Presentation at World Economic History Congress, Kyoto 2015 (original) (raw)
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Metropolitan vision under question: Fiscal policies and practices in Portuguese Africa (1850s-1970s)
This paper sheds light on the colonial policies and fiscal practices in Portuguese Mozambique and Angola from their early colonial period (1850s) until their independence (1970s). Its added value derives from its comparative approach to long-term state (trans)formation, fiscalisation and citizenship in an understudied region. The paper contributes to the literature on colonial Africa by demonstrating various dimensions of colonial taxation and public spending, based on novel data from primary sources, such as the Statistical Yearbooks and the National Accounts of Mozambique and Angola. Covering more than a century, the paper identifies tax per capita levels, types of taxation imposed, main revenue sources and expenditure patterns. Annual time series indicate trends, continuities, ruptures and varieties within Portuguese Africa as well as with respect to British and French Africa. The paper shows that despite the context-dependent disparities between Mozambique and Angola, the metropolitan vision was dominant in shaping the administration and fiscal policies applied in the colonies. Under the influence of regime changes in Portugal, colonial rule swung between administrative and financial autonomy (following the model of British Africa) and power centralisation policies (French Africa). In theory, colonial rule aimed to maintain the order in Portuguese Africa at minimum cost. In practice, both direct and indirect taxation revenue increased across time, especially in Mozambique, while public investments on security resources and infrastructure were prioritised over social services almost throughout the colonial era.
Published in a collective volume (edited by Ewout Frankema and Anne Booth) by Cambridge University Press, 2019
This chapter surveys the fiscal policies and practices in the Portuguese African colonies of Mozambique and Angola from the 1850s to 1970s. It explores the fiscal implications of a long history of trade relations and cultural exchange, including early forms of colonial settlement (merchants, missionaries, prazeros), which were moulded into a relatively late and severely contested occupation wave in the late 19 th nineteenth century. It discusses the constraints to revenue centralization and fiscal unification and shows how spending policies prioritized security, administration and infrastructure over welfare services. I argue that local conditions, including this specific 'pre-colonial' history of Portuguese-African relations, limited possibilities of fiscal modernisation, while major ruptures in metropolitan politics (e.g. the Salazar authoritarian regime) were key in the re-organization of imperial finances.
Revista De Historia Industrial — Industrial History Review , 2024
We adopt the metaphor of the “jackal” and the “lion” to explore whether variation in geo-political power of metropoles affected fiscal and military capacity building in colonial Africa. Zooming in on Portuguese Africa, we hypothesize that indigenous taxpayers in Angola and Mozambique were forced to invest more in order, security and their own subjugation, as Portugal lacked the wealth, the scale economies, the imperial cross-subsidies and the means of credible deterrence underpinning British and French imperial security policies. We show that military and police force expenditures extracted larger proportions of the colonial budget in Portuguese Africa. The Portuguese African army was also relatively large, relied extensively on forced labour recruitment and remained poorly equipped. While Britain and France supported African colonial armies with substantial metropolitan and imperial subsidies, and Britain also kept far fewer troops on African soil, the conditions of “jackal imperialism” placed greater burdens on long-term colonial state finances.
International Review of Social History, 2017
Samir Amin (1972) divided the African continent into three “macro-regions of colonial influence” with distinct socio-economic systems and labour practices: Africa of the colonial trade or peasant economy, Africa of the concession-owning companies, and Africa of the labour reserves. We argue that Mozambique encompassed all three different “macro-regions” in one sole colony. We reconstruct government revenue (direct/indirect taxes) raised at a district level between 1930 and 1973 and find persisting differences in the “tax capacity” of the three regions throughout the colonial period. The tax systems, we claim, developed in response to existing local geographic and economic conditions, particularly to labour practices. Portuguese colonial rule adapted to and promoted labour practices such as migration and forced labour to maximize revenue. The extent to which the lack of integration played a role in the post-colonial state and fiscal failure should be studied further.
Recent economic and historical literature has emphasized the importance of metropolitan identity for the nature of colonial institutions. But to what extent did particular colonial policy objectives actually translate into institutional design? We explore the importance of exogenously-imposed metropolitan policies and endogenous economic and political conditions for the design of colonial institutional development in British and French Africa through the lens of colonial taxation. Fiscal institutions were a key element in the process of colonial state formation as they constituted the financial backbone of the colonial state. Using colonial government budget accounts we construct Purchasing Power Parity-adjusted comparisons of per capita government revenue, and analyze the source composition of taxes. We find that local geographies and indigenous responses to commercial opportunities were key determinants for the design of local colonial tax systems and that typically ‘British’ or ‘...
"Portuguese colonialism in Africa"
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, 2018
in Thomas Spear, ed., Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 30 pp. Summary: The Portuguese colonial empire was the first and the last European empire overseas, from the conquest of Ceuta (1415), in Morocco, North Africa, until the formal handover of Macau to the People’s Republic of China (1999). From the coastline excursions in Africa and the gradual establishment of trade routes in Asia and in the Indian Ocean and the related emergence of the Estado da Índia (the Portuguese empire east of the Cape of Good Hope), to the colonization projects in the Americas, namely, in Brazil, and, in the second half of the 19th century, in Africa, the Portuguese empire assumed diverse configurations. All of these entailed expansionist projects and motivations—political, missionary, military, commercial—with changing dynamics, strongly conditioned by local circumstances and powers. In Africa, actual colonization was a belated and convoluted process, which started and ended with violent conflicts, the so-called pacification campaigns of the 1890s, and the liberation wars of the 1960s and 1970s. In Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe, the Portuguese enacted numerous modalities of formalized rule, based on political, military, and religious apparatuses. These forms of control engaged with and impacted on local societies differently. However, until the very end, coercive labor and tax exactions, racial discrimination, authoritarian politics, and economic exploitation were the fundamental pillars of Portuguese colonialism in Africa.