The national question and the colonial question according to Oliveira Martins

Abstract

In the first part, the article analyses the development of Oliveira Martins' ideas about the national question. It points out that in his writings there is a tension between two explanatory models: the one that gives predominance to natural and permanent features of a people's life (characteristics that are handed down from the beginning of time); and that which gives more emphasis to civilisation, to things that are constructed historically. During an initial phase the tension was resolved in favour of the latter model. From 1873, with the abandoning of Proudhon's version of federalism, Oliveira Martins emphasised the importance of ethnic and racial foundations, both in anthropological writings and in those with a historiographical character. In the second section of the article, the implications of these general theoretical concepts for one particular question are analysed - the relationship between Portugal and its empire. The theses of Martins established a rigid racial hierarchy, with Aryans at the top and the supposedly inferior races condemned to be subordinate, if not to extermination. This justified the subjection of African peoples to the hardest forms of exploitation, and sidelined the idea of integrating them in the national total.