ABSTRACT
Study of Portuguese corporatism and its ramifications in its wealthiest colony, Angola, is long over-due. Hitherto, attention has largely focused on the corporatist experiment in Portugal after 1930. But analysis of its application to or implications in the colonies is just beginning to be undertaken. The Portuguese experiment of extending its corporatist model to the empire makes an interesting case of analyzing the adaptation of historic corporatist traditions to the newer institutional requisites to twentieth-century Angola. The twentieth-century Portuguese ideology of state corporatism was a function of the contradictions between metropolitan decline and imperial delusions resulting from Portugal’s dependence on other more industrial political economies. The chapter assesses the successes and failures, coalitions and contradictions of the corporate framework in Angola for the period 1930 to 1960. Metropolitan Portuguese corporatism as advocated by Salazar was nationalist, repudiating foreign institutions as well as rejecting national economic dependency.
