1
Understanding emigration
The history of all human communities is marked by the interaction of two apparently conflicting tendencies: the desire to remain securely in a single place and the desire to move in search of a more favourable environment and enhanced opportunities in life; in other words, the passion to put down roots and the passion to move to pastures new. As this book will demonstrate, these are not conflicting tendencies at all but aspects of human society that are complementary and mutually supporting.
At one time the term ‘diaspora’ was largely reserved for the story of the dispersal of the Jews, but it is now much more widely used. There are countless examples of individuals and whole communities dispersing over great distances, under various political, social and economic pressures, who continue to maintain a cultural identity rooted in the idea of a homeland or place of origin: the various Völkerwanderungen which dispersed Asian populations eastwards across the land bridge of the Bering Strait throughout the American continents or by sea through the Pacific Islands; the movement of Central Asian peoples westwards through the steppes to Russia, Poland and western Europe; the spread of Greeks throughout the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions; the dispersal of Scandinavians throughout the North Atlantic and down the rivers of Russia; the migration of the Indian caste that came to form the distinctive Roma communities of Europe. The list is endless. With these migrations, languages, religions, social customs and economic practices were widely disseminated, merged with other cultures and evolved in a constant process of ‘creolisation’. Most migrants do not seek to return to the place from which they migrated and are quickly assimilated into the communities where they settle. However, some migrating groups retain a strong attachment to a homeland, real or imagined, or seek to retain an identity, a cultural separateness, which keeps them from being fully absorbed into the society within which they are living. These communities are true diasporas.
In many cases lack of evidence means that the reasons for migrations, which were sometimes movements of individuals or small groups and sometimes of large communities, are little understood. Although it is self-evident that many people migrate in order to better their condition in some way, such a general assertion needs a greater degree of focus before it can mean very much. Migrations, for example, are not always voluntary and can arise from the forcible expulsion of individuals or groups from their place of settlement for political or cultural reasons or because of economic pressures (poverty, unemployment, land shortage, climate change, over-population). The exile of convicts, contract labour, slavery and the slave trade are also forms of migration—forced migration clearly, but frequently leading to the establishment of long-lived diasporic communities.
Voluntary migrations may be what are now called trade diasporas (traders who travel and settle outside their homeland in the pursuit of commercial opportunity). In a recent, highly acclaimed book on the slave trade, Toby Green uses the term diaspora to apply to ‘trading communities characterized by the ability to retain distinctive original cultural features and [which] also adopt traits of the host culture’.1 Migrations may also be migrations of elites (military leaders and soldiers of fortune, scions of ruling families seeking to establish new communities over which to rule) or migrations of members of the educated classes (scholars, sharifs, missionaries, artists and literati). Pilgrimages are a form of migration, the pilgrim leaving home in search of some spiritual destination. In the imagination of religious writers the whole of life becomes a pilgrimage, a migration from a point of origin to a distant goal of spiritual fulfilment. Many migrations share more than one of the above characteristics, and in most cases there are ‘pull’ factors as well as ‘push’ factors—certain destinations exert an attraction, which may exist only in the imagination, but which nevertheless provide a powerful incentive for people to move who might otherwise not have done so.
Migrations, therefore, whether of individuals or whole groups, usually present a complex mixture of motives, causes and historical contingencies. Recent studies have emphasised just how complex migrations can be. The commonest form of migration is internal migration, from one part of a country to another or from the countryside to the town—the history of almost all large towns is one of in-migration of very diverse groups from the surrounding rural areas or from further afield. William McNeill has stressed the importance of the high mortality in towns, which created a kind of demographic vacuum that sucked in population from rural areas.2 Some migrations were only seasonal with regular return to the point of origin. Others were staged (single males who would later be joined by other family members). Then there were chain migrations and networks which linked people from extended families or neighbourhoods in migratory movements which, without such linkages, might never have taken place. It is no coincidence that many of the adventurers who enlisted with Pizarro for his expedition to Peru were from his own home town of Trujillo. There can also be onward migrations as people from migrant communities move on from their original first port of call to further destinations or decide to return to their original homeland. As the means of travel have become easier, so the to and fro of migration has become ever more complex. Recently the ‘grey’ migration of retired people heading for retirement locations in Florida or the Mediterranean has acquired the kind of volume typical of earlier migratory movements.
On the other hand, the ties which have bound people to a homeland and settled community have always been strong—some human communities revealing through their DNA an identity with a single place stretching back hundreds, even thousands, of years. Among the factors that attach communities to specific locations are the belief in the religious significance of special places (tombs of ancestors, religious shrines); the control of economic resources (land, water, minerals, rights over hunting and gathering); the importance of a support network of kin and community for survival; common language and customs; strong cultural identification with a particular environment; real or perceived difficulties presented by any move, and simple inertia. In the case of true diasporas, a community may move or be displaced from its homeland but retain a deep attachment to the land, community and place which they have left behind. There will often be an attempt to recreate the homeland in the new place of settlement. James Sweet even entitled his study of the slave community in Brazil Recreating Africa.3
There are further issues that need clarification. Human migrations, it has been claimed, cannot be understood in general terms that are applicable to all eras of human history, but have to be seen as the result of specific circumstances related to specific times and places. Recent mass migrations, for example, cannot be explained by looking at historic patterns of migration but have to be placed in the context of the development of global capitalism. As Miriam Halpern Pereira put it,
although a phenomenon of ancient origin, [migration] came to acquire in the course of the nineteenth century new characteristics: it ceased to be predominantly integrated into an imperial project and became the result of distortions in the development of dependence capitalism.4
Joel Serrão made the same point when he wrote, ‘it is becoming more clear, at least in our view, that the emigrations which took place in the socio-economic context of the Ancien Régime are structurally different … from those which have taken place in the context of contemporary industrial capitalism’.5 A strong case can be made for this distinction, but it requires that powerful elements of continuity between the different periods be discounted. Moreover, it is saying little more than that history never repeats itself exactly, despite the underlying structures that exist over the longue durée, just as no two landscapes are exactly similar despite the underlying similarities of their geology. Looking at six centuries of Portuguese migration, it is the similarities not the differences in the processes of emigration and the experiences of the emigrants that are most striking.
One reason for migrations, forced or otherwise, has always been the requirements of the global labour market and the imbalance in regional economies. For some economists this is reason enough. Before the sixteenth century most movements of labour were probably fairly small-scale: seasonal labour at harvest time, the use of slaves in domestic service, in mining, agriculture or the rowing of galleys. However, the sixteenth century saw the beginning of what grew into a transfer of very large numbers of human beings to satisfy a large and rapidly growing demand for labour. It was the development of plantation agriculture, first in the Atlantic islands and then in the New World, which required labour in unprecedented quantities. The demand was met in two ways: by the use of various bureaucratic measures to engage the poor or criminal classes in forms of time-limited apprenticeship, and the purchase of African slaves. In the nineteenth century slavery was gradually replaced by a return to the idea of time-limited work contracts for the poor. Most of this demand was met from India and China, but thousands of poor Europeans, among them many Portuguese, were also contracted in this way.
In the twentieth century contracted labour was largely replaced by freeing up the movement of voluntary labour, making it easy for people from underdeveloped economies to migrate to meet the demands of the developed world. There is no sign of such transfers coming to an end or even slowing. In the twenty-first century there is still a massive demand for labour in agriculture and construction, while the megacities of the world employ armies of cleaners, caterers and maintenance staff. Stand and look out over the cityscapes of London, Chicago, Dubai or Shanghai and ask, who cleans all these buildings, disposes of the rubbish, builds the skyscrapers and provides the food and services? The answer is a vast multitude of usually low-paid workers, mostly immigrants from poorer countries. These migrants are nearly invisible to the citizens and bureaucrats. They live and work beneath the radar of the law and the social services. They are not exactly slaves but they are removed only halfway from slavery. They usually have no rights and often no legal status or protection. They do not even have the advantage, which some contracted workers had in the past, of being able to look forward to the end of their servitude with a paid return passage or the right to settle and own land.
To understand modern mass migration it is always necessary to see how it fits into the demands for labour and the cycles of the world’s economy. Even so, migration cannot be understood by abstract economic principles alone. Networks and chain migration are still important. Traditional areas of migration still count for more than simple demand in the labour market. Affinity of language between migrants and the host countries can be of crucial importance. Migration still remains an individual decision related to an individual’s circumstances.6
Joel Serrão also makes a distinction between ‘colonisation’ and ‘emigration’. The colonist, he says, is acting ‘due to the initiative of the state or is integrated in some project within the national ambit’; the emigrant ‘abandons his country exclusively for personal motives’.7 This was an important distinction for those who sought to control and direct emigration, as the Portuguese governments frequently tried to do. In the eyes of the governing elite there were good and bad migrants, just as there were deserving and undeserving poor. However, when the causes and effects of migration are viewed in the long term, the colonist and the emigrant are frequently one and the same person. Nevertheless the recent history of European colonisation and decolonisation has, in many respects, added a new dimension to the story of emigration. The rapid expansion of European empires in the nineteenth century was accompanied by a great increase in the numbers of elite emigrants (colonial administrators, technicians, soldiers, teachers, scientific researchers) who had a profound cultural impact on the societies where they operated; but the equally rapid dismantling of these empires did not involve just repatriating these migrants. As John Darwin has pointed out, decolonisation had unexpected consequences in the great influx into the metropoles of peoples from the former empires who made full use of the networks that imperial rule had established and who were often slow to integrate with the host society.
If decolonisation had necessitated the fashioning of new national identities, it had also encouraged the cultural expression of innumerable ‘subnational’ ones. This cultural expression had to be portable; that is, it had to be accessible and comprehensible to outsiders—whether local or international—if the economic and political claims it embodied were to stand any chance…. Hence, vast numbers of people previously equipped only with a highly localised culture … quickly acquired the basic techniques of preserving a distinct cultural identity in an alien environment….8
An important distinction is usually made between diasporas and other types of migration by focusing on the explicit desire of the diasporic community to retain ties with the real or imagined homeland and to preserve identities which create links with other diasporic communities. This characteristic can vary from the celebration of loose cultural identities to a desire to maintain a wholly separate, ghetto existence within the host society. This attachment of diasporic communities to a homeland, or the idea of a homeland, is sometimes expressed as a conscious desire to return: Jews still utter the words ‘next year in Jerusalem’ at the end of every Passover Seder; and in many cases the idea that one day you will return can help to assuage a number of psychological problems encountered in the process of migration and be the factor that reconciles the conflicting tendencies of wanting to remain rooted with the desire to better oneself by moving away.
However, by no means all diasporic communities actively seek a physical return to the homeland; rather more common is the attempt to recreate an idealised version of the homeland in the place where they have settled. This is particularly the case with elite emigrants who have aspired to form new polities which recreate their homeland and reassert its values. To illustrate this one might consider the Viking chieftains who settled in Iceland and Greenland, the Crusader lords who carved out kingdoms and counties in the Middle East, or the Islamic ‘Swahili’ elites in eastern Africa where over a period of many hundreds of years leading members of ruling families migrated to found new towns and settlements where they sought to recreate the traditional Islamic community they had left.
In contrast to the tendency of some diasporic communities to maintain distinct identities defined by the idea of a cultural homeland, it has been maintained that communities of migrants almost always undergo some form of creolisation; that is, they absorb elements of the culture of the host country without becoming totally absorbed by it. Sometimes this adoption of elements of the host culture is merely a device to enable the individual to operate successfully in the host society; sometimes it is a stage on the way to total absorption, as so often happened with emigrants to the United States. However, creolisation may also be the birth of a new ethnic identity. The study of creolisation is sometimes very narrowly focused on a few self-styled ‘creole’ societies who speak ‘creole’ languages, but creolisation itself is much more common in human history. It is the process by which all cultures grow and change—the English language, for example, is the result of a process of creolisation which merged Celtic, Latin and Germanic elements into a new language. Portuguese and Spanish are creolised forms of Latin, while Swahili is also a creole language derived from Arabic and Bantu elements. What is true of languages is also true of cultures, which are never static and evolve through interaction between groups. From this perspective, métissage is not the result of crossing distinct cultures but part of what is a very fluid process of interaction and change that is constantly taking place in all societies.
In the twenty-first century the demands of global capitalism, the ready flow of information and the relative ease of travel have turned migration into a massive phenomenon. Sometimes it seems as if the whole world is on the move, meeting the demands of a global labour market or seeking the grass that is always perceived as being greener across the sea. Virtually every ethnic group now has its diasporic community, and the ideological fictions that still attempt to confine ethnic groups to defined national territories are every year more difficult to defend.
In the twenty-first century there remains the assumption, stridently voiced in some political quarters, that it is somehow natural for people of a single ethnicity to inhabit a nation state and that this normal condition of society is threatened by the existence of diasporic communities. The assumption that nations inhabiting national territories were somehow a norm which has been undermined by globalisation, and that nation states represent some golden age ideal to which we all struggle to return, is totally to misunderstand history. The idea of the nation inhabiting a nation state was employed in comparatively recent times to legitimise certain power structures and deny legitimacy to others. Linda Colley, for example, has eloquently demonstrated just how recent a construct the idea of being ‘British’ really is.9 Before the nineteenth century people were more flexible in their loyalties and identities and moved about with greater readiness than this view of history will permit. The large multi-ethnic states of the past, like the Mongol khanates, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire or the Russian Empire always contained, on an extensive scale, what today would be called diasporas: Venetian communities were established in China under the Mongol khans, Tatar and German communities were to be found throughout imperial Russia, Greeks and Armenians had their own quarters in most Ottoman cities. In all these cases ethnic communities, while taking advantage of the relative freedom of movement within the overarching imperial state, retained a strong identity with their cultural homeland and sometimes negotiated separate privileges for themselves from the rulers. Edward Shils has argued that such multi-ethnic states are only possible if the ethnic minorities are content to remain somewhat detached from the centre and do not challenge the culture or power structure of the dominant elite.10
In many ways, therefore, the global migrations of the twenty-first century mark a return to a past when multi-ethnic, not national states were the norm, a past which historians and politicians embedded in the nationalist traditions are so reluctant to recognise. For this reason the study of diasporas should suggest ways in which the twenty-first century might think more positively about the immigrant communities brought about by globalisation. It has been pointed out that, although the separate identities that diasporic communities seek to maintain in their host country can lead to conflict and even to ‘ethnic cleansing’, the opposite can also be true. ‘The strategy of being different to be equal or being special to belong has predominated in societies where cultural diversity is not only a valued feature but also a central characteristic of the social structure.’11
Yet it is one of the ironies of history that the diasporic communities tend to cultivate nationalist sentiment as much if not more than their compatriots who remain behind in the homeland. Ethnic or national consciousness is often essential for the cohesion of the diasporic community and for the preservation of its identity. Moreover the nationalism which it asserts is often an idealised construct built on distant and increasingly fictitious memories. This can make the diasporic communities appear conservative and out of touch with the social and cultural change that has been taking place in the homeland. It is a commonplace that English expatriate communities often were, and still are, the last guardians of an imagined English society and outdated English values that in England itself are long gone. The profound disillusionment of emigrants who return to the homeland they have idealised is, after all, a very common experience.
Characteristics of the Portuguese diaspora
Portuguese emigration, which first assumed a large dimension in the fifteenth century, was the earliest major migration of western European people beyond their own continent and beyond the Mediterranean basin. Many of those who left their Portuguese homeland over the course of the next six centuries were migrants who became absorbed into other communities, but others sought either to create a new Portugal overseas or held on to a Portuguese identity which set them apart from their host community. There are twists and turns in this story which make it exceptionally complex and difficult fully to describe.12 Below are set out some of the characteristics that distinguish Portuguese emigration, none of them in themselves unique but, taken together, forming a remarkable story which is perhaps without parallel in history.
First, the migrations of the Portuguese were not concentrated in one short period but were continuous over six hundred years—the complaints of sixteenth-century writers that Portugal was being depopulated were echoed in exactly the same terms by writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the fifteenth century Portuguese peopled the islands of the Atlantic; in the sixteenth century possibly as many as a quarter of a million Portuguese endured the harrowing journey to India; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries emigrant Portuguese settled Brazil, sometimes in such numbers that the Crown sought to control the outflow; in the nineteenth century tens of thousands left for the USA, the Caribbean and Brazil, reaching a peak in 1910–11; in the twentieth century emigrants left not in their thousands but in their hundreds of thousands for France, Germany and Switzerland but also for Canada, Venezuela, Argentina, Australia and South Africa. And in the twenty-first century emigration has begun once again, this time to Africa. Over the centuries the idea of emigration has become deeply embedded in Portuguese culture and the reality has profoundly influenced the political economy of Portugal itself.
Second, Portuguese emigration provides examples of all the main types of migrants and migrations. There were forced migrants—individual convicts, orphans and political exiles as well as whole groups like Jews, gypsies and black slaves; there were poverty-stricken and landless peasant families driven by economic hardship to seek to better their lives by seasonal migrations or by leaving permanently for distant lands; there were merchants who settled outside Portugal to carry on their business and members of the nobility—the military and political elite—who sought lucrative official positions in the empire or seigneurial landholdings in the colonies to maintain their status. There was also a steady emigration of the intelligentsia: missionaries bound for the East or South America and scholars and churchmen seeking preferment, appointments or patrons in other European states. The Portuguese who made their careers in foreign courts, salons and universities or who practised their professions abroad have a name. They are the estrangeirados who are to be found in most European countries from the sixteenth century to the present, among their descendants some of the greatest figures of western European civilisation, for Baruch Spinoza, Diego Velázquez and Benjamin Disraeli all descended from Portuguese living in exile from their homeland. Nor should one forget the soldiers of fortune heading for glory and wealth wherever there was war and the large number of women who left to join their husbands and families who had already left the homeland. It was the coming together of these very different elements that enabled the migrants to attempt to recreate a Portuguese homeland in so many parts of the world.
Third has been the fact that the migration of Portuguese has not consisted only of men and women departing from Portugal itself. The Portuguese communities established overseas have themselves generated further migrations. After the first wave of Portuguese emigrants had settled in the Atlantic islands, fresh migrations took place from these island homelands. Some left to search for other islands in the Atlantic, while others, intent on trade, left the sovereign territory of the Portuguese Crown and formed trading communities along the West African coast. This process would continue in the East where Portuguese left the officially established Portuguese cities of Goa or Malacca to migrate to new lands in South-East Asia, Bengal or the China Sea, or to seek their fortunes among the indigenous populations as traders, mercenaries, pirates or missionaries. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this process continued as migrants in increasing numbers left Goa to find careers in British India and East Africa, while Macaonese and Timorese, who held Portuguese nationality, went to Australia and Portuguese from Mozambique moved to South Africa. Meanwhile many Portuguese who had settled in Hawaii and Trinidad relocated to California and Illinois. The Portuguese story is not therefore one of departure from a single homeland, it is also the story of the dispersal of the emigrant communities themselves. Individual Portuguese, particularly in the early days, have been highly mobile. The Portuguese world was essentially, although not exclusively, a maritime one in which the coastal settlements from Brazil to China were connected by a network of sea routes. Along these pathways individual Portuguese would move in surprisingly varied ways, and the viability of this maritime empire depended on the facility with which people could move within it. John Russell-Wood called his study of the Portuguese empire A World on the Move to emphasise that the Portuguese who left their homeland were essentially a mobile migrant people.13
Fourth, in the 1490s the expulsion of Jews and their descendants from the Iberian peninsula began. Initially the policy had been to put pressure on the Jews to convert to Christianity, but those who did convert and came to form the converso (in Portugal called ‘New Christian’) communities were soon seen as a Judaic fifth column within society. The Inquisition was established in Spain and later in Portugal to ensure their orthodoxy. Castile began the expulsion of unconverted Jews in a systematic way in 1492, and three years later Portugal was persuaded also to implement laws enforcing conversion or expulsion. Large numbers of Jews took the opportunity to emigrate—forced migrants who resettled initially around the shores of the Mediterranean and subsequently in northern Europe, western Africa and the New World. Over the next three centuries persecution of the ‘New Christians’, descendants of Jews who had converted, continued. These persecutions, sporadic as they were, nevertheless ensured that there was a steady and continuing emigration of ‘New Christians’ to join Jewish and converso communities outside Portugal, in the process forming the Sephardic branch of Judaism. The Jewish and New Christian diaspora never wholly merged with that of the other streams of Portuguese migrants though the two streams often ran through the same bed, mixing their waters along the way to such an extent that in the eyes of many host states no distinction was made between ‘Portuguese’, Jew or New Christian.
The dispersal of the Sephardic Jews must be considered a forced emigration, though many left voluntarily and once departed from Portugal were able to move freely to find a congenial community in which to settle. The same, however, could not be said for the third stream of migration which also began in the fifteenth century and merged with the other two to create new Portuguese communities throughout the Atlantic world. The slave trade from Africa was always a form of forced migration, though the settlements that resulted from it often assumed the status of free Portuguese communities. In the fifteenth century the Portuguese labour market was not elastic enough nor was the demographic surplus sufficient to secure the effective occupation of the newly discovered islands. So the Portuguese developed a slave trade to supplement the labour force at home and to provide additional labour resources for the island settlements. By the middle of the sixteenth century slaves brought into the Portuguese settlements were equalling and possibly exceeding the numbers of Christian and New Christian Portuguese, and slaves were also being landed in Portugal to replace the Portuguese who were leaving. It has been estimated that by the middle of the sixteenth century nearly 10 per cent of the population of Lisbon may have been slaves. The emigration of Portuguese was being matched by the immigration of Africans—a two-way movement of population, similar to that of the late twentieth century when Cape Verdeans were encouraged to come to Portugal to replace the large numbers of emigrants departing for northern Europe. The slaves supplied the labour needed by the Portuguese economy and by the new settlements overseas, but they also provided women to complement what was largely a male Portuguese migration. In this way the forced migration of African slaves merged with the Portuguese Christian and New Christian diasporas, and through their mulatto offspring the slave women gave rise to the free black Portuguese communities which grew up in the islands, along the African coast and in Brazil.
If these factors made the tapestry of the worldwide Portuguese diaspora a complex one, further complication was provided by the assimilation into the Portuguese communities of people who were not slaves and who had no direct link with a Portuguese homeland. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, although national consciousness certainly existed enabling people to describe themselves as ‘English’ or ‘Portuguese’, people were first and foremost subjects of their overlords rather than citizens of a nation state. People of different ethnic origin who spoke different languages could find themselves subjects of the same monarch. As Portuguese expansion unfolded, first in the Atlantic and West Africa and then in Brazil and maritime Asia, very many people who had no personal or family origin in Portugal became subject to the Portuguese Crown, beginning with the French, Genoese and Flemish who helped people the Atlantic islands. In Africa, Asia and America many thousands, and eventually millions, of people acquired a Portuguese allegiance either directly through living in a Portuguese settlement or indirectly through becoming subject to the padroado real—the royal patronage over the church in the eastern half of the world—granted by the Papacy to the Portuguese Crown. The communities of the Portuguese diaspora also acquired clients, servants, wives and workers from local communities. Through adoption of the Christian religion and the use of the Portuguese language these groups became ‘Lusitanised’, adopting Portuguese names, religious practices, dress and other cultural symbols. Many of these people and their descendants in time identified themselves, or became identified by others, as ‘Portuguese’. Moreover this process was not always limited to the lower orders of society and in many locations in Asia individuals from elite families assumed a Lusitanian identity. This Portuguese identity often involved a high degree of local adaptation which departed ever further from a recognised European norm. Stefan Halikowski-Smith has commented on the ‘Portuguese’ of Ayutthaya who ‘appropriated certain items of Portuguese dress such as hats whilst neglecting others such as shoes’.14
Although emigrant Portuguese clung to their Portuguese identity, this did not prevent their Portuguese culture being radically altered by close association with slaves and with peoples native to the areas where they settled. The hybrid cultures that evolved can legitimately be called ‘creole’, and their most striking features were the Portuguese creole languages which evolved in Asia and in the Atlantic where they still flourish in the Cape Verde and Gulf of Guinea islands and in Guinea-Bissau. The thesis advanced by Toby Green is that creolisation was inextricably linked to the diaspora of Jews and New Christians—‘the lançados [Portuguese settled in West Africa] were only able to operate with such success because of their cultural pre-disposition towards flexibility, which was a result of their New Christian origins and the recent history of the New Christians in Portugal’.15 Elsewhere he suggests that ‘Old Christians [had] an increasingly inflexible ideological outlook in which “intermarriage” was a positive slur on one’s limpeza’ which they were ‘less able to countenance than New Christians’.16 Whatever may have been the case in western Africa, this alleged reluctance of the Old Christians to countenance intermarriage was self-evidently not the case in the rest of the world where the willingness of Portuguese of all classes to marry or cohabit with local women began the process of creolisation wherever the Portuguese settled in the world.
There were also cases where a Portuguese creole culture took root in societies that were not under Portuguese rule at all and where Portuguese immigrants were few. The most notable example of this was the kingdom of Kongo in West Africa where the Mwissikongo aristocracy adopted Christianity along with Portuguese titles, names, styles of dress and material culture. This Kongolese elite can hardly be considered part of the Portuguese diaspora, but the creole culture that evolved in Kongo possessed many similarities with the creole cultures that evolved in areas of Portuguese settlement.
The establishment of Portuguese communities so widely dispersed across the world would not have been possible without an institutional cement to bind them to one another and to the homeland of Portugal from which they derived their identity, even if only at many times removed. This strong institutional underpinning is a marked characteristic of the Portuguese diaspora. The Catholic church has probably been the strongest bond tying together so many far-flung communities, and in many ways the Catholic church has been a national church for the Portuguese since Papal Bulls in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries conferred on Portugal special rights over the church in Africa and Asia—rights which included making church appointments, regulating missions, authorising regional church councils and collecting ecclesiastical taxes. These rights covered all Christians and not just the immediate subjects of the Portuguese Crown. Through the existence of church courts, including the Inquisition which was established in Goa in 1560, this made all Christians subject in their spiritual life and in the organisation of their family and social affairs to the influence, if not always the direct jurisdiction, of the Portuguese Crown.
For Portuguese throughout the world it was not just belonging to the church that bound them together but celebrating specific festivals and venerating specific saints. Although many communities celebrated the protection of their local saints, it was Saint Anthony of Lisbon (and Padua) and Saint Elmo, patron saint of sailors, who were venerated throughout the Portuguese world. The annual feast of Corpus Christi was the highlight of the Christian Year for all Portuguese, while Azorean emigrants took with them wherever they went the special devotion to the Holy Spirit, a devotion which was traced back to the canonised Portuguese queen—Saint Isabel.
The larger cities of the Portuguese empire had a chartered town council—a Senado da Câmara—modelled on that of Lisbon. These councils that governed, among others, the communities of Funchal, Macao, Malacca, Goa, Luanda, São Tomé, Bahia and Rio were similar in their constitutions, their responsibilities and their modus operandi. They, more than any other institution, bound the communities of the Portuguese together into a mutually supporting worldwide community. Each Portuguese community also established religious brotherhoods and a Santa Casa da Misericórdia. The Misericórdia was a highly prestigious organisation, primarily of lay Portuguese, originally founded in Lisbon in 1498 by the dowager queen D. Leonor. It raised money and owned property, the income from which was dedicated to charitable causes—the care of the sick, the burial of the dead, the support or ransom of prisoners, the protection of widows and orphans. The Misericórdias also operated as banks and trustees for the property of orphans, widows or absentees.
Wherever a Portuguese travelled in the world he would find familiar religious brotherhoods and a Misericórdia, and could take part in the annual celebration of Corpus Christi or, in the twentieth century, pay his respects to Our Lady of Fatima. Take, for example, this description of the seasonal migration of Portuguese fishermen to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland.
On 27 May [1955], four thousand Portuguese fishermen, clad in their colourful checkered shirts, walked fifteen to twenty abreast up the hilly streets of St John’s to the Basilica of St John the Baptist, bearing the three-and-one-half-foot-high statue of Our Lady of Fatima, their gift of gratitude and friendship. Our Lady was to be a holy link between the two peoples.… The six thousand men and women who filled the cathedral, along with those who lined the streets, were part of “one of the most colourful, inspiring, and solemn events ever to take place in St John’s”.17
The church has remained important for Portuguese communities throughout the world, with the veneration of Our Lady of Fatima perhaps now more prominent than that of St Anthony or St Elmo. However, as befits a more secular age, the Misericórdias have been replaced by mutual aid societies, which from the nineteenth century have been funded by most Portuguese emigrant communities and which have survived in the better organised communities until the present. At first these were established to provide financial support for poor and struggling migrants, but as the twentieth century advanced and Portuguese communities became financially more stable they were often refounded as cultural organisations. In many diasporic communities there is now to be found a Casa de Portugal, which provides Portuguese language lessons, celebrates festivals, not all of them now religious, arranges visits to Portugal, supports Portuguese folklore and dance or Portuguese bands, and sponsors a range of social and cultural activities. Some of these Casas link with each other through regional conventions. It is not unknown for people with no personal or family ties to Portugal to join such an organisation and in this way to become part of the Portuguese diaspora, just as many Asians and Africans did in the past.18
Emigrant communities are not static. They evolve as the original migrant generation is succeeded by second, third and subsequent generations. The memories of the homeland fade and are replaced by new ideas of what it is to be Portuguese: ‘“Roots” and “Heritage”… become separated from “place”.’19 Frequently it happens that the ‘Portuguese’ community is largely absorbed by the more numerous local indigenous population and the old Portuguese identity lingers on only in Portuguese family names (still common in many parts of Asia), in Catholic observance or in isolated unconnected cultural survivals—faint ghostly remnants of the old diasporic community.
A final characteristic of the Portuguese diaspora has been its role in promoting ‘globalisation’. The migrations of the Portuguese were the first that took a people from their homeland to settle in almost every part of the world (with the exception perhaps of Russia and Central Asia). In the process of creating their settlements in Asia, Africa and the Americas the Portuguese had a profound impact on the way that human communities have interacted in modern times. By the early seventeenth century the Portuguese were operating a global trading network in which silver mined in Spanish America and Japan was being employed as a global currency; and the spices, silks, cottons, drugs and luxury products of Asia were being traded in ever increasing quantities to Europe and the Americas, in the process bringing about a revolution in European tastes and ideas. The Portuguese were also redistributing food crops and animals around the world, taking maize, potatoes and tobacco from the Americas and introducing citrus, grapes, bananas, cattle and horses. A global redistribution of labour saw thousands of slaves moved in Portuguese ships from Africa to the Americas. Meanwhile Portuguese had become an international language of commerce from Japan and the Moluccas to West Africa and South America, while Christianity had become a world religion with a global reach. The Portuguese and Spanish had begun the process of modelling a world order based on European legal concepts and a scientific revolution, which involved the mapping of the world and the scientific description of its geography, its languages and its peoples, had begun. Although the Dutch, French and English were eventually to surpass the Portuguese in promoting this global revolution, the Portuguese were undoubtedly the pioneers who created the parameters within which so much of modern history has been played out.20