«Decline» or underdevelopment: a reinterpretation of its origins in Portugal

Abstract

Which are the historical origins of the Portuguese underdevelopment? The idea of a «decline», that is to say a stagnation in the main economic activities and an immobility in an «ancien regime» society during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as some historians and essayists have conceived it, is not confirmed, on the contrary, by recent studies. But since the end of the seventeenth century, Portugal became a colonialist country and a dependent one on England at the same time. The origins of Portugal's underdevelopment must be searched exactly in the consequences upon the production processus of the articulation between colonialism and external dependency and in the expatriation of a part of the accumulated capital. In this processus of Portugal's spacing as to a powerful economic center, even itself in formation, one must distinguish two phases. The first phase embraces the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, presenting a mercantile capitalism as its main feature. It does not prevent a clear recuperation in the Portuguese economic independence and the reinforcement of an industrial commercial and perhaps agrarian bourgeoisie in the second half of the eighteenth century. The second phase embraces the nineteenth century. During it, a new form of dependency was structured, embracing the whole of Portuguese economy, and at the same time a deep division in the bourgeoisie interests were produced, what makes it weaker in its struggle against the noble class. Thus the disarticulation of the national production processus happens in the nineteenth century, in the frame of an already capitalist society.