Lusotropicalism (Portuguese : Lusotropicalismo) is a term and "quasi-theory" [1] developed by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre to describe the distinctive character of Portuguese imperialism overseas, proposing that the Portuguese were better colonizers than other European nations. [2] [3]
Freyre theorized that because of Portugal's warmer climate, and having been inhabited by Celts, Romans, Visigoths, Moors and several other peoples in pre-modern times, the Portuguese were more humane, friendly, and adaptable to other climates and cultures. He saw "Portuguese-based cultures as cultures of ecumenical expansion" and suggested that "Lusotropical culture was a form of resistance against both the 'barbaric' Soviet communist influence, and the also 'barbarian' process of Americanization and capitalist expansion." [3]
In addition, by the early 20th century, Portugal was by far the European colonial power with the oldest territorial presence overseas; in some cases its territories had been continuously settled and ruled by the Portuguese for five centuries.[ citation needed ] Lusotropicalism celebrated both actual and mythological elements of racial democracy and civilizing mission in the Portuguese Empire, encompassing a pro-miscegenation attitude toward the colonies or overseas territories. The ideology is best exemplified in the work of Freyre. [3]
The beginning of the Portuguese Empire is usually traced to the 1415 Conquest of Ceuta in North Africa. In the succeeding decades of the 15th century, Portuguese sailors traveled all over the world: Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488; Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498; and Pedro Álvares Cabral made landfall in Brazil in 1500. At first the Portuguese were interested primarily in lucrative trade opportunities (including the slave trade), and by the end of the 16th century the Portuguese had established trading outposts in Africa, India, Brazil, the Middle East, and South Asia. During this time there was some minimal Portuguese intermarrying with and settlement among African and Asian peoples. It was much more common for the Portuguese to bring Asian and especially African peoples to Europe and Brazil, most often though not always as enslaved people. As early as the 1570s, Lisbon had a sizeable and well-known Black African population of enslaved and free people.
During the New Imperialist Scramble for Africa of the 1890s onward, Portugal expanded its coastal African territories in modern Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau inland. Like other European colonial empires, Portugal achieved this expansion primarily through physical and economic violence against native peoples. After the 1910 Portuguese Revolution, and as an official policy of the 1933–1974 Estado Novo dictatorship, Black people in Portuguese Africa were de jure eligible for full Portuguese citizenship and its attendant rights. In practice, Black people hardly ever achieved such status, and during the Estado Novo even white Portuguese born in Africa were denied the same legal rights and protections as whites born in metropolitan Portugal.
Prior to Freyre's publication of Casa-Grande & Senzala, few—if any—Portuguese politicians and colonial administrators conceived of the Portuguese Empire as a multicultural, multiracial, and pluricontinental nation (the idea that Portugal was not a colonial empire but a nation-state spread across continents). [5] They were more likely to think of Portuguese colonialism as a logical historical extension or continuation of the Reconquista . [5] For example, Armindo Monteiro, Portuguese Minister of Colonies between 1931 and 1935, considered himself a "social Darwinist" and was a proponent of the traditional colonial "civilizing mission" and white saviorism. [5] Monteiro believed Portugal had a "historic obligation" to civilize the "inferior races" who lived in its African and Asian territories by converting them to Christianity and teaching them a work ethic. [5]
Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar strongly resisted Freyre's ideas throughout the 1930s and 1940s, partly because Freyre claimed the Portuguese were more prone to miscegenation than other European nations. He adopted lusotropicalism only after sponsoring Freyre on a visit to Portugal and some of its overseas territories in 1951 and 1952. Freyre's work Aventura e Rotina (Adventure and Routine) was a result of this trip.
Salazar adopted lusotropicalism by asserting that since Portugal had been a multicultural, multiracial, and pluricontinental nation since the 15th century, losing its overseas territories in Africa and Asia would dismember the country and end Portuguese independence. [3] According to Salazar, in geopolitical terms, losing these territories would decrease the Portuguese state's self-sufficiency.
The life of Freyre, after he published Casa-Grande & Senzala, became an eternal source of explanation. He repeated several times that he did not create the myth of a racial democracy and that the fact that his books recognized the intense mixing between "races" in Brazil did not mean a lack of prejudice or discrimination. He pointed out that many people have claimed the United States to have been an "exemplary democracy" whereas slavery and racial segregation were present throughout most of US history: [6]
"The interpretation of those who want to place me among the sociologists or anthropologists who said prejudice of race among the Portuguese or the Brazilians never existed is extreme. What I have always suggested is that such prejudice is minimal... when compared to that which is still in place elsewhere, where laws still regulate relations between Europeans and other groups".
"It is not that racial prejudice or social prejudice related to complexion are absent in Brazil. They exist. But no one here would have thought of "white-only" Churches. No one in Brazil would have thought of laws against interracial marriage ... Fraternal spirit is stronger among Brazilians than racial prejudice, colour, class or religion. It is true that equality has not been reached since the end of slavery.... There was racial prejudice among plantation owners, there was social distance between the masters and the slaves, between whites and blacks.... But few wealthy Brazilians were as concerned with racial purity as the majority were in the Old South". [6]
The Portuguese Empire, also known as the Portuguese Overseas or the Portuguese Colonial Empire, was composed of the overseas colonies, factories, and later overseas territories, governed by the Kingdom of Portugal, and later the Republic of Portugal. It was one of the longest-lived colonial empires in European history, lasting 584 years from the conquest of Ceuta in North Africa in 1415, to the transfer of sovereignty over Macau to China in 1999. The empire began in the 15th century, and from the early 16th century it stretched across the globe, with bases in Africa, North America, South America, and various regions of Asia and Oceania.
The culture of Brazil has been shaped by the amalgamation of diverse indigenous cultures, and the cultural fusion that took place among Indigenous communities, Portuguese colonizers, and Africans, primarily during the Brazilian colonial period. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Brazil received a significant number of immigrants, primarily of Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and German origin, which along with smaller numbers of Austrians, Arabs, Japanese, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Greeks, Chinese, and Koreans gave a relevant contribution to the formation of regional cultures in Brazil, and thus contributed to its current existence as a plural and racially diverse society.
The Estado Novo was the corporatist Portuguese state installed in 1933. It evolved from the Ditadura Nacional formed after the coup d'état of 28 May 1926 against the unstable First Republic. Together, the Ditadura Nacional and the Estado Novo are recognised by historians as the Second Portuguese Republic. The Estado Novo, greatly inspired by conservative and autocratic ideologies, was developed by António de Oliveira Salazar, who was President of the Council of Ministers from 1932 until illness forced him out of office in 1968.
The Portuguese people are a Romance-speaking ethnic group and nation indigenous to Portugal, a country in the west of the Iberian Peninsula in the south-west of Europe, who share a common culture, ancestry and language.
Gilberto de Mello Freyre was a Brazilian sociologist, anthropologist, historian, writer, painter, journalist and congressman born in Recife. Considered one of the most important sociologists of the 20th century, his best-known work is a sociological treatise named Casa-Grande & Senzala.
The civilizing mission is a political rationale for military intervention and for colonization purporting to facilitate the Westernization or Japanization of indigenous peoples, especially in the period from the 15th to the 20th centuries. As a principle of Western culture, the term was most prominently used in justifying French colonialism in the late-15th to mid-20th centuries. The civilizing mission was the cultural justification for the colonization of French Algeria, French West Africa, French Indochina, Portuguese Angola and Portuguese Guinea, Portuguese Mozambique and Portuguese Timor, among other colonies. The civilizing mission also was a popular justification for the British and German colonialism. In the Russian Empire, it was also associated with the Russian conquest of Central Asia and the Russification of that region. The Western colonial powers claimed that, as Christian nations, they were duty bound to disseminate Western civilization to what they perceived as heathen, primitive cultures. It was also applied by the Empire of Japan, which colonized Korea.
Portuguese Mozambicans are Mozambican-born descendants of Portuguese settlers.
Racial democracy is a concept that denies the existence of racism in Brazil. Some scholars of race relations in Brazil argue that the country has escaped racism and racial discrimination. Those researchers cite the fact that most Brazilians claim not to view others through the lens of race, and thus the idea of racial discrimination is irrelevant.
Neo-Manueline is a revival style of architecture which drew from the 16th century Manueline Late Gothic architecture of Portugal. Neo-Manueline constructions have been built across Portugal, Brazil, and the Lusophone world.
Brazilian society is made up of a confluence of people of Indigenous, Portuguese, and African descent. Other major significant groups include Italians, Spaniards, Germans, Lebanese, and Japanese.
The casa-grande was the Brazilian equivalent of a Southern plantation in the United States. These casas-grandes were predominantly located in the northeast of Brazil. Additionally, sugar cane was grown in the interior, in the states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
Casa-Grande e Senzala is a book published in 1933 by Gilberto Freyre, about the formation of Brazilian society. The casa-grande refers to the slave owner's residence on a sugarcane plantation, where whole towns were owned and managed by one man. The Senzala refers to the dwellings of the black working class, where they originally worked as slaves, and later as servants.
The history of Afro-Brazilian people spans over five centuries of racial interaction between Africans imported, involved or descended from the effects of the Atlantic slave trade.
Assimilado is the term given to African subjects of the colonizing Portuguese Empire from the 1910s to the 1960s, who had reached a level of "civilization", according to Portuguese legal standards, that theoretically qualified them for full rights as Portuguese citizens. Portuguese colonizers claimed as the goal for their assimilation practices, the "close union of races of different degrees of civilization that help and support each other loyally"; however, this notion of a "close union" differed from its practical application in the cultural and social spheres of the colonies of Portuguese Angola, Portuguese Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea.
Luso-Indians or Portuguese-Indian, is a subgroup of the larger Eurasian multiracial ethnic creole people of Luso-Asians. Luso-Indians are people who have mixed Indian and Portuguese ancestry or people of Portuguese descent born or living or originating in former Portuguese Indian colonies, the most important of which were Goa and Damaon of the Konkan region in the present-day Republic of India, and their diaspora around the world, the Anglosphere, Lusosphere, the Portuguese East Indies such as Macao etc.
Pluricontinentalism was a geopolitical concept, positing that Portugal was a transcontinental country and a unitary nation-state consisting of continental Portugal and its overseas provinces. With origins as early as the 14th century, pluricontinentalism gained official state sponsorship in the Estado Novo regime. It was the idea that Portugal was not a colonial empire but a singular nation-state spread across continents. As such, overseas possessions were a part of Portuguese identity. The first time that Portugal was a pluricontinental country was during the reign of Maria I of Portugal, with the creation of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves, when the Portuguese court was living in Brazil and Rio de Janeiro served as the capital for the country. The idea of pluricontinentalism quickly collapsed following the Carnation Revolution in 1974.
Carlos Julião was a Luso-Italian artist and engineer of the Portuguese colonial army, working as a fortress inspector during the second half of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th century. He is more known for his watercolor drawings, portraying the different racial and social types inhabiting the Portuguese empire, as well as the period and methods of mining in Brazil.
Events in the year 1933 in Brazil.
Sérgio Nascimento de Camargo is a Brazilian journalist and politician, affiliated with the PL. He is known for his conservative positions and for having assumed, from 2019 to 2022, the presidency of Fundação Cultural Palmares, a Brazilian body for the promotion of Afro-Brazilian culture.
Guinea-Bissau–Turkey relations are the foreign relations between Guinea-Bissau and Turkey. Turkey has an embassy in Bissau. Guinea Bissau has an embassy in Ankara.