Ideology and Colonial Propaganda in the Estado Novo

The book Ideologia e Propaganda Colonial no Estado Novo, by CEIS20 researcher José Luís Lima Garcia, has been published by Editora Palimage. The book is the result of research carried out for a doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Coimbra in 2012 and includes a foreword by Luís Reis Torgal. Find out more on the publisher’s website or read an extract from the foreword below.

“Until recently, my Faculty of Arts had an Institute for the History of Overseas Expansion. I had no objection to this name, as long as it was properly analysed, but I always proposed – unsuccessfully, by the way – that it should be supplemented by the history of colonisation, colonialism, anti-colonialism and of the formerly colonised countries.

In this context, I have supervised or followed some theses and final papers, such as those on Amílcar Cabral and the PAIGC, or, at the other end of the spectrum, on the colonial propaganda of the so-called Estado Novo (New State), which, moreover, extended the propaganda of our First Republic, which was also (as it had to be in the second and third decades of the 20th century) colonialist or colonial. Hence José Luís Lima Garcia’s dissertation on the subject and, within it, on the Agência Geral das Colónias (General Agency for the Colonies), which became the General Agency for Overseas Territories in the 1950s. The author began researching this subject at the end of the last century and in 2012 he completed his doctoral thesis on the subject.

It is finally being published on paper, which will make it more widely known, or at least more resistant to time. In the end, it will be another contribution to the understanding of colonialism and the realisation of the idea of empire, a concept that has been trivialised even in the common names of various companies. This idea of the colonial empire encompasses the vast territory stretching from Africa to Timor and the period from 1924 to 1974, although from the 1950s the cosmetic process of calling each of the (so different...) possessions Overseas Provinces rather than Colonies began and the Indigenous Laws were abolished.”

in Foreword, Luís Reis Torgal