Portuguese Colonial Wars

At issue: Portuguese domination of territories in Africa, Asia, and Latin America

Date: 1415–1939

Location: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Azores, Goa, Brazil, East Timor, Macau, and other territories along the Atlantic and Indian Oceans

Combatants: Portuguese vs. native armies

Principal commanders:Portuguese, King Sebastian (1554–1578), Afonso de Albuquerque (1432–1481), Salvador Correia de Sá, Francisco Barreto, Joaquim José Machado, Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970)

Principal battles: Diu, Mashonaland, Alcazarquivir, Luanda, Mombasa

Result: Portuguese colonial rule established in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, Azores, Brazil (until 1822), and smaller territories in Asia and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans

Background

The Portuguese empire began in a relatively small way, with the conquest of the Moroccan city of Ceuta in 1415 and the discovery of the islands of Madeira, the Canary Islands (yielded to Spain in 1479), and the Azores in 1419, 1425, and 1427, respectively. At the initiative of Prince Enrique the Navigator and other rulers of Portugal, Portuguese sailors beginning in the early fifteenth century began an extensive program of exploration and conquest focusing on the coasts of Africa and the territories bounded by the Indian Ocean. Motivated by a desire to control the spice trade with Asia, spread Catholicism, and gain new wealth and status, Portugal established one of the first global empires, along with that of the Spanish.

Action

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Portugal added extensive areas to its empire, beginning its conquests with small coastal settlements and only gradually expanding inland. Portuguese sailors and soldiers claimed the Cape Verde Islands and Portuguese Guinea in 1460, Brazil in 1500, Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) in 1505, Mozambique in 1507, Goa and other small Indian territories (Diu Island and the Daman enclave) in 1510, Malacca (modern-day Malaysia) in 1511, and Macau (along the Chinese coast) in 1557. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Portuguese explorers, merchants, and soldiers had claimed most of the Atlantic and Indian coastlines of Africa for their kingdom, although they did not exert effective control over vast areas of this territory.

In most locations, direct Portuguese authority did not extend beyond the artillery range of Portuguese forts. Given the superiority of European military technology, there was little organized opposition to the initial expansion, particularly in southern Africa and Asia. In most cases, the Portuguese were able to sign treaties with local rulers to extend the sovereignty of Lisbon without major armed conflict. The main priorities of the Portuguese were not gaining territory for its own sake but rather obtaining slaves for their American plantations and spices for trade.

The Portuguese avoided a great deal of conflict with the Spaniards, their principal rival during the first two centuries of European colonial expansion, through the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. This treaty, with the blessing of the pope, apportioned the world between Portugal and Spain, leaving East Asia and most of the Americas to Spain, while reserving Africa and South Asia to Portugal, taking as the dividing line a mark 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. Another agreement, the Treaty of Alcáçovas (September, 1479) gained Castilian acceptance of Madeira, the Azores, Cape Verde, Guinea, and Fez as Portuguese possessions, while the Spaniards gained control over the Canary Islands.

The first significant challenge to Portuguese expansion came at the naval Battle of Diu (November, 1509), in the Indian Ocean. The sultan of Egypt, supported by the Ottomans and Venice, attempted to check Portuguese expansion. The Portuguese naval forces inflicted a significant defeat on the Egyptians and continued their move into India, which had begun with Vasco da Gama’s landing at Calcutta in 1498. Afonso de Albuquerque conquered Goa, Diu Island, and Daman in 1510 and established his fortress at Goa as the center of a viceroyalty that included Portuguese territories in Mozambique, Ormuz, Muscat, and Malacca.

The Portuguese met resistance in Mozambique until Francisco Barreto began a campaign into Mashonaland (1572) to repress native resistance and seize gold fields. In the only major battle of the campaign, 600 Portuguese soldiers emerged victorious over 10,000 Shona near the Zambezi River.

Portuguese expansion into Morocco in North Africa was halted after a disastrous attack on Alcazarquivir (August, 1578), led by King Sebastian. The Portuguese forces of 24,000, with poor equipment and leadership by Sebastian, were crushed by numerically similar but qualitatively superior Arab and Berber armies, in what became known as the Battle of the Three Kings, which dealt a severe blow to Portugal. Along with the death of King Sebastian and thousands of Portuguese troops, Portugal suffered from the ransom that it had to pay to release its captured nobles, which drained its treasury at a moment when Spain was preparing to move against it. In 1580, Spanish forces invaded to assert Philip II’s right to the Portuguese throne, and from then until 1640, Portugal was ruled by Spanish kings, although its colonies were administered separately and never incorporated into Spain’s empire.

From 1505 to 1698, the Portuguese had a strong presence on the Swahili coast of East Africa, but this ended with a sustained assault after 1650 by local chiefs aided by Arabs from Oman. The final confrontation was an Omani siege of the Portuguese fort at Mombasa (1698), which fell, costing the lives of 1,000 Portuguese and 5,000 African auxiliaries.

From 1700 on, Portuguese attention focused on the region of Mozambique, which had already become the most important stop for Portuguese traders moving spice from India to Lisbon. Beginning in 1885 and ending in 1902, the Portuguese embarked on no fewer than fifteen separate campaigns in Mozambique to suppress native revolts and establish unequivocal control over the interior of the colony, with the aim of forestalling the intrusion of other colonial powers. Native resentment against forced labor erupted in the Zambezi Rebellion (1917–1920), which took more than 20,000 Portuguese troops to suppress.

Initial Portuguese efforts in central Africa had been concentrated in the region of the Congo, where in 1491 King Nkuwu converted to Christianity. Faced with continued losses of soldiers and priests to tropical diseases and in defense of this pro-Portuguese state, by the middle of the sixteenth century, Portugal began to shift its attentions elsewhere in Africa.

In 1576, the Portuguese established the town of Luanda, in Angola, and by 1600, this territory became the most important African colony of Portugal, sending over the course of three centuries more than three million blacks as slaves to Brazil and other colonies. Aside from very limited skirmishes against the three largest tribes, the Ovimbundos, the Congo, and the Ambundos, the only serious challenge to Portuguese rule over Angola came from other Europeans. From 1598 to 1663, the Dutch had attacked Portuguese colonies worldwide, permanently seizing Ceylon, the East Indies, and Malacca, and taking temporary control over Brazil. A Dutch assault on Luanda (August, 1641) temporarily overturned Portuguese rule in the capital and threatened the entire colony, until being defeated by a Brazilian general, Salvador Correia de Sá, who retook Luanda (August, 1648) with the help of 1,500 troops brought from Brazil. Along with Mozambique, Angola’s main contribution to the Portuguese empire was in the form of slaves, until this trade and system of ownership was gradually ended over the course of the 1860’s and 1870’s. During World War I, the Germans attempted to foment rebellion in Angola, in 1914 and 1915 arming chiefs who promised to fight the Portuguese, but with little result, given the weakness of the kaiser’s African forces.

Brazil gained its independence without a struggle. After the Napoleonic Wars, during which time the Portuguese royal family sought exile in its American colony, most of Spanish America gained its freedom from Spain. Seeing the likelihood of a similar move in Brazil, the crown prince of Portugal, Dom Pedro, put himself at the head of the Brazilian independence movement and was declared emperor of Brazil in October, 1822.

Portuguese control over Guinea and East Timor remained very limited during the colonial period, with formal authority not exerted much beyond the coast, colonial cities, and military fortifications.

At the Conference of Berlin (1884–1885), called by the European powers to resolve colonial differences in Africa, Portugal was disappointed by its treatment. It lost significant territory to the British but, given its weakness, could have lost more. Convinced that it had to reform its colonial administration, Portugal granted wide-reaching autonomy to its colonial governors in the years immediately preceding and following World War I, but this policy was reversed with the establishment of Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorship in 1926. Although natives in Macau, Goa, and Cape Verde were granted Portuguese citizenship, in the African colonies, citizenship was granted on the basis of assimilation: converting to Catholicism, attending school, and learning Portuguese, an opportunity embraced by thousands of black Angolans and Mozambicans before World War II.

For most of its history, Goa and its associated territories in India remained quiet under Portuguese rule, but in 1895, a major rebellion by Indian auxiliaries within the Portuguese garrison threatened the colonial administration and was put down only several months later at great expense and through a careful combination of military force and diplomacy by the governor, Joaquim José Machado.

Aftermath

From this period until World War II, when the cataclysm of that conflict signaled the beginning of the end for European colonialism, the small nation of Portugal held sway over colonies in Africa, Asia, and, until the loss of Brazil in 1822, South America. In 1939, tiny Portugal ruled the third largest global empire, following those of the British and French. Despite the potential strength of this formal empire, Portugal’s sovereignty was often tenuous and threatened by rival European states and native rebellions, and the benefits to the Portuguese of these far-flung possessions frequently elusive. The Portuguese empire began to collapse in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, as major insurgencies began in its African colonies and India and Indonesia seized Goa and East Timor. With the fall, in April, 1974, of the dictatorship established by Salazar, Portugal granted independence to its African colonies and, in 1999, returned Macau to China, leaving only the Azores and Madeira still under its control.

Bibliography

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‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Portugal and Africa. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

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MacAulay, Neil. Dom Pedro: The Struggle for Liberty in Brazil and Portugal, 1798–1834. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986.

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