The word Portugal derives from the Roman-Celtic place name Portus Cale. Around 200 BC, the Romans under general Decimus Brutus took the Iberian Peninsula from the Carthaginians during the Second Punic War, and in the process conquered Cale and renamed it Portus Cale around 136 BC.

The Methuen Commercial Treaty agreed between Portugal and England at the end of 1703 is often singled out as a cause of Portugal’s structural backwardness, but matters are not so straightforward. 

Since the 1300s, there had always been English merchants living in Portugal, and many of them lived in Lisbon, while there were also significant communities at other times in Porto, for example, and in Faro.  The community based in Lisbon was called a Factory, meaning not a manufacturing plant but a trading association.

In absolutely opposed ideological camps, Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz and Francisco Franco Bahamonde had something else which brought them closer.  Not their common Galician roots, but ancient traumas lived through by both Spain and Cuba.

Below, is an edited version of a book review recently published in LBR.  It seems to me to encompass all of the ills of our current global food systems, and to indicate how and where these systems came into being.  I thought that it is such a powerful argument, and so close to home, that I should share it with others who may be interested in history.

Essays tell stories of different subjects. Basically, historical essays are very much popular among people. Thus, writing a historical essay is not always that easy that we tend to think. This is why people engaged in writing historical essays look for free samples on the internet and other areas. Mostly, the historical essay samples speak about the different facts and figures of historical events.

I take the bi-monthly issues of two Portuguese magazines devoted to history.  One is called Visão História, and the other Journal de Notícias História. Below is an opinion piece by José Pedro Teixeira Fernandes, published in the August issue of Journal de Notícias História.

As I translated the piece below by José Pedro Teixeira Fernandes in the June issue of Journal das Notícias História, I was also reading the novel by Dorothy L Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh with the title Thrones, Dominations. An unusual title for a detective story, which is also in some respects a historical novel, since DLS died in 1957, and JPW finished her novel in 1998.