Massive population transfers with Portugal and it's various colonies

Rather than just sending Portuguese colonists to it's African colonies. Could Estado Novo adopt a policy of massive population transfer between the various colonies and Portugal as a way of integrating the empire as part of Pluricontinentalism and Lusotropicalism.

How many people could be moved around the Portuguese empire .

What would be the impact on Portugal colonial wars and the aftermath

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lusotropicalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluricontinentalism
 
If the Estado Novo did consider such a thing, I would say good luck trying to afford it.

As a comparison, approximately 6 million people were forcibly transferred in the Soviet Union. A few points:

1. The Soviet Union relocated people mostly by train. Transporting people by sea is a much more difficult process.
2. Portugal is obviously a much smaller country than the Soviet Union.
3. Portugal's population was approximately 8.6 million by the end of Estado Novo. Angola's was 7.4 million, Mozambique's was 10 million. In comparison, Russians constituted a majority in the USSR, so they were a useful tool in repressing ethnic minorities.
4. The Portuguese would not be able to move everyone at once and would be forced to move people of certain ethnic groups at a time. This would certainly cause tremendous political instability in their disunited African holdings.
5. Infrastructure was lacking in Angola and Mozambique, and was inadequate to transport thousands of people, let alone millions.
6. Like Communist internationalism, Lusotropicalism was a fallacy. Obviously, the Bantu peoples did not consider themselves Portuguese. Moving people here or there would not change that. It would take generations of determined educational programs to convince people that they were Portuguese and not Mbundu, Ndau, etc.
7. The biggest thing that ended colonialism in Africa was not necessarily cultural differences (though that did play a part), but economic disconnection. The US or the USSR were much more valuable trading partners than the mother countries of Europe. Portugal would not have the resources to develop Angola and Mozambique, so they would naturally turn to the US or the USSR for economic aid. Both countries had a vested interest in decolonization.
 
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So Portugal was successful in sending something like 800,000 civilians to the colonies in the last 20 years of colonialism, but that was in a context of a massive emigration from Portugal (during that same timespan nearly 2 millions left for other countries, mostly France, America, Brazil), a lot of the colonists were also poorly educated and lived of purely on small trade in cities, they didn’t really contribute a lot to the economy. Also only about 1% lived in farms in rural areas.

A main problem with emigration to the colonies is that they had initially little infrastructure (but they were built very quickly in the last decades), that they were filled with disease and that they had very poor reputation from centuries of prisoners being sent there (more than a hundred thousand people were sent between the 16th and 19th century yet less than a dozen thousand lived there at the turn of the century), that means that you need modern medicine as well as an authoritarian government to bring massive investment and push people to the colonies.

The colonial policies in the early 20th century was fairly consistent and didn’t change too much despite the regime changes, your best bet is to have Portugal be scared of South African/English/german takeover of colonies and starting to settle them in the 1910s/1920s, Irl about 800k Portuguese left between 1900 and 1918, and an additional 600k during the 20 next years, the vast majority in both cases to Brazil, make Brazil less attractive and make Portugal push hard to make the colonies attractive and you may maybe send half there? The majority would still go to other American country.

After WW2 nearly 2 millions people emigrated , about half of that to France, if you already have infrastrucutre and are Willing to subsidise the trip, maybe you could send more than half of these to the colonies, in addition to the 800k of IRL, all things considered you could get 3 millions or so portuguese people by 1975 in the colonies, you gotta spend more in education to actually make them useful and make them keep their job and stay once the colonial ressource boom stops. I guess you could try to bring Eastern European in te early 20th venture and in the late 20th century Latin American and Eastern European to boost that to maybe what, 5 millions or so by 2000?

That’s not enough to keep the colonies but some small states in southern Mozambique or coastal Angola could be kept or made independant depending on the status of the Cold War and decolonisation.

As for the other way around a main problem was that Portugal didn’t care much about educating a colonial native elite, while one of the side effect was to slightly delay calls for indépendance, that also reduces link between the native population and the mainland and makes large scale immigration of African To Portugal before the late 20th century hard, after it depends on the immigration policies of the governments.

It would be interesting to see significant inter colonies migration (post loss of Brazil) , the only I know of are a few dozen thousands goans to Mozambique and Cape Verdean to angola, could be fun to have hundred of thousands of Goan in Mozambique, or a large African populaiton in Macau or goa.

If you really want hue population transfer you gotta make Brazil keep the Portuguese empire (maybe with Portugal itself too!), the African colonies had only a few million people before the demographic transition, between rebellion, famines and natural disaster in Brazil it’s easy to flood Angola with Brazilians, possibly making it majority mixed race by today. That is of course pre 1900
 
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Rather than just sending Portuguese colonists to it's African colonies. Could Estado Novo adopt a policy of massive population transfer between the various colonies and Portugal as a way of integrating the empire as part of Pluricontinentalism and Lusotropicalism.

How many people could be moved around the Portuguese empire .

What would be the impact on Portugal colonial wars and the aftermath

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lusotropicalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluricontinentalism
Would never happen. There where lots of whites moving away from Portugal looking for a way out of poverty, but they went to Venezuela, Brazil and France seeking a conventional life.
And Estado Novo would't want to bring large numbers of blacks to Portugal. At best, it would be possible to divert some of the emigration flow by offering incentives, but the scale would be limited.
The passion for Africa was always a minority thing in Portugal. Sometimes an influential minority, but never something to generate a mass movement.
 
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A France that was relatively populous and wealthy, and that did try at times to integrate its colonies with the Metropole, ended up abandoning the project as costly and with unwelcome political implications. I cannot see a smaller and poorer Portugal having more success.

If you wanted this to work, you would probably need some sort of South Atlantic Lusophone monarchy including Brazil. Even then, the intermixing would probably extend only to promoting white settlement in Africa, not the other way around.
 

Lusitania

Donor
You really need to start early building up the infrastructure and industry in Portugal then industry in the overseas provinces (colonies).

Now you point of moving 6 million people, why that number?

As for Estado Novo you need Salazar out of power ASAP otherwise you continue with his philosophy of uneducated masses governed by elite group of people.

I looked at that issue and developed a TL (see signature) about such an scenario although numbers not same. You need development, industry, education and opportunity in both Portugal and colonies to keep the Portuguese at home or to migrate within the country. Lastly you need a Federation to keep it all together otherwise colonies go same way as South Africa, Australia and so forth.
 
Loving this thread, I think this is a very interesting discussion
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