Change to Remain: The Late Colonial State in the Portuguese Empire, 1945–75

This paper aims explores the developmentalist and modernizing nature of Portuguese late colonialism since 1945, especially focusing on the formation and transformation of the late colonial state in Angola and Mozambique. Including an analysis of the dynamics of institutional and ideological change in the metropolitan empire-state in what related colonial affairs – in a context of an authoritarian regime, the Estado Novo of Oliveira Salazar –, this paper will nonetheless focus on the fundamental political, economic and sociocultural historical processes that characterized the late colonial state in the Portuguese empire. Among other important aspects, this paper will (1) evaluate the overall transformation and local impact of the imperial juridical, administrative and institutional frameworks in the post-1945 period that entailed new mechanisms and modalities of colonial rule (e.g. the Overseas Organic Laws of 1953 and 1963); (2) understand the formation of a developmentalist colonial state, both at an economic level (e.g. the developmental plans between 1953 and 1973) and at a sociocultural one (e.g. the modernizing plans associated with the schemes of native and white settlement or the end of the native statute in 1961); (3) analyze the process of militarization of the colonial societies, especially after the beginning of conflict in Angola (1961), and the rise of a colonial police state; (4) assess the impact of these interrelated phenomena in the pathways towards decolonization in the Portuguese colonial empire, more properly in its ability to change to remain.