COLONIALISM

‘Colonialism is a practice of domination’ (Kohn and Kavita, 2017) that involves the transfer of a populational group from a metropole or a centre to a colony or periphery. For analytical purposes, it is possible to classify concrete historical instances of colonialism according to their era (e.g., classical, medieval, early modern, modern periods) and the major types of colonization that they rested on (e.g., settler colonialism, exploitation colonialism, trade colonialism, and internal or surrogate colonialism). The resulting typology immediately foregrounds two defining characteristics of this complex socio-political phenomena: 1) colonialism is not bound to any specific time and/or culture; 2) colonialism always relies on a populational group controlling the land and/or resources that originally belong to another. Although there is no stable academic consensus about the best way to distinguish between colonialism and imperialism, by focusing on these two characteristics it is possible to propose a heuristic demarcation between the two concepts that is adequate to tackle the Portuguese context. Thus, pragmatically we can claim that colonialism shares its transhistorical nature with imperialism, while distinguishing itself from imperialism because its focus always rests on economic exploitation and settlement instead of military conquest, religious conversion, and political sovereignty. Working with this hypothesis, we can make the following observations about the recent history of Portuguese colonialism: a) the birth of modern Portuguese colonialism coincided with the rise of ethnonationalism, when the economic interests of the liberal elites of the metropole became the main drive of Portuguese imperialism, subduing old feudal, military, and religious interests; b) the Third Portuguese Empire (1820-1975) was composed of settler colonies (Angola, Mozambique), exploitation colonies (Saint Thomas and Prince), trade colonies (East-Timor, Guinea-Bissau), and surrogate colonies (Cape Verde, Goa, Macau). Finally, it is relevant to mention that, during the modern period, Portuguese liberal elites persuaded the masses to partake in market driven colonial endeavours by repurposing and disseminating older, emotionally charged, imperialist myths. Valentim Alexandre identifies two of these mythic narratives, the ‘myth of the sacred inheritance’ and the ‘Eldorado myth’. According to him, they were instrumental in providing the ideological scaffolding of the Third Portuguese Empire (c. 1820-1975). Other scholars have focused on the ‘Lusotropical’ myth (1852-1975) and the ‘civilizing mission’ myth.

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