Introduction

Abstract

Portuguese Studies vol. 28 no. 2 (2012), 123–25© Modern Humanities Research Association 2012 Introduction Toby Green and Malyn Newitt King’s College London The seven papers published in this number of Portuguese Studies were originally presented at a workshop we organized at King’s College London on 13 January 2012.1 The workshop, entitled Formal and Informal Empire: Portuguese Relations with the Non-European World brought together younger scholars working on the history of Portuguese overseas expansion. As the title indicates, Portuguese expansion has been both formal and informal — operating formally through established imperial structures, informally through the spread of the Portuguese language, the influence of the missions operating under the padroado real, the business networks of Sephardic Jews, the activities of Portuguese renegades, sertanejos and emigrants, and the emergence of fractions of local populations which assumed an explicit ‘Portuguese’ identity. The beginnings of Portuguese expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries created the first truly worldwide empire, and Portugal’s control of the re-export of American silver to India and China through the networks of the Estado da Índia provided ample opportunity for both formal and informal imperial structures to develop. The experience of this imperial rise and fall found echoes in more recent experiences of Portuguese imperialism in twentieth-century Africa, an experience which only finally came to an end with the fall of the Estado Novo in 1974. The Portuguese empire thus operated from the late fifteenth century to 1974, a span of almost 500 years that eclipsed the longevity of many other imperial projects. The articles collected here cover this whole period, and offer distinctive visions of different periods of the Portuguese imperial project, and of the similarities and differences that run between them; the comparative perspective which emerges will be useful to scholars seeking to understand the inner workings of processes of government that were so enduring and affected so many peoples around the world. Three of these articles revise in important ways our understanding of the formal empire in twentieth-century Africa. Too often the Estado Novo has been characterized as a rigid, ideologically driven, regime operating according to centrally directed policies developed with no consideration for local conditions. 1 The workshop was sponsored by Instituto Camões Centre for Studies in Portuguese Language & Culture, the Department of History, and the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies (SPLAS), at King’s College London. Eleven papers were presented. The four not submitted for publication were by Alan Strathern, Zoltan Bierdermann, Sao Neto and Pedro Ramos Pinto. Toby Green and Malyn Newitt 124 Recent research, however, has increasingly shown that there was active debate within the Portuguese colonial hierarchy and profound disagreements about the direction that policy should take, as well as great variations in the way that policies were locally applied. Alexander Keese shows the extent to which highranking Portuguese officials in Angola disagreed not only over the general direction of labour policy but over the way it should be implemented. He argues that the problem was not that the colonial officials all conformed to a rigid ideology (they clearly did not), but that there were no developed bureaucratic networks through which to influence policy. A surprising conclusion is that it was the military, which, in the wake of the 1961 uprisings, eventually managed to insist on serious reform. Corrado Tornimbeni also reflects on a colonial policy which was pragmatic rather than doctrinaire. Colonial officials in Mozambique had to find practical solutions to problems arising from the proximity of more economically advanced ‘British’ territories and from the administrative fragmentation that was the legacy of the 1890s. The practical solutions adopted, in particular the use of ‘traditional’ authorities to control population movement, were later to be adopted by the Frelimo government when faced with the urgent necessity to rebuild its relations with rural society. The formal and informal ways in which colonial authorities had addressed real day-to-day administrative problems provided a legacy to which eventually the government of independent Mozambique had to return. Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses and Robert McNamara’s article deals with Portugal’s relations with its neighbours during the war of independence. A recent biography of Sp...