Portugal and the End of Ultra-Colonialism

Perry Anderson

It is now clear that the Portuguese Empire is coming to an end. In its final days, it may be timely to examine the history and structure of this empire, both for their own interest and for the importance they have for any general account of imperialism. Good factual accounts of the Portuguese Empire, past and present, already exist and will no doubt continue to appear. The study below is intended rather to suggest a theoretical model which can integrate the available material into a coherent and significant whole. It begins, necessarily, with the briefest of accounts of contemporary Portugal itself, as centre of determination of its colonies. There follows a rsum history of the Empire, and then a structural analysis of Portuguese imperialism as it exists today. A final section deals with the insurrection in Angola.

Portugal: Economy* Lying on the Western sea-board on the Iberian peninsula, Portugal is some 350 miles long and 100 miles wide. The north is mountainous: most of the centre and the south consists of high plateaux which prolong the Central Spanish Meseta down to the Atlantic. The climate is Mediterranean, with a rainfall of 29 inches and an average temperature that varies between 70 and 50 F. The population (1960) is 9,100,000. A break-down of the economically active proportion of this shows:
* Statistical sources: Annuario Intelligence Unit. Estatistico 1958, UN, OEEC, Economist

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Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing Manufacturing ... ... Personal and General Services Trade and Insurance ... ... Building and Public Works ... Civil Servants ... ... ... Transport ... ... ... Mining ... ... ... ... Public Service Industries ... Rest ... ... ... ...

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

1,569,000 592,000 489,000 227,000 155,000 115,000 107,000 25,000 10,000 6,000

Total ... ... ... ... 3,186,000 of whom women ... ... 725,000 (1950 census figures) The primary sector (agriculture, fishing, forestry) thus absorbs about 50% of Portugals manpower. Industry accounts for only 24%. The tertiary (white-collar) sector employs the remaining 26%. As a pattern, this is unique in Western Europe. The only other country with a work-force distributed in anything like this way is Spain, which, however, has a much more considerable industrial sector. A comparison with the two other physically smallest colonial powers, Belgium and Holland, is instructive. In 1957, Belgium, with a population almost exactly the same as Portugals (9,000,000), had an agricultural sector of 11%, an industrial sector of no less than 49%, and a tertiary sector of 37%. In Holland in 1957 the figures showed an even more sophisticated pattern: 19%30%41%. The contrast reveals the Portuguese economy as backward in the extreme. The picture becomes sharper as it takes on more detail. Agriculture occupies the vast bulk of the work-force, yet it is subsistence farming at such low levels of technique, that it accounts for only one fourth of the national product. The soil is particularly poor, lacking phosphates and potash. Fertiliser techniques are rudimentaryit is officially estimated that production could be raised by at least 50% given adequate fertilisation. Mechanisation is minimal (there were 6,000 tractors in all Portugal in 1958). Erosion, due to unreliable rainfall and lack of preventive measures, is widespread. As a result, despite the overwhelming place of agriculture in national life, Portugal has a permanent cereal deficit: 150,000 metric tons of corn were imported annually in the period 195355. In 1960, wheat imports alone cost 227 million escudos. There is almost no heavy industry. Deposits of coal and iron ore are relatively small: 490,000 tons of coal was produced in 1960, and 280,000 tons of iron ore. There is now one steel works in the country, at Seixal near Lisbon, with an initial planned capacity of 200,000 tons a year and target capacity of 500,000 tons; but with a slowly rising level of demand, this is expected merely to hold the volume of steel imports at its present level. Electrical production has increased in recent years, and in 1960 reached 3,250 million kilowatts. But this is still the lowest per capita output in Western Europe. Total energy

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consumption was some 355 kilos of coal (equivalent) per capita in 1959: OEEC estimates place this as about 15 to the OEEC average index of 100. Such underdeveloped countries as Panama (478 kilos), Lebanon (567 kilos) or the Malayan Federation (558 kilos) consumed more. Textiles are the dominant light industry. They employ one third of the total manufacturing work-force and provide one fifth of all export earnings. The basis of much of this industry is artificial, as it is heavily dependent on forcibly depressed cotton prices in the colonies, and drastically protected markets in the same territories: in 1960 82.7% of Portugals raw cotton imports came from her colonies, and 35.8% of her cotton manufactures were exported back to the same areas. Without this administratively enforced supply and demand, the Portuguese textile industry, which is inefficient and uncompetitive, would dwindle rapidly. Cork, of which Portugal is the worlds largest producer, is the other major export industry (one sixth all foreign earnings in 1960). But about half these earnings come from raw cork which, as a primary product is subject to considerable fluctuations in world prices, and is at the minute suffering from excess supply. Next in size come fish products (mainly sardines) and wine. The 1960 figures were as follows: Exports (million escudos) Textiles ... ... ... ... ... 1,980 Cork ... ... ... ... ... 1,468 manufactured ... ... ... 772 unmanufactured ... ... ... 696 Canned Fish ... ... ... ... 1,057 Wine ... ... ... ... ... 687 Timber and manufacture ... ... 465 Resin and products ... ... ... 420 Wolfram ... ... ... ... 106 Olive oil ... ... ... ... 82 6,265 Total exports ... ... ... 9,354 For domestic consumption, there are small industries producing leather goods, metal products, chemicals, soap, paper, glassware, ceramics, electrical goods and Pharmaceuticals. The major import items, in contrast, are heavy industrial goods (machinery, finished steel), classic consumer durables (motor vehicles, radio sets, sewing machines), foodstuffs (wheat, sugar, potatoes, cod), and fuels (petroleum, coal). Imports (million escudos) 1960 Industrial machinery ... ... ... 1,425 Iron and steel ... ... ... ... 1,403 Raw Cotton ... ... ... ... 1,041 Motor Vehicles ... ... ... 882 Crude Oil ... ... ... ... 820 Refined Oil Products ... ... ... 525 Man-made fibres ... ... ... 301

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Wheat ... ... ... ... Ships ... ... ... ... Iron and steel products ... Radio and television receivers Antiobiotics and medicaments Plastics ... ... ... ...

... ... ... ... ... ...

226 222 200 187 251 235

7,902 Total imports ... ... ... 15,636 With the single exception of cotton for the textile industry, the classic colonial absorption of raw materials for re-export as manufactured products, does not occur. The balance is exactly opposite: quasi-raw material exports (cork, wine, etc.involving minimal technological intervention), manufactured imports. The pattern is the very reverse of an imperial economy. A semi-subsistence agriculture, an insignificant producers goods industry, an extremely limited consumer sector, overwhelming export reliance on processed primary products: Portugal, an imperial power, has the economy of an underdeveloped country. The corollary is a standard of living that is the lowest in Western Europe, and one of the lowest in the world: 210 dollars a year, less than Greece or Mexico. Society Social structures reflect and reinforce the retardation of the economy. More than two-thirds of the population live in communities of less than 2,000 people. The peasantry is thus by far the most numerous class. This class suffers under two opposite, but equally oppressive tenurial regimes. The South is dominated by the vast latifundia of a feudal aristocracy; the North by myriads of tiny peasant holdings. The disproportions of wealth have few comparisons anywhere in the world. Ninety per cent of the farms in the north are miniscule plots averaging 2.4 acres of field crops. In the south the average size is 2,500 times as large5,878 acres. Of all Portuguese farms 94.9% are less than 24 acres in size: 0.3% are over 494 acres. Yet the first account for only 28.7% of the countrys total cultivated areathe second for 39%. In the north, through generations of divided inheritances, the innumerable small holdings are steadily becoming ever smaller and less viable. Even within this system landlordism is rampant: a recent observer reported that it is not unknown for a five-acre farm to be owned by no less than 15 different landlords. The immense southern latifundia are devoted to extensive cultivation and livestock breeding. In the north, the small peasant proprietor has no capital to improve his yield. In the south the absentee latifundista, as in much of Latin America, is content with his aggregate profit, and will not invest to raise productivity. The net result is chronic unemployment in the countryside, and the cereal deficit. The average agricultural wage is 5/7d. a day for men, and 3/1d. for women. The urban working class is little better off. The average wage in the cities is 6/7d. a daysome 2 a week. There is no question of

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striking for higher wages, shorter hours or better conditions: unions are illegal. With a stagnant economy and creeping prices (monopolies, inflated administrative and commercial sectors) real wages dropped by one third between 1939 and 1958. Per capita consumption of meat is a quarter of that in France, and scarcely more than that in Egypt. Consumption of sugar compares with Ceylon or Pakistan. Calory intake (2,410) is lower than in such underdeveloped countries as Greece, Paraguay or Egypt. Housing conditions match diet: even by official Portuguese standards 11,000 families in Lisbon alone (population 790,000) live in dwellings unfit for human habitation. In 1950, only 14.5% of all Portuguese houses had running water in the houses (34.2% in Spain, 28.7% in Greece); only 19.5% had electricity (Spain 80%) and 7.8% baths. Health inevitably reflects the conditions of food and shelter. The infant mortality rate is the highest in Europe (88.6 per 1,000 population), and higher than some colonial and ex-colonial territories (67.5 in Senegal). Tuberculosis is more frequent than anywhere else in Europe (51 deaths per 100,000 population). Portugal has only had an actual Ministry of Health since 1958. Education fares no better: 40.4% of the population over seven years of age is illiterate, the most damning single figure of all. The emigration statistics are a verdict on the system. Between 1954 and 1957 net average emigration was 31,760 persons a year (about 65% went to Brazil or Venezuela), one third of the net national increase of population over that period. The sovereigns of this misery are a tiny, compact oligarchy of families which entirely dominate the economy through a set of complementary personal and institutional controls. On the one hand, a series of interlocking directorships link banks, industries and insurance houses. On the other, an all-embracing network of cartels overlays the whole economy and ensures monopoly profit-levels from it. These structures underline Portugals backwardness as a colonial metropolis. They show striking analogies to pre-war Egypt, where a traditional, socially exclusive intermarrying elite of a similar kind dominated the economy from power positions in banking and finance houses, debilitating economic growth by financial and real estate speculation. The archetype of the Portuguese cartels, the Companhia Unio Fabril (CUF), occupies a comparable position to the famous Misr group in the ancien regime in Egypt. CUF has a monopoly of the Portuguese metallurgical industry. It controls the majority of dockyards and shipping firms, and has a massive share of export houses and colonial enterprises. Through its subsidiary, Gouveia, CUF all but owns Portuguese Guinea: it has a monopoly of all wholesale and retail commerce, the rice and peanut industries, and all transport. Within Portugal itself its ancillaries include: medicinal drugs, cement, tobacco, tin, cellulose, air transport, electrical industry, banking, soap, beer, matches, livestock, cinema, real estate and insurance. At the same time, foreign capital penetration in Portugal, particularly British, is probably more advanced than in any other

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European country. The industrial and commercial centre of Oporto is dominated by Anglo-Scottish families resident there for generations; Clarkes, Coutts, Sandeman, de la Fosse. The Anglo-Portuguese Telephone Company has a monopoly of the countrys telephone system. The urban bus and train services are all British owned. Strong representation in banking is ensured by the Bank of London and South America. About half of the insurance companies (40 out of 86 in 1953) are foreign owned, with British concerns again predominant: 26 British firms to 6 French, 4 Spanish, 2 Swiss, 1 German, and 1 Italian. The British have strong interests in shipbuilding and electrical goods (English Electric) the German in Pharmaceuticals (Meyer) and engineering (Mannesman, Krupp). There is a US monopoly in the marketing of cork. Political Regime The logic of economic archaism, brutal exploitation and omnipresent foreign capital is a political regime of permanent violence. Only a massive machinery of repression could keep the whole intolerable structure in place. The Salazar dictatorship is precisely this. Born in 1926 out of an army revolt, it was, like its Spanish and LatinAmerican homologues, the creation of a military and ecclesiastical alliance. The beneficiaries of the regime are the feudal landowners of the latifundia and the oligarchy which controls the cartels. Church and Army in turn are institutional formations of these groups. The social character of the Salazar regime is thus unambiguous, but its identity is not simply to be absorbed into its class of origin and its range of beneficiaries. In its 35 years of existence, the political apparatus of Salazarism has, by now a classic sociological process, worked itself to a certain extent free from its social base, gaining a margin of autonomy vis--vis the groups which brought it to power and whose interests it factually serves. It has developed an extensive paramilitary and ideological armature of its own. There are at least five different armed political and police corps: the secret police (PIDE); the riot police (PSP); the Republican guard (GNR); and the volunteer Legio Portuguesa, a green-shirted shock and vigilante organisation. There is also an armed customs police (Guardia Fiscal). The Legio has some 87,000 members and is an important military and political reserve force for the regime. The GNR in 1958 numbered some 7,675 men, and is capable of deploying fully armoured and motorized units instantly against strikes or demonstrations. Parallel to these bodies is the civilian organisation of the regime, the Unio Nacional, Portugals single political party. Founded in 1930, this has never been very important in the constellation of power within the regime, and is today confined mainly to an ideological and publicity role. The Portuguese regime is commonly described as fascist, and the apparatus of repression and exploitation outlined above clearly meets this classification. The ideology of Salazarismcorporativismgives the term a precise historical reference. Corporativism conceives the nation as a series of conflicting interest groups, between whom the State should act as arbiter, organising all groups into corporations

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and mediating impartially between them. Employers are organised into gremios, workers into sindicatos. The Legislature is divided into a National Assembly (all 120 seats, elected on a severely restricted suffrage, are held by the Unio Nacional), and a Corporative Assembly, representing the different corporations. Corporativism was, of course, the official ideology of the Italian Fascist Party, and its imitation in Portugal defines Salazars regime as fascist in a pure sense of the term. At the same time, it remains in Portugal a somewhat half-hearted affair: the regime has never made any real attempt at a systematic propagation or even exposition of the theory. Corporativism in Portugal is a larvaed ideology, with little political importance. The reason lies doubtless in the role of Catholicism in Portugal. Fascism is an emergency operation: a last, desperate attempt to prolong or resurrect by force a social order which once functioned as if naturally and automatically, without the open intervention of violence, but which is now irretrievably broken. It develops an articulated ideology to the exact extent that traditional centres of authority have weakened or declined. In Portugal, deprived of the experience of either Reformation or Industrial Revolution, Catholicism is virulent and unchallenged, more so than in any other European country, even Spain. A developed fascist ideology is therefore unnecessary. In Italy, the influence and power of the Church, although still massive, was also widely contested and discredited in the 20s: fascism in Italy was correspondingly more ideological. In the maelstrom of Germany in the 30s, where all traditional authority had broken down, fascism took a highly articulated and systematic ideological form. What is true of political theories is probably equally true of political machines. The facade nature of the Unio Nacional, the decentred position of the Legio Portuguesa are the obverse of the overwhelming role of the Army in Portugal; just as the relative positions of the Falange, the Fascist or the Nazi parties have varied inversely to the role of the Army in Spain, Italy and Germany. In 1958 one out of every three Cabinet Ministers in Portugal was a member of the Armed Forces (including the crucial Ministries of the Interior and the Overseas Territories). The President of the Republic is always a General. Military expenditure in 1960 absorbed one-fifth of the budget (2,219.4 million escudos of a total expenditure of 10,488 million escudos), and was scheduled to take up well over a quarter in 1961, an estimate made well before the Angolan insurrection. Elite recruitment of the officer corps is explicit: no coloured Portuguese citizen can become an officer, no officer can marry any woman without either a university degree or a 875 dowry, all officers must marry in Church. Salazars regime has been able to rely largely on traditional institutional formations for its apparatus of coercion and mystification. It has also developed independent structures of its own, particularly in its exercise of police repression, and enjoys a limited, but definite margin of autonomy from its institutional supports and their social ground. (This is of immediate political importance, as will emerge later). To sum up: Portugal, formally the third largest imperial

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power in the world today, is itself an underdeveloped country. A largely pre-industrial infra-structure, feudal ownership patterns, military paramountcy, a torpid fascism. This is the metropolitan complex which determines the specific system of Portuguese overseas domination: ultra-colonialismthat is, at once the most primitive and the most extreme modality of colonialism. It is in terms of these two elements that an analysis of the Portuguese empire can be made. REFLEX-COLONIZATION The anomaly of Portuguese imperialism has to be seen in the perspective of its history. How did Portugal ever come to possess its vast African colonies? Their origins lie at the very opening of European overseas expansion in the 15th century. I. Asia Portugal, favoured by a geographical position along the Atlantic sea-board and just off the extreme western edge of North Africa, began sending ships southwards along the African Atlantic coast at the beginning of the 15th century. Cape Bojador was passed in 1434, Senegal reached in 1444, the Cape Verde Islands colonised in 1456. In 1485 Diego Co reached the mouth of the Congo. In 1487 Dias sailed beyond the cape of Good Hope. And in 1498 da Gama landed in India. What was the economic content of this expansion? Two stages need to be distinguished. In the first half of the century, Portuguese expeditions to West Africa aimed primarily at the acquisition of Guinean gold. Caravels left loaded with tin and brass-ware, linen, trinkets, coral (and later beads on the East coat of Africa), and bartered these for gold and slaves. The gold thus accumulated probably helped to substitute for the increasingly scarce Sudanese source which had up till about 1440 financed deficit European trade in the Levant. Once da Gama had landed in India, the whole basis of Portuguese commercial expansion changed. The object was now spices (pepper, nutmegs, cinnamon, cloves), not gold. Direct access to India allowed the Portuguese to eliminate the Arab and Levantine middlemen who had controlled the European export market to that date from Cairo and Alexandria. The profits from the spice trade were initially colossal. Da Gamas shipment of pepper (not a large one) paid for his voyage 60 times over. The spices were bought with Guinean gold and the German silver for which it was sold in Europe. After the first voyages, pepper prices slumped in Europe, but were later stabilised at 30 cruzados a quintal, while their procurement price in India remained at about 2 cruzados. Venice, the former entrept of the spice trade in Europe, suffered a severe crisis and joined with Arab Red Sea traders in attempting to oust the Portuguese from their Indian vantage-points by force. But in 1509, a combined Venetian-Arab-Indian fleet was destroyed by Almeida off Diu, and Portuguese control of Middle-Eastern shipping was assured.

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Rapid expansion followed. Goa was seized in 1510, and soon dominated the Indian coast. Malacca, in the Malay straits, was taken in 1511 and the main source area for the spices, the Indonesian islands of Amboina, Ternate and Tidore in 1514. In 1515, Ormuz in the Persian Gulf was captured. In 1519 Colombo fell. By the middle of the 16th century, the Portuguese exercised control over the whole Indian Ocean from East Africa to Indonesia, and the Persian Gulf to Burma. The structure of this Empire was absolutely distinctive. It consisted simply of a vast arc of naval bases strung-out at immense intervals round the Indian Ocean: Sofala, Mozambique and Mombasa in East Africa; Ormuz and Muscat in the Persian Gulf; Diu, Damao, Bassein, Chaul, Goa, Cochin in India; Colombo in Ceylon; Malacca in the Malay straits; Amboina, Ternate, Tidor and Solor in Indonesia (later Macao extended Portuguese penetration to the South China sea). These bases commanded both sources (Indonesian islands, Ceylon) and sea routes, and effectively secured Portuguese commercial dominance over the whole ocean. Wealth flowed into Portugal on an immense, unprecedented scale. Albuquerque estimated the annual profits to the Crown alone at 1,000,000 cruzados a year. Lisbon became the most spectacularly opulent town in Europe. In the first half of the 16th century a climax of imperial luxury was reached, which marked the zenith of the first wave of European overseas expansion. This Portuguese empire of the 16th century was the creation of a specific type of imperialism, an imperialism of exchange. Its pattern was the barter or purchase of one type of (usually primary) commodity for another. Pepper from the Malabar coast, cinnamon from Ceylon, cloves, mace and nutmeg from the Indonesian islands, were initially bought on the Indian coast, mainly with German silver from the Augsburg mines. The original accumulation of capital came from the influx of Guinean gold in the first half of the 15th century: this was then ploughed back into the spice expeditions, with an enormously increased yield. As the Portuguese grip on the Indian Ocean littorals extended, much of the supply-areas for these spices came under their control, and they could then be shipped home directly. Finally, when naval supremacy was firmly established, the Portuguese came to make larger and larger profits from the Asian interport trade, which they controlled through a system of licences, unlicenced local traders being liable to arrest and confiscation. In this way, much of the spices came to be paid for in Coromandel cloth from the Indian coast: Arabian horses, African gold and ivory, Chinese and Japanese bullion were carried the relatively short and safe distances from one oriental entrept to another: Ormuz to Goa, Cochin to Colombo, Macao to Nagasaki, etc. Ultimately, the actual majority of Portuguese revenues in the East came from this carrying trade, but much of it stayed in the East, whereas the carracks which got back to Lisbon were predominantly loaded with spices, silks and textiles. Portuguese oriental trade was imperialism as well as exchange, because of its enforcement by technologically superior means of

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violence (bombardment of Calicut, burning of Mombasa, seizure of Socotra, sacking of Goa, etc.). The basis of Portuguese successes in the Indian Ocean in the 16th century is much argued over. Two crucial factors were Portugals own position in European geopolitics at the time, and the state of the various Empires which confronted the Portuguese when they rounded Africa at the turn of the 16th century. Besides the purely geographical assets of her outlying position on the Atlantic seaboard, Portugal enjoyed the related advantage of comparative isolation from the European power-political struggle, thus allowing an all-out concentration on overseas expansion which no other European country could match. At the same time, none of the major states against which Portuguese expansion in the Indian Ocean was launched, was politically very strong at that moment. The Mameluke empire in Egypt was about to succumb to the Ottoman Turks. Southern India was dominated by five Muslim Sultanates and the Hindu Kingdom of Vijayanagar, all frequently at war with each other; the Javanese empire of Madjapahit was in collapse and decline; Ming China was in an isolationist phase; Japan was in anarchy. Thus, when the Portuguese appeared in the Indian Ocean and beyond, there was very little armed shipping there to resist them. In their overall level of culture, the eastern empires were easily as advanced as the Portuguese aggressor, if not more so. This was true even of the small Arab city-states on the East Coast of Africa: as Duffy says: By all accounts, it was a world comparable, if not superior, in material culture to Portugal in 1500.* Portuguese success was not even due to a superior naval technology; pilots and navigating instruments in the Indian-African traffic were as good as anything the Portuguese had. Chinese and Indonesian war-junks were more formidable than Portuguese warships. Where decisive superiority did lie was in artillery. The Chinese had possessed cannon for centuries, but they were inefficient compared with European models. Other Asian artillery was still less effective. Portuguese paramountcy in the East was based ultimately on heavier fire power. The logic of this type of expansion was to move beyond control of exchange to control of actual extraction. The transition from one stage to the other implied a more systematic use of violence: instead of the establishment of factories and forts along a littoral, it meant the conquest of extensive hinterlands. With the seizure of the spice islands, the Portuguese in the 16th century had already formally taken this step, but spices are such a concentrated crop (by the 18th century, the totality of the worlds cloves crop was grown, by Dutch restrictive practice, on the island of Amboina) that the normal consequences of the change were never effected in the Portuguese Asian Empire. Key administrators (Almeida, Real) consciously resisted any tendency to extend Portuguese enclaves inland: da Gama even advised the abandonment of Ormuz, Malacca, and all the Indian forts except Goa and Cochin.
*James Duffy, Portuguese Africa, Cambridge, 1959.

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The decisive difference between either of these types of imperialism and the classic transformer imperialism of the 19th century is clear. The one exploited its colonial possessions both for raw material supplies and as consumer markets for goods produced at home, often manufactured from processed primary products from the same area. The other simply enforced an advantageous exchange of primary products, or, at best, seized control of their extraction. The crucial difference lies in the role of technology in each. In 19th century imperialism, technological superiority is generalized. Structuring and defining every aspect of colonial reality, it is at once the motor and the meaning of the totality of the economic and social relationships at stake. By contrast, in the earlier type of imperialism, technological superiority is confined to the essentially external medium of violence, leaving the strictly economic processes unadvanced and unchanged. The difference is underlined by the domestic impact of the wave of Portuguese commercial expansion at the beginning of the 16th century. While oriental revenues soared, the metropolitan economy stagnated and declined. In the words of the textbook account: They (the Portuguese) did not produce anything at home, in agriculture or manufacture; in the midst of what seemed a perpetual carnival the nation was begging its bread. The King sent to Flanders for ships of corn. After the famine of 15034 came the plague of 1505. The immense wealth of Lisbon was useless. In 1521, the pressure of hunger was so great that poor people, wandering in bands through Lisbon, fell dead and remained unburied. Corn continued to be bought abroad: Portugal began importing wheat and barley from France and North Africa as well as from Flanders.* Salt meat, cheese, butter, and fish had to be bought abroad. Elementary manufactures like cloth, metalwork and furniture were imported. The external debt in Flanders became so high that by 1543 interest-rates in Antwerp had risen to 50%. By 1544 the royal debt was 2,000,000 cruzados; by 1552 it was 3,000,000; by 1560 it was so large that the interest-rate on it was repudiated. Slaves were imported from the Guinean Coast for manual labour while Portuguese emigrated to Western Spain to find employment. Pogroms broke out against the Jewish population. In 1538 sumptuary laws, a classic phenomenon of inflation and extreme social disintegration, made their appearance. Contemporary foreign observers were emphatic that the spice empire had demoralized domestic industry and agriculture. They believed it did this by its magnetic effect on manpower, its high rate of casualties (as many as 50% of a crew often died from disease; and as carracks became more and more heavily loaded, capsizing and shipwreck increased), and the cultural effects of its quick-money climate. It is possible the actual economic decline in Portugal has been exaggerated in this period for the purposes of subsequent morality. But the central fact is clear: the opening phase of Portuguese overseas expansion was based on a flagrantly fainant metropolitan economy.
*J. B. Trend, Portugal, London, 1957.

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2. America Towards the middle of the 16th century, sugar plantations were started on the sparse Portuguese settlements in north-eastern Brazil. Production expanded, and by the end of the century was making a major contribution to the domestic economy. From 1580 to 1640 Portugal was incorporated in the Spanish Kingdom and thus drawn into war with England and Holland. Dutch attacks on Portuguese positions in the East began almost immediately. In 1602 the Dutch East India Company was founded: Amboina fell in 1605, Ternate and Tidore in 1607, Ormuz in 1622. Expulsion from Japan came in 1639, Malacca was taken in 1641, Ceylon and the Malabar coast in 165563, when peace was finally made. By the early 17th century, the spice empire was lost. At this critical juncture, Brazilian sugar saved Portuguese prosperity and preserved its structure almost intact. In 1612, eight of the eleven Brazilian captaincies were together exporting some 7,000 to 8,500 tons of sugar a year. The market value of this crop was enormous: as early as 1627 it was calculated at 400,000 cruzados a year. The Portuguese empire was not merely transferred from a basis of one primary product to another. In both cases, the product concerned was the most lucrative single commodity of the century: spices in the 16th, and sugar in the 17th century. Sugar was the most important bulk export from the tropical world to Europe in the 17th century, and Brazilian sugar dominated world supply. The Brazilian plantations completed the conversion of the Portuguese empires basic mode of exploitation from exchange to extraction, and attracted the first real wave of colonization. Technological innovation began to impinge on the economic process per sesugar was an imported crop, and it was processed in refineries on the spot. Large areas of north-eastern Brazil were penetrated and cleared, although development was still mainly concentrated close to the littoral. But in all major respects, little was changed; sugar simply replaced spices, and the orientation of Portuguese imperialism shifted from Asia to South America. The home economy grew no stronger; indeed, the leading authority on colonial Brazil can write: It is not too much to say that the existence of Portugal as an independent nation depended mainly on the resources which she derived from the Brazil trade.* At the end of the 17th century, French and British West Indian sugar production was beginning to overtake Brazilian output. At this second moment of crisis, the imperial economy was rescued and relayed once again. In 1694 gold was discovered in Brazil. In 1718 further deposits were found inland: in 1728 diamonds were discovered in the original gold-bearing area. The revenue from this new colonial wealth equalled or exceeded the profits from sugar. For 100 years, the mines of Minas Gerais and Cuiab assured the continuity of Portugals imperial prosperity. But despite marginal re-investments in Portugal, it also preserved the continuity of Portuguese economic infantilism.
*C. R. Boxer, Salvador de S and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola, London, 1952.

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In Brazil, the habits of monoculture were carried over unchanged, or were even reinforced, by the substitution of mines for plantations. In Minas Gerais there was actually a formal prohibition of any occupations that might have diverted manpower from the gold industry. In Portugal, the Methuen treaty with England was signed in 1703, and Portugals under-development received explicit juridical status. An adumbration of 19th century colonial devices, the Treaty placed Portugal in the position of a permanent economic dependent: in exchange for the preferential entry of Portuguese wine to Britain, free entry was granted to British cloth, thus effectively stifling Portugals projected woollen industry and restricting its export economy to processed primary products. At a time when Brazilian bullion was furnishing huge cpaital revenues in Lisbon, the anomaly of Portuguese imperialism was never clearer. Cereal production sank as viniculture spread, in a pattern which has become classic of Algeria in the 20th century. The English trade ran at a deficit of 1,000,000 a year, and the difference was covered in gold. In 1822 Brazil declared its independence. Portugal, deprived of its empire, relapsed into poverty, stagnation and debt. The 19th century left the country suddenly reduced to its real proportions, and arrested there. 3. Africa Then, as the century was coming to an end, the Portuguese empire was revived and transformed once again. Its final metamorphosis came in Africa. In 1505, on his voyage to India, Almeida had set up a factory at Sofala on the east coast, and a fortress at Kilwa. Two years later a fortress and factory were built on Mozambique island. In 1531 Sena was founded, in 1544 Quelimane. The purpose of these enclaves was to act as supply and protection ports for the traffic to India and Indonesia. They were technically administered from the Goan viceroyalty. At the same time, the Portuguese hoped to discover important sources of silver and gold in the African interior; limited amounts were finding their way down to the coast from Manica and Mashona at this period, raising great expectations. But neither metal was ever found in substantial quantities, and Portuguese penetration of the hinterland, motivated almost exclusively by the search for them, was limited and ephemeral. By the end of the 17th century only the Zambezi valley as far as Tete had been occupied and even there the settlements were few and shadowy. The total Portuguese population on the whole coast probably did not exceed one thousand. With the collapse of the spice trade and the Asian empire, the rationale of Portuguese presence on the East Coast had gone, and the whole area disintegrated and declined: there was a withdrawal from the farther posts in the interior, and on the coast Sofala became deserted. The historian of Portuguese Africa writes: in the 1810s the extent of Portuguese coastal occupation was the same as in 1600 and consisted of forts and trading posts from Ibo to Lourenco Marques.

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Reports of travellers and governors record the apathy, disease and neglect in these coastal towns. . . . Neither in the south nor in the north had the Portuguese penetrated appreciably into the interior; to the contrary, their coastal outposts sustained periodic attacks from bordering tribes.* Meanwhile on the West Coast, around Luanda (founded 1576) and the mouth of the Congo river, development had been very different. Silver and slaves were the two objectives of the Portuguese penetration of Angola. In 1604 Cambambe, reputed to be the centre of the silver country, was reached and no mines were found. From then on, the Portuguese settlements on the coast functioned almost entirely as embarcation posts for the slave trade. The Brazilian plantation economy of the 17th century demanded a vast influx of manpower; the Portuguese West Coast existed to supply it. With the exception of the fishing port of Benguela in the South, no other economic activity was seriously pursued in Angola for two centuries. From 15801680, about a million slaves were exported from Angola, and another half million from the Congo area, making an annual average of 15,000 of which over half (8,500) went to Brazil. From 16801836 the total estimated figure is 2,000,000 slaves for Luanda and Benguela alone, plus another probable 1,000,000 in the illicit trade and from the Congo. Annual shipments reached 20,000 to 30,000 in the last ten years of the trades legal existence. (Meanwhile by 1800, slaves were also Mozambiques major export item, and as the West Coast supply tapered off, the East Coast traffic rapidly expanded: from 17801800 the flow was about 10,000 a year, and for the 50 years after that it went up to 15,00025,000). In the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, Angola was the major supply area for labour on the Brazilian plantations and mines. Its role in the Brazilian economy was absolutely indispensable. A slogan of the 17th century was without sugar there is no Brazil, and without Angola there is no sugar. A total of about 4,000,000 to 5,000,000 slaves were imported to Brazil during the whole colonial period (15001820). The symbolic relationship between the two areas was underlined when Brazil, on achieving independence in 1822, attempted to detach Angola from Portugal, and establish a Trans-Oceanic Federation with Angola and Mozambique. The extent and type of Portuguese presence in Angola was thus determined almost exclusively by its slave-economy. Some penetration of the interior was necessary for the purchase or seizure of slaves, so that the geographical expanse of Portuguese-controlled territory was larger than on the East Coast. By the end of the 17th century, it was estimated that some 50,000 square miles were controlled, at least in the sense that there was freedom of movement for Portuguese within the area. Portuguese presence was concentrated mainly in the enclaves of Luanda and Benguela on the coast. In the interior, it was maintained through a system of small fortresses scattered at isolated points in the back country: Massangano, Muxima, Pungo Andongo, Cambambe and Ambaca. None of these
*Duffy, op. cit.

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was more than some 150200 miles from the coast. The total area of even vestigial Portuguese presence was not more than one-tenth of the size of present-day Angola (481,000 square miles). In terms of population, a census of the 1830s gave only 1,832 whites in the whole area of Portuguese occupation: of these 1,500 were concentrated in Luanda, leaving some 300 for whole of the rest of Angola. In 1845 Benguela had just 38 white inhabitants. Nine years later, in 1854, Livingstone calculated that there were some 830 whites in Luanda, and only about 1,000 in all Angola. Thus, in the middle of the 19th century, it is safe to say that there were never more than about 3,000 Portuguese nationals, and perhaps twice that number of mulattoes, in the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa. For four centuries, Portuguese Africa had an almost purely ancillary existence: its value was extrinsic, as a supply area for the great central complexes of Portuguese imperial power in India and South America. The East Coast functioned as a transit and depot zone for Indian shipping; the West Coast as a labour reservoir for Brazil. When India and the Indies were lost, the East Coast disintegrated. When the slave trade was suppressed, the West Coast sunk into neglect and decline. By the middle of the 19th century, the African settlements were almost the only extant remnants of the Portuguese Empireand they had survived largely because of their unimportance. (An ominous remark of Livingstones had criticised Portugals decay in Angola as early as 1854. Had the province, been in the possession of England, it would have been yielding as much or more of the raw material for the manufacturers as an equal extent of territory in the cotton-growing States of America.) Suddenly, late in the 19th century, these were converted into the massive colonial territories of Angola and Mozambique. In the circumstances of this change lies the root explanation of the structure of the Portuguese colonies today. The conquest and division of Africa by the West European powers occurred essentially in the last two decades of the century. In 1880, European occupation was limited to the following areas: Algeria (to the Saharan border), Senegal (including areas of the present Mali and Mauretania), and Gabon (coastal strip)French. Gambia, Sierra Leone (coastal strip), Gold Coast (coastal strip), Lagos (coastal strip in Western Nigeria)British. Angola (coastal strip), Mozambique (coastal strip)Portuguese. There were also the Cape Colony, Natal, Transvaal and the Orange Free State. By 1895 the entire continent was divided up, with the exception of the Sahara, the Sudan, Morocco, Tripoli and Ethiopia. The thrust behind this vast expansion was industrial. The new type of imperialism had emerged, the full and final expression of technological supremacy and frustrated productivity. The new type of exploitation required the absorption of an unprecedented volume and range of raw materials by the colonizing power, and the re-

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export of a substantial proportion of these to the colonized territories in the form of cheap manufactured goods (mainly clothing). The three most industrialised countries of EuropeEngland, France and Germanybetween them accounted for almost exactly 80% of the total territorial acquisitions in Africa in the second half of the 19th century. Their conquests were based on an extreme economic and (with the exception of France) demographic dynamism. The most expressive institution of this imperialism was the chartered company. Political and geographic initiative was seized by powerful private concerns before State intervention itself took place. The companies assumed semi-sovereign political status, administering huge areas of Africa with their own budgets, laws, police, diplomacy, etc. In West Africa, the United Africa Company (1879), and its successors the National African Company (1881) and the Royal Niger Company (1886) effectively occupied and ruled large parts of Nigeria. In East Africa the German East African Company (1885) administered Tanganyika, and the British East Africa Company (1887) Kenya. In Central Africa, the phenomenon took its most extreme form of all, with the regime of King Leopolds International Association of the Congo (1882). In Southern Africa, the British South Africa Company seized most of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland, while the Deutsche Kolonial Gesellschaft took over South-West Africa. From 1893 the Filonardi Company controlled Italian Somalia. The companies role was small only in French expansion, where a more military and dirigiste tradition asserted itself. These mixed formsprivate concerns exercising public powers were exact institutional notations of the new imperialism. The impetus behind the scramble for Africa came from the driving economies of Western Europe: its spearheads were logically the great marauding companies. The expansion was spontaneous, an elemental explosion and overflow of economic forces, not a planned political artefact. Once in motion, political and strategic considerations came into play, state policy intervened, and the company protectorates became colonies. But State action came afterwards, as a consummation of the process, not its impulsion. There were, in fact, several occasions when the State refused to follow a company in a acquisitive manoeuvre (in 1881, for instance, the British government refused the protectorate of the Sultan of Zanzibars mainland dominions, the option of which had been secured for it by Sir William McKinnon, the future president of the British East Africa Company). To what extent did the development of the Portuguese colonies adhere to this pattern? Portuguese presence in Africa antedated that of any other European power; her settlements were the oldest European enclaves in the continent. Yet Portuguese entry into the competition for Africa was almost the last. The timing and circumstances of its opening are revealing. For 60 years, from the 1820s onwards, England had refused to recognise Portugals claim to to the territory between Ambriz and the River Congo, the historic but now unoccupied area of the Bakongo Kingdom. Then, in 18821883, English policy suddenly changed, and

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became receptive to Portuguese claims. The reason was the swift and effective penetration of Equatorial Africa by de Brazza (for the French government) and Stanley (for King Leopold), which threatened to lock off the whole of Central Africa, in particular the Congo basin, from British interests. To block this development, England in 1884 attempted to recognise Portuguese sovereignty over both banks of the Congo as far as Noqui, in return for freedom of navigation on the river, customs preferences, and a dual Anglo-Portuguese commission to control the river traffic. German, French and domestic English opposition prevented the ratification of the Treaty, and precipitated the Berlin Conference of 1885, at which Portugal was ceded the south, but lost the north bank of the Congo. Portugals major bid for territorial aggrandisement came in the next year. Treaties were signed with France and Germany which recognised the right of sovereignty and civilisation in the territories which separate the Portuguese possessions of Angola and Mozambique, without prejudice to the rights which other powers may have acquired there. The Portuguese ambition was for a coast-tocoast Empire stretching uninterruptedly from Luanda to Lourenco Marques. This plan directly threatened two entrenched British interests: Rhodes in South Africa, and the missionaries in the Shire district of Nyasaland. Rhodes was attempting to push up north across the Limpopo after the annexation of Bechuanaland, and the missionaries were concerned to strengthen their hold on the Lake Nyasa region. The British Government delivered a note to Lisbon in 1887 rejecting the Portuguese transcontinental claims on the grounds that the areas in question were not effectively occupied by Portugal in the terms of the General Act of the Berlin Conferencewhich was indeed the case. Portugal reacted by belatedly sending expeditions to establish Portuguese sovereignty in Mashonaland and Nyasaland and by proclaiming the creation of a new district of Mozambique which would have included most of the north of Southern Rhodesia and thus cut off British-occupied Mashonaland from British-occupied Nyasaland. In late 1889, a Portuguese force under Serpa Pinto began moving into Makololand with the ostensible purpose of surveying land for a railway line, in fact to effect a junction with a force moving eastwards from Angola. In November the column clashed with British-protected tribesmen on the Shire River. The British government promptly sent an ultimatum to Portugal, demanding withdrawal from the Shire area and Mashonaland. Faced with the threat of force (warships from Zanzibar were moving towards Mozambique), Portuguese imperial diplomacy collapsed. The government resigned, and in June, 1891, a treaty was signed which confined Portuguese jurisdiction more or less to the present limits of Mozambiquea line some 600 miles east of the farthest eventual limit of Angola. Simultaneously, a major financial crisis broke out in Portugal. Even after the diplomatic settlements, the implementation of the Berlin General Acts effective occupation had still to be completed. The diplomatic disaster of 1891 aroused an intense nationalist reaction in Portugal, and for the first time, a coordinated and

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deliberate attempt was made to subdue by military force the African populations nominally under Portuguese control. From 1895 to 1896 a campaign under Antonio Enes and Mousinho de Albuquerque reduced Gazaland in Southern Mozambique. In 1897, Coutinho occupied the coastal area north of Quelimane, in 19024, the Zambezia company pacified the area from Tete to the Nyasaland frontier. In 1906 the northern sector opposite Mocambique island was subdued. In a series of campaigns from 190812 the Yao tribes off Lake Nyasa were brought under control. In Angola military occupation took even longer. In 19012 the Bailundo country in north central Angola was conquered. From 190710 the Dembos area only some hundred miles back of Luanda was attacked and occupied. To the south, the Quanhamas inflicted a heavy defeat on the Portuguese in 1904 and campaigns to subdue them lasted right into 1915. In 1917 it was still necessary to send a force to pacify Moxico in South-eastern Angola. Only in fact towards the end of the First World War were Angola and Mozambique fully and finally brought under Portuguese control. The specific characteristics of the Portuguese colonialism of the last two decades of the 19th century are clearly visible even from the resum narrative just given. In the first place, Portuguese colonial diplomacy was initially set in motion from the outside, by the actions and decisions of other European powers. The Congo negotiations of 188485, which marked the entry of Portugal into the arena of African partition, were the result of British apprehensions of French and Belgian penetrations of Equatorial Africa. Portugal thus only entered the mesh of events at two removes from their starting-point: France and King Leopold threatened English positions, England counter-manoeuvred by manipulating Portugal. England clearly regarded Portugal as so weak as to be virtually supplantable by herself in the key areas she was recognising to Portugal. The Portuguese offensive of 188690 was a direct result of the humiliation of Berlin in 1885. The nationalism of the military and professional intelligentsia demanded a massive territorial riposte to the treatment Portugal had met with at the Conference and the evaluation of her status that it implied. Not only the motivation, but the strategy of the attempt was dictated by the Berlin experience. England had proved an ineffective patron there, Germany a successful opponent, so the de Castro-Gomes cabinet of 1886 attempted to achieve the Rose-coloured Map (the transcontinental colony) by getting German support: hence the treaty with Germany of 1886, which made considerable territorial concessions to Germany in southern Angola and northern Mozambique. The approval meant no concrete backing for Portugal against British opposition, so that the treaty was only a paper weapon. Yet it was the keystone of the Portuguese plan for the coast-to-coast colony: the unreal quality of the offensive is thus evident from the start. Subsequent measures such as the simple proclamation of a new district of Mozambique, incorporating large areas of the present Southern Rhodesia, were of a similar kind. When military action was finally taken, some four years

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after the treaties of 1886, it only got a few miles into Nyasaland before it was stopped. Portugals bid for a transcontinental empire was a bluff which deceived only itself: when faced with a real challenge, it collapsed instantly and ignominously. Set in the larger context of the European seizure of Africa in the last two decades of the 19th century, the Portuguese manoeuvres of 188690 acquire a redoubled significance. A glance at the chronology of European advance in Africa (see above) shows that the bulk of colonial acquisitions had been made by 1885: Tunisia, Egypt, Somaliland, much of French West Africa, Togo, Niger Coast, Kamerun, French Congo, Congo Free State, South-West Africa, Bechuanaland, Tanganyika. Major seizures were still to come, but in the compressed time-span of the scramble it is striking how late the attempted Portuguese expansion into Central Africa came. Following the formation of the Geographical Society in Lisbon in 1875, several exploring expeditions had, it is true, been sent out to reinforce Portuguese claims in Central Africa: the most notable were the continental crossings of Serpa Pinto (1877,1879) and Capelo and Ivens (1884). In themselves, these expeditions were successful, but Portuguese inability to consolidate them with any effective system of military or political control, and the absence of pioneering company enterprise made them only prestige affairs ultimately. A serious attempt to secure recognition of territorial claims came only after 1884, and then both the specific circumstance, (the Congo crisis, the bid for the Anglo-Mozambique corridor) and the general timing strongly suggest that the Portuguese role in the seizure of Africa was determined by the prior roles of the other, industrial European powers, and not by any internal logic. A final consideration confirms this conclusion. The major vector of the new imperialism, the chartered company, was almost nonexistent in Portuguese Africa at this time. There were no real equivalents of the British South Africa Company, the German East Africa Company or the Royal Company of the Niger. Concessionary companies did exist in Mozambique from 1891 onwards: the Mozambique Company (1891), the Niassa Company (189193), the Zambezia Company, which between them controlled two-thirds of Mozambique by 1900. But two distinctive features marked these companies off from their English or German counterparts. Firstly there were deliberately imitativeinspired by foreign examples and modelled consciously in their image. Secondly, not merely their model, but their actual capital was mainly foreign. The initial issued capital of the Mozambique Company was 5,000,000 dollars, of which a large proportion was subscribed in England, Germany and South Africa. The capital for the Niassa Company was predominantly British. Shares in the Zambezia Company were bought in England, France, Germany and South Africa. The Portuguese economy was scarcely touched by the commercial and industrial expansion of Western Europe in the 19th century. Portugals relative and absolute share of international trade is damning:

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Portion of International Trade (Mulhalls Directory of Statistics) millions sterling 1850 1860 1870 1880 1889 Great Britain ... ... 169 375 547 698 740 Holland & Belgium ... 61 86 136 237 310 Germany ... ... 95 167 227 339 311 Portugal ... ... 5 8 10 14 18 Italy ... ... ... 38 52 66 91 94 The backwardness of the private sector is mirrored in the size of the national budget, which reveals a parallel inability to meet the costs of the administrative and military infra-structures of colonial expansion: Government Expenditure by Heads (Sample Year 1887) sterling Government Debt Military Total Naval Great Britain 30,200,000 27,900,000 31,900,000 90,000,000 Germany ... 82,300,000 16,700,000 31,000,000 130,000,000 France ... 41,000,000 52,800,000 31,400,000 125,000,000 Italy ... 34,700,000 20,700,000 14,200,000 69,600,000 Portugal ... 4,000,000 3,601,000 1,400,000 9,000,000 In 1888, Portugal had the highest ratio of national debt to national income27.5 per centquoted for any European country, a figure exceeded only by Turkey, with 30 per cent. The specific nature of the Portuguese African colonies at the turn of the 20th century is unmistakeable. The normal colonies of the 19th century were the outcome of industrial expansion by the metropolitan power: they were sprung from a domestic base of massive capital accumulation and advanced technology, which had created an unprecedented need for raw materials and markets. As such they were natural extensions of the metropolitan economy, and funtioned according to a uniform, rationalised pattern. The Portuguese colonies were wholly different in origin. In essence, they were stagnant survivals of 16th century slave and trading posts, suddenly extended into the hinterland under the threat of rival European annexation. If the grandiose dream of a trans-African Empire came to nothing, the manoeuvres of 188691 did secure, if only by falling short of the greater target, the present frontiers of Angola and Mozambique, both of them far beyond the lines of any Portuguese presence at the time. Thus the stimulus to conquest did not come for any industrial lan: it was not internal and natural but external and artificial. It can accurately be called reflexcolonization. The Portuguese economy was archaic and bankrupt, a hollow and rotten shell. It was utterly unable to effect or even begin the conversion from an extractive to a transformer imperialism. This fact is the root determinant of the structure of the Portuguese colonies today. It provides the master-explanation both of the individual sectors of the Portuguese colonial system, and of their integration into the ensemble. (to be concluded)