Portuguese Colonial History

The first comprehensive account in English of how the Portuguese Armed Forces prepared for and conducted a distant counterinsurgency campaign in its African possessions with very limited resources, choosing to stay and fight despite the small odds for success. The Portuguese military crafted its doctrine and implemented it to match the guerrilla strategy of protracted war, and in doing so, followed the lessons gleaned from the British and French experiences in small wars. The Portuguese approach to the conflict was distinct in that it sought to combine the two-pronged national strategy of containing the cost of the war and of spreading the burden to the colonies with the solution on the battlefield. It describes how Portugal defined and analyzed its insurgency problem in light of the available knowledge on counterinsurgency, how it developed its military policies and doctrines in this context, and how it applied them in the African colonial environment. The uniqueness of its approach is highlighted through a thematic military analysis of the Portuguese effort and a comparison with the experiences of other governments fighting similar contemporaneous wars.

This macrohistorical study sheds light on the "Portuguese paradox": why a country with a vast and wealthy colonial empire became the poorest and most backward of Western European nations. Employing a class conflict perspective, Machado examines Portugal's Estado Novo and the eventual collapse of the reactionary coalition. He analyzes the important role of the state in Portugal's political economy between 1926 and 1974, offering new insights about the Estado Novo, Salazar, the military, and bureaucratic-authoritarian states.