Empire and Nation in Portugal, C.1930-1951: Beyond the Imperial Mystique

This book investigates how discourses of colonial policy and nation explicitly overlapped in Portugal during the 1930s and 1940s. This period corresponds to the early decades of the New State, which Portuguese historiography has traditionally referred to as the years of the 'imperial mystique.' Previous studies of the entanglement between empire and nation under the New State have largely focused on commemorative events and other forms of colonial propaganda. In contrast, this book reverses that perspective, examining the place of the nation within discourses of empire rather than analysing empire within nationalist discourse and propaganda. Using a set of colonial themes that were in vogue during the 1930s and 1940s, the book explores how imaginings of the nation permeated debates on imperial affairs and colonial policy. By approaching the relationship between nation and empire from the vantage point of imperial discourse, the author argues that multiple--often contradictory--historical and rhetorical tropes about the nation's past, present, and future were continually negotiated, combined in different ways, and adapted to meet the internal and international challenges of the period.