This article is built on two premises: the first one is that, in its propaganda, the regime of twentieth-century Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970) extensively used the topic of ‘Portuguese Overseas Expansion’ as a founding myth for justifying its own colonialism, and that, for that purpose, some topoi and icons were deliberately created. The other is that damnatio memoriae and iconoclasm were applied and are responsible for the currently twisted interpretations of the long-term historical process of Portuguese maritime expansion and overseas colonialism.

Political appropriations of historical events and dynamics are recurrent and mark today’s historiographical debate around the issue of a desirable or undesirable interventionist science. My position in this debate is clear: manipulations of history and memory can result in forms of whitewashing, in distortions of analysis. They contribute nothing to our desired, even if not always possible, objectivity of historical knowledge. The debate presents itself as inevitable, fuelled by a clear agenda of research funding, established by a top-down approach designed to meet societal challenges. But let us be clear: I am not suggesting that the latter implies the former and I have nothing against the production of scientific knowledge contributing answers to present-day societal issues. Nevertheless, basic criteria of scientificity have to prevail in any area of knowledge production, including History. As for our topic (the political appropriations of Portuguese Overseas Expansion) from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s, many myths and mystifications were created. Some of them still persist.

Monuments of the discoveries (such as the one at Belém, in Lisbon), along with propaganda literature or school textbooks, all insist on the central role of Prince Henry, the so-called ‘navigator’ who never really navigated, except to cross the Mediterranean for the conquest of Ceuta and Tangiers.

Transformed into an icon of the Portuguese ‘Discoveries’ (a term, in turn, subject to intense iconoclasm in our days), he is presented as a scientifically-minded character, responsible for the formation of a generation of nautical personnel and for launching a genuine nautical revolution, through the implementation of nautical science, due to his programmatic thinking. The fact is that no historical evidence confirms this, except the fifteenth-century author of a chronicle, Gomes Eanes de Zurara (c. 1410–1474), who had been in Henry’s pay and was influenced by humanistic thinking, which suggested comparisons with the Greeks, Alexander the Great or the Romans.

This comes with another mystification: the major importance of the so-called nautical school of Sagres. At least since the 1940s, we have known with certainty that it never existed. Portuguese historian Luciano António Pereira da Silva (1864–1926) proclaimed, and rightly so, that the real ‘Sagres School’ were the planks of the caravels, accurately pointing out the empirical processes of learning and acquiring the practical knowledge on which the alleged geographical ‘discoveries’ and the unquestionable Portuguese expansion were based (Silva Reference Silva1924).

However, such icons and myths still persist, and are still used for political purposes. In a 1987 forum held in Alpbach (Austria), the Portuguese vice-prime minister still claimed that the school of Sagres was for the fifteenth century what NASA is for us today. Or take the call, by the current, widely respected Portuguese President, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa (b. 1948) to proclaim the deeds of Vasco da Gama in order to remind the Portuguese of their past greatness in times of a recognized crisis, such as the European Union interference which, by means of a Troika, imposed heavy restrictions on Portuguese financial governance from 2011 to 2014.

This overall process of political appropriation of the narratives around Portuguese overseas expansion, driven by ideological and political uses, began, however, much earlier, at the end of the nineteenth century. It was crucial, both during the final period of the monarchy, and during the first Portuguese Republic (1910–1926). The regime was then faced with claims over Africa by other much more powerful European rivals, for which the 1890 British ultimatum to Portugal as a result of the Congress of Berlin is the most outstanding example. The 1884–1885 Berlin Congress, organized by Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), marked Germany’s emergence as an imperial power and raised the expectations of many other players (Craven Reference Craven2015: 31–59; Uzoigwe Reference Uzoigwe1985: 9–22). It is usually considered as having divided Africa among the European powers during the New Imperialism period. The Portuguese had to fight to keep their share of the African continent based on what they perceived as their historical rights – after all, they had been the first Europeans to settle, at least in the sub-Saharian African continent. This put history and historical narratives in the main field of debate.

This narrative persisted and was used by the Salazar Regime (1926–1974). Salazar’s ideological propaganda had to justify his political aim of trying to consolidate the Portuguese empire in Africa at a time of global European decolonization. This necessitated the mystification of the origins of the so-called discoveries process, so that Portuguese rule over African territories could be labelled something other than ‘colonialism’.

Rather than such qualification, Salazar built his political programme around a triad (God, Motherland and Family) which resumed its ideological orientation towards an unquestioned nationalism (Medina Reference Medina1993). A propaganda apparatus was set up. It was chiefly fed by the strategic thinking of António Ferro, based on the appropriation and instrumentalization of Portuguese history, in particular of three topics: the so-called foundation of nationality (the emergence of the kingdom of Portugal); the restoration of independence from Spain in 1640 (after 80 years of an Iberian Union under the same crown); and Portuguese overseas expansion, always treated as ‘discoveries’ and never as ‘colonization’ or ‘colonialism’. Specific individuals such as Henry ‘the Navigator’ were presented as icons of those key-moments of Portuguese history.

António Ferro, journalist, writer and man of culture (1895–1956), is referred to as a figure of modernism in twentieth-century Portuguese literature, but he is better known and more studied for his political activities in the second half of his life: the famous interviews with Salazar, which promoted the image of the dictator in 1932–1933, and most of all for his work regarding the New State’s propaganda and cultural policy from 1933 to 1950, when he headed the Secretariat for National Propaganda (SPN – Secretariado da Propaganda Nacional) (Orlando Reference Orlando2013; Acciaiuoli Reference Acciaiuoli2013; Leal Reference Leal1994; Ó Reference Orlando1999; Paulo Reference Paulo1995).

Textbooks were used, and the network of primary schools created during that period was manipulated, as tools for ideological training, and manifestos were published abroad (Medina, Reference Medina1988). In addition, two important events may serve to show how Salazar successfully fed his propaganda aims: the Exhibition of the Portuguese World in 1940, and the 500th anniversary of Prince Henry’s death, in 1960.

The Portuguese World Exhibition, held in Lisbon from June to December 1940, marked the high point of Salazar’s ‘nationalist-imperialist’ propaganda. Staged to commemorate the founding of the nation around 1140 and its independence from Spain in 1640, the Exhibition became a vehicle for the diffusion and legitimization of the dictatorship’s ideology and values in which the idea of the nation was (re)constructed through a series of carefully planned images, myths and symbols. While Salazar disliked, even feared, the emotional, mass events associated with Hitler’s and Mussolini’s propaganda machines, he did value them for their legitimizing, educative and propagandistic functions. The Salazar dictatorship preferred to involve the population in essentially passive state-sponsored exhibitions rather than mobilizing them through mass parties, public rallies, or similar mechanisms – as Hitler or Mussolini did. Instead, Salazar preferred to construct an imagined community and a sense of pride by way of commemorations, exhibitions and symbols (Corkill and Almeida, Reference Corkill and Almeida2009). This was reflected in several public events, in the form of exhibitions, promoted by the Salazar’s ‘New State’.

In parallel with the increase of a community imagery based on great leaders, the great historical past and the greatness of a small country, the rural background of a traditional, corporative Portugal was evoked. Portugal was transformed along this imagery as a museum, frozen in the past (including its colonial past). Seen from a modernizing perspective, this imagery was quite different from other authoritarian or fascist regimes, such as for example Hitler’s, which claimed to be modern, technical-minded, and a fast ‘movement’. Salazar instead reinforced the slogan ‘Proudly alone’ and applied it to the colonial ideology as well as the persistent presence in African territories – now described as Portuguese provinces overseas. So, both in the 1934 Porto Colonial Exhibition and in the 1940 Lisbon Exhibition, the representation of overseas territories and also their ethnography were built on an imagery of a multi-cultural and multi-racial empire of the past. The theory of Lusotropicalism fed this with very convenient arguments.

The second public symbol of the imagery built around the Portuguese expansion is the ‘Monument of the Discoveries’. Originally, a temporary structure for the 1940 ‘Portuguese World Exhibition’, glorifying the feats of Portuguese explorers, this monument was rebuilt in concrete and limestone in 1960, to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the death of Prince Henry, and also to stand as a reminder of the ‘Age of Discovery’.

Shaped like a ship, with 32 figures lined up on a stylized prow, it represents personalities from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries following Prince Henry. There are sculptures on both sides of the monument representing the main actors: noblemen and clergymen on one side and the supporters of maritime expansion (captains, pilots, cosmographers) on the other. Only one of them is a woman, Queen Filipa de Lencastre, Prince Henry’s mother.

Standing nine metres tall, Henry himself is the largest figure, while those behind rise ‘only’ to seven metres. To this day, it is an iconic monument of Lisbon, used worldwide to market the country and the city for touristic purposes. Yet, it has also become one of the main targets of another iconoclast movement, well-known worldwide, which has targeted Portugal, causing shock waves without, however, significant amplitude. In any case, besides the Monument of the Discoveries, the statue of father António Vieira (1608–1697), Jesuit and missionary, has also been the object of protests due to his statements about African slaves and the Atlantic slave trade (‘Descoloniza’ 2020).

To this day, some websites related to this monument, particularly those aimed at the thousands of Lisbon tourists (Padrão dos Descobrimentos 2022), by persistently reproducing a historical narrative glorifying Prince Henry as ‘the navigator’ and ‘the discoverer’, distort the concrete role this character indisputably played in the launching of the overall process.

The same kind of distortion applies, for different reasons, in the case of another character – Magellan, in turn targeted by Salazarist iconoclasm, but nowadays dealt with, in Portugal, as in the world, as an idol, the result of a process of another mystification that is working wonderfully. Let’s revise the main topics of this debate.

Ferdinand Magellan (Fernão de Magalhães) (c. 1480–1521), an agent of the Portuguese overseas expansion, serving the Portuguese crown in Morocco and the East (mainly, but not exclusively, in India), proposed himself to prove to emperor Charles V, together with some Portuguese cosmographers, that, under the Tordesillas Treaty (1494), the Spice Islands (as the Moluccas were then known) came under Spanish rule. The only way to confirm this was to find a passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, around the southern tip of America.

Magellan did indeed find that passage and arrived in the Pacific Ocean. He could not prove, however, his main thesis, and if he came back to Seville (from where he departed with a crew of five ships and around 250 men), he would have to admit his failure. Following his death, another pilot, Sebastian Elcano (1476–1526), a Basque from Getaria, performed what was never planned or even foreseen: a maritime run that successfully sailed around the world. Yet, this result – the circumnavigation of the globe – was an unplanned event which totally contradicted the terms of the Valladolid Agreement, the proof of which had initially conditioned the terms of the expedition.Footnote ^a Under no circumstances was the journey to have entered in any areas of Portuguese influence. Obviously, that is just what it did, beginning with its stopovers on the Brazilian Atlantic coast, during the first leg of Magellan’s Atlantic itinerary. The need to survive forced Sebastian Elcano to disregard these instructions in the East and to return, in a very poor situation, with a single carrack, to Seville, in 1522, along the ‘Portuguese’ cape route. A huge feat was thus accidently achieved: a maritime run around the globe (that empirically proved what was already known: the roundness of the Earth) was established along with the connection between all the oceans (and seas, if we are inclined to differentiate the terms): the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian Oceans. And that achievement is taken to have been performed by Fernão de Magalhães – worldwide known as Magellan – who had not even lived to see the end of the voyage: another icon, produced by the past as much as by the present nationalist historiographies.

Magellan was Portuguese. He had abandoned his career under the Portuguese crown in search of better opportunities (as many others did) and eventually put himself at the service of Castile (again, as many others did). For that, the Salazar regime attached to him labels of ‘disloyalty’ and even ‘treason’. His own achievement and even his person were silenced (even if he is still among the characters represented on the Discoveries’ monument). If we think of the highly nationalist thinking of the regime’s ideologists, beginning with Salazar himself, we do understand that it could not be otherwise. The reverse face of the apologetics no doubt targeted Magellan. His imagery was the most prominent of Portuguese Overseas Expansion to be submitted to iconoclasm; his story remained a very awkward and uncomfortable topic to deal with. Overall, his career and his achievement were kept in a strategic silence. Commemorations were avoided until 2017–2019, when a huge wave of events celebrating Magellan and his actions began.

Let us now take a step back and focus on another crucial and selected topic which reveals how apologetics and iconoclasm interact in the scenario under scrutiny. Within this setup, and besides the mystification of Henry the Navigator and the role of the non-existent ‘Sagres School’, the chosen interpretations about the foundations of the Portuguese launching of an overseas expansion were the perfect choice: the exceptional and indomitable spirit of the Portuguese; Christian proselytizing at the time of the Muslim invasion of Europe; the strength of some exceptional Portuguese leaders – mostly Henry the Navigator – were among them.

During the first half of the twentieth century, scholars such as Jaime CortesãoFootnote ^b and António SérgioFootnote ^c offered other explanations, which included the critical and scientific knowledge and the ‘free thinking’ of the Portuguese. This thesis assumed that the Portuguese were, somehow, at the birth of a Scientific Revolution and that they anticipated, during the fifteenth century and in an Iberian context, what was at the time accepted elsewhere as having been a seventeenth century process, led by Northern Europe.

Some historians followed a deterministic geographical explanation, such as – again – Jaime Cortesão. Others proposed a geo-strategic and geo-economic explanation, trying to understand Portuguese overseas expansion in worldwide geographic and economic contexts, considering the Portuguese expansion as part of a European one. Vitorino Magalhães Godinho (1918–2011) was a distinguished representative of this latter trend.

All of them would focus on the geography, the demography, the economic trends, the circulation of knowledge, the structures or thinking. All of them were, however, discarded by the Salazar regime, and the publication of their work had to wait until 1974 and the beginning of a democratic process to see the light and to be taught in university history programmes. Godinho and Charles Boxer are cases in point as targets of the Salazar regime iconoclasm, but not the only ones.

University teaching was controlled as much as the publishing policy by an active censorship that forced those whose thinking did not fit the regime’s propaganda into becoming political refugees. The first was Jaime Cortesão, who migrated to Brazil. Then, Vitorino Magalhães Godinho and Joaquim Barradas de Carvalho (1920–1980) – two high-ranking scholars – could only pursue their research in France, mainly at the CNRS and the École des Hautes-Études en Sciences Sociales.

Godinho is indeed the ultimate testimony of the Salazar regime iconoclasm: his approach to a non-official and geo-economic history of Portuguese Overseas Expansion was responsible for him being labelled a ‘Marxist’. He was suspended from teaching in the University of Lisbon, returned in 1960 as full professor of the Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Política Ultramarina, only to be expelled again in 1961, for political reasons. Most of his academic career he spent in France, as professor at Clermont-Ferrand. He befriended both Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel, and became an active member of the Annales group.

In 1961, his book, which had, after all, been commissioned by the organizers of the commemorations of the fifth centenary of the death of Infante D. Henrique, was refused for contradicting the official view of the discoveries, as Godinho explained in a preface to the recent republication of A Economia dos Descobrimentos Henriquinos, now titled A Expansão Portuguesa Quatrocentista’ (Godinho Reference Godinho2008).

Among the many scholars who dedicated themselves to the history of the Portuguese colonial empire and who were also expelled by the regime, we must also highlight British historian Charles Boxer (1904–2000). First, Boxer was capable of demonstrating in a convincing way that most of the difficulties faced during the process of maritime expansion and the establishment of Portuguese dominion overseas derived from logistic problems due to the limitations of the Portuguese State in terms of human and material resources. This could not come as a surprise in view of the immense spatial extension of the Empire, but it was not acceptable to a regime that proclaimed the greatness of Portugal and the Portuguese.

Second, but equally important, Boxer contributed to the most extensive and comprehensive discussions concerning some of the crucial issues regarding the establishment and consolidation of Portuguese dominion overseas. Among these were racial relations (Boxer Reference Boxer1963) and the ideas concerning a possible higher adaptive ability of the Portuguese in the tropics. These created areas of disagreement with the views of the regime responsible for a censorship that did not allow the publication, in Portugal, of Boxer’s works before 1974.

Since the 1930s, the Portuguese were depicted as the ‘good colonizers’ (another icon painted by the regime) due to their capacity of melting with the Tropics. A sizable number of Boxer’s publications clearly contradicted this concept formulated by Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987), generally subsumed under the title of luso-tropicalismo (‘Lusotropicalism’) (Freyre Reference Freyre1961; Curto Reference Curto2011). In broad strokes, one can say that this perspective was presented in 1933 with the first edition of Freyre’s Casa Grande e Senzala (Freyre Reference Freyre1986) and was progressively developed in the 20 years that followed. According to the basic ‘Lusotropicalist’ assumptions, the Portuguese were endowed with a kind of ethno-racial plasticity which favoured the establishment of a colonial empire. That is to say, they possessed a particular ability to adapt to the tropics, one that was not necessarily activated by economic or political interests, but rather by a supposed empathy (Castelo Reference Castelo1999; Ferreira Reference Ferreira2014; Silva and Cabral Reference Silva and Cabral2020). According to Gilberto Freyre, this adaptability resulted in a great vocation towards miscegenation and in the consequent rise, in the diverse parts that made up the Empire, of social relations infused with a certain measure of harmony with regard to racial relations.

Boxer, in his book Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415–1825 (Boxer Reference Boxer1963), called into question this main idea of the harmonious racial relations, convincingly demonstrating the existing asymmetry between the social status of different racial groups inside the social structures of the empire. This, among other perspectives, contributed to the damnatio memoriae of Boxer’s work in Portugal, since the Salazar regime had adopted Freyre’s theories as the main justification of their remaining presence, particularly in Africa. The idea of harmonic racial relations, according to Freyre, personified by miscegenation (Freyre Reference Freyre1986), had initially been perceived as unsavoury by the Portuguese Estado Novo, but had then been adopted as the right solution for the many problems Salazar faced with his European counterparts, mostly regarding Portugal’s membership of NATO. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean however, another Estado Novo – the Brazilian one – while sharing certain ideological similarities with its namesake, took advantage, in its own way, of the idea of this tropical ‘racial democracy’ (Castelo Reference Castelo1999). It survived the end of the actual Brazilian Estado Novo (1937–1945) and lasted into the 1980s, at the twilight of another dictatorial period (1964–1985).

On the Portuguese side, as the colonies’ wars of independence escalated, the Lisbon regime came to see several component ideas of Lusotropicalism as adequately convenient. In its ideologically-driven propaganda, and to justify the existence and conservation of a colonial empire in Africa – a move criticized by Europeans who leaned towards de-colonialization – there was no shortage of scholars of various fields ready to countersign the historical origins of the good racial relations in the Empire.

Hence, even if the opus authored by the conservative Boxer caused some semblance of discomfort to Salazar’s regime, a wider revision of the historiography concerning the themes of expansion and of the Empire would be delayed for several years, up until the definitive consolidation of democracy in Portugal during the 1980s.

Obviously, in the last 40 years, new historical approaches have been made. Portuguese and international researchers produced new insights into the subject, both from a European and a non-European point of view. These researchers include the authors of the earlier period: Vitorino Magalhães Godinho; Luís Filipe Thomaz (b. 1942); Charles Boxer; Anthony Russell Wood (1940–2010), as well as many Brazilian colleagues; and in the East, Michael N. Pearson (b. in 1941), Sanjay Subrahmanyam (b. in 1960); and again, among a younger Portuguese generation, Diogo Ramada Curto (b. in 1959), Francisco Bethencourt, just to name a few.

A different appreciation and comprehension of the process indeed followed after 1974, which enabled a democratic opening in Portugal. The decolonization process came to an end, illuminating the ultimate consequences of the Portuguese colonization and decolonization processes, such as civil wars in Africa and the violent takeover of Timor by Indonesia. Equally intense ideological projections were put forward on the historical analysis, even if in an opposite direction. A new trend in Portuguese historiography tended to disregard the accomplishments of the Early Modern Portuguese expansion and to stigmatize the overall process with the recent marks of the African colonization process. Antagonist positions were stressed, and conflicting analyses were put forward, which emphasized imposition mechanisms and strategies. A dichotomic model of confrontation between colonizers and colonized became dominant. And an active iconoclasm against Salazar icons was inevitably put into action.

Even so, and on the whole, an analysis focused on central power strategies and central power achievements and failures was still likely to prevail, giving a monolithic perspective of a phenomenon which is, by its nature, pluralist. The focus on the structures, mostly the formal and institutional ones, and the exclusion from the analysis of the informal ways of organization, is responsible for a framework that does not acknowledge aspects essential, in our view, to a full understanding of the phenomena. Furthermore, this perspective proves unable to explain both the specific contributions of the Portuguese as builders of a global world, and to analyse how Portugal was able to maintain a multiple territorial and maritime empire spread all over the globe, clearly exceeding the potential power and means of the Portuguese crown. Visions of a connected history (Subrahmanyam Reference Subrahmanyam2005), of a world history, demand answers impossible to provide according to the previous standardized proposals.

That is why the present generation of historians is still faced with several challenges: the most urgent is to demystify Salazar regime narratives. And here the iconoclast dimension, even if always critically explained, is inevitable. Then, we have to fill in the blanks so as to be able to fully understand this secular phenomenon. The logistics of maritime expansion have been disregarded as unimportant (the ‘Sagres School’ was supposed to explain it all). In terms of nautical knowledge, naval officers, mostly members of the Naval Academy, were believed to have provided the main approaches, while any issues of sharing or transference of knowledge were absent from the ‘official’ narrative, as were all issues of any kind of trans-imperial dynamics.

Characters who were just the king’s representatives, such as Vasco da Gama (1469–1524), became ‘discoverers’, together with the main ‘discoverer’: Henry the (non-)navigator; pilots and nautical personnel were demoted to being humble (and obeying) seafarers; some characters were selected among many others as topoi – take Afonso de Albuquerque (1453–1515), as viceroy of the State of India, when his performance provides exceptional orientations rather than any kind of norm. He was supposed to have pursued a miscegenation policy through the promotion of mixed marriages – another mystification which was orchestrated to prove the supposed racial democratic attitude of the Portuguese. This totally misrepresented the rigorous analysis of the actual practices and their implications, abundantly proven by hundreds of documents, many of which had been published for decades. The population of local maritime communities in Portugal was totally neglected, together with the role of local, autochthonous populations, whether in Asia, Africa or Brazil (Polónia 2007; Polónia and Capelão Reference Polónia, Capelão, Bührer, Eichmann, Förster and Stuchtey2017).

Until recently, a top-down perspective of analysis prevailed before and after 1974. State agents (or crown representatives to be more accurate) dominated the scene during and after the Salazar regime. From a different viewpoint, shared already by many researchers in colonial studies, one could, however, ask:

• Could it be that the sustainability of empires, particularly the Portuguese overseas multicontinental empire, depended on the commoners and their entrepreneurial initiatives as much as on central power policies, military and commercial strategies?

• Could it be that European empires were also, if not predominantly, sustained by cooperative patterns and relied on agent-based networks?

• If so… we must put aside the strict focus on the structures, on the systems, on the State, on the macro level and concentrate our attention on individuals and their web of connections.

If these hypotheses stand the test of academic debate, if they can open and then pursue new avenues of research, then one has to perceive how individuals and groups of individuals contributed to the rise, sustainability and eventual unsustainability of empires. And thus, we place ourselves on the opposite side of the Salazar regime, and we have to erase some of the myths that prevent scholars from looking at the performance of anonymous agents, women, local communities, in Portugal and overseas, or the intense networks of cooperation and rivalry among non-state agents.

We have to understand informal and non-institutionalized mechanisms of empire building and thus also scrutinize the agency of individuals and networks belonging to societies, cultures and communities of contact, in Africa, Asia and America (Polónia and Antunes Reference Polónia and Antunes2017; Antunes and Polónia Reference Antunes and Polónia2016).

Summing up, we have to identify local inputs into the process of building a global world – which leads us to the centrality of brokers and go-betweens in this overall process (Polónia and Capelão Reference Polónia, Capelão, Polónia, Bracht and Conceição2018). All this completely overtakes a national or even nationalist point of view. Only an effective dismantling of the previous narrative, expertly built by Salazar and his cronies, will allow us to renovate the teaching and the understanding of such dynamics, and that is why an iconoclastic attitude towards the bases of such construction is paramount. Scholarly criticism was not enough, during almost half a century, to explain how Salazar apologetics and iconoclasm prevented the building of an effective understanding of a complex phenomenon.

If this is iconoclasm, then it makes me, much to my own surprise, an iconoclast.