the book’s organization is oddly nonchronological); his highly erudite narrative showcases the author’s decades of teaching and writing related to this subject. From 1998 to 2014 Newitt was a professor of history in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at King’s College, London. His prior publications focus on the colonial era in the Indian Ocean, particularly the Portuguese in Mozambique.Emigration and the Sea opens with a consideration of recent historiographical trends and theories regarding the role of emigration in world history, followed by two chapters that explore emigration patterns from continental Portugal and the Atlantic Islands (the Azores and Madeira) from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Having laid this groundwork, Newitt examines in eight successive chapters the diaspora of Sephardic Jews from Portugal; Portuguese patterns of migration to Asia and Brazil; Portuguese emigration in the twentieth century, across Europe, and to various destinations in the Americas; and Portuguese emigration to Africa. A brief final chapter, “The Portuguese and the Sea,” considers the cultural diasporic significance of Portuguese fishing fleets in the northwest Atlantic.While valuable for its fresh vision and analytical parameters, the book offers a quirky and sometimes uneven analysis—one inevitable result, perhaps, given the broad, long perspective created by a senior scholar drawing on a lifetime of research. The narrative often relies on a device unusual for scholarly historical works—throughout the text Newitt quotes impressions provided by fictional literary sources as illustration and evidence rather than presenting actual experiences recounted in primary sources. Surprisingly, the publication lacks maps to orient the reader; this is an unfortunate oversight in a work meant to explain demographic movement between points on the globe that are unfamiliar to students in most Anglophone countries.Some lapses in the investigative fabric of the book are difficult to understand. For example, while discussing the Portuguese diaspora in the United States Newitt makes no mention of the substantial community based in New Jersey. He uncritically repeats as plausible the discredited Portuguese origin story to explain the reclusive Melungeons of Appalachia (210), ignoring definitive genetic research disproving an Iberian link. Similarly, Newitt offers an uncritical perpetuation of the myth of Pedro Francisco, a Revolutionary War hero supposedly of Portuguese descent, despite having no evidence of note supporting this claim. And what logic justifies including a detailed consideration of Cape Verdean immigration patterns in the United States but not in Paris, all the while failing to mention the comparable role of Brazilian communities settled across North America?Newitt ends his book very abruptly, with no analytical conclusion. While readers will find much here to enrich their understanding of Portugal’s impact on the world—Newitt’s contribution is undoubtedly useful as a teaching text for Lusophone studies—one hopes that subsequent editions may clear up some of the substantial matters of concern raised here.