‘Portuguese race’ and empire

Abstract

ABSTRACT The notion of ‘Portuguese race’ started to take shape in the early 1870s, under the influence of Aryan mythology and the first iterations of Haeckelian social Darwinist concepts of ‘historical races’. This notion evolved alongside theories of a ‘race struggle’ that would ensure planetary domination by the ‘Aryan peoples’. With these theories as a reference, mass killings and genocides became regular features of the conquest of territories in Angola, Mozambique and Timor, from the mid-1890s to the late 1910s. António Sardinha, one of Portuguese fascism’s leading doctrinaires, would revive the idea of a ‘Portuguese race’ in the early 1910s, infusing it with a certain air of mystique. Later that decade, Mendes Correia, a ‘raciologist’ initially related to the ‘anthroposociology school’ that gave rise to Nazi race programs, would fit the concept into a supposedly scientific framework. Mendes Correia also built up the mystical side by projecting the realization of the race onto empire. For the next forty years, his ‘raciology’ school would provide the Portuguese empire with its official ‘science of the races’, carrying out numerous anthropological field studies in the African colonies. Portugal’s national day, June 10, was celebrated as Dia da Raça, the ‘Day of the Race’, by the fascist regime up until the 1970s.