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Administration and Taxation in Former Portuguese Africa: 1900-1945

This book addresses a notable gap in the knowledge of Portuguese colonial administration and the policies implemented in the main territories of its “third” African empire: Angola, Mozambique and Guinea. In recent years, the question of colonial taxation has become a topic in the academic debate on colonial empires and has led to a comparative, long-term focus on its impact in African societies. Given that former Portuguese colonies in Africa have been largely absent from this debate, this book offers new perspectives on taxation and colonial rule, and the first detailed and comprehensive study of fiscal administration. Besides dealing with the economic and financial aspects of empire, the book interprets the social experience of African populations through their interaction with colonial institutions. Based on a thorough and probing qualitative and quantitative analysis of published and unpublished data, it places taxation in a broad social context for the period between the full military control of the territories and the end of WW II. Thus, whilst engaging with ongoing debates on comparative African economic and political history, the book provides a key contribution to research on African social change.


Philip J. Havik received his PhD in Social Sciences from Leiden University, The Netherlands. He is Senior Researcher at the Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical (IHMT), and Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities (FCSH) of the Universidade Nova in Lisbon. His multidisciplinary research centers on public health, tropical medicine, (post-) colonial administration, cultural brokerage, and entrepreneurship, with a special focus on West Africa.

Alexander Keese has a PhD in History from the University of Freiburg, Germany, and a Habilitation from the University of Berne, Switzerland. He is Research Project Director of the project ForcedLabourAfrica (ERC Starting Grant 240898) at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. He has published widely on colonial administration and labour-related issues in Portugal's and France's African empires.

Maciel Santos received his PhD in History from the University of Oporto, Portugal, and is Professor at the Faculty of Letters of Oporto. Currently researcher at the Centro de Estudos Africanos of the Universidade do Porto (CEAUP) and Director of the international journal Africana Studia, edited by the CEAUP, he is the author of several publications on Portuguese colonial history.

"Scholarship on the Portuguese African colonies is sparse and this book makes an important contribution to our knowledge of, in particular, colonial administration and taxation in those colonies. The book highlights the clear lack of data from the Portuguese colonies and notes that much archival work remains to be done. Towards this end the authors have compiled from various archival data sources a description of the nature of taxation and administration in three colonies in Africa: Angola, northern Mozambique, and Portuguese Guinea, from 1900 to 1945. The volume is informative and does well to place the Portuguese colonies in the context of mainly the British and French colonies, but also at times of the Belgian and South African colonies."

Martine Mariotti Australian National University Economic History Review, 69:4 (2016)

"The fact that we have now left the age of easy and retroactive indignation makes this book an original contribution as it plunges into the statistics and archives of the [Portuguese] administration. This approach makes it possible to measure the real importance of taxation over 45 years in three colonial territories, which did not apply a general rule without also implementing necessary local variations. [...] To our knowledge, no other books like this one have been published to date, and if the word 'pioneering' still has meaning to Africanists, it can be used here to describe this work on Portuguese-speaking Africa."

René Pélissier Politique africaine, 145 (2017/1)

“This book [makes] an important contribution to including Portuguese Africa in a wider comparative literature on colonial fiscal policies, and to understanding the ways in which local and global contexts interacted to shape African interactions with the colonial state. Important work remains to be done on colonial expenditures and on the transition of colonial fiscal institutions to independence, to name just two issues. This book provides an important foundation for those future investigations.”
Leigh Gardner
London School of Economics/Stellenbosch University
The Journal of African History 59/1 (2018)

Philip Havik

Alexander Kees

Maciel Santos

Buy This Book

ISBN: 1-4438-7010-2

ISBN13: 978-1-4438-7010-8

Release Date: 16th March 2015

Pages: 255

Price: £47.99

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