The land question in early twentieth-century Portuguese legal colonial thought

Abstract

Part of a broader effort to bring the land question to the fore of scholarship about colonial Mozambique, this article looks at how legal colonial thought about land and property, part of the growing body of knowledge about topics of interest to the colonies, developed among Portuguese colonialists in the early twentieth century, especially with regard to African access to land. Different contributions to this thought will be analysed to enquire the role the land question played in the Portuguese colonial project in Africa. The main theories and debates about the land question held in Portugal will then be analysed alongside theories and debates about this same topic within an increasingly internationalized field of colonial thought, in which Portuguese colonialists also took part.