After the military coup of 1926, and during the Salazar dictatorship, there were dozens of prisons in Portugal and its Overseas Provinces dedicated to the incarceration of political prisoners. The most famous is the purpose built prison camp at Tarrafal in Cabo Verde.
The Romans in Portugal - Province of Hispania Ulterior, then Lusitania. The first Roman invasion of the Iberian Peninsula occurred in 219 BC. Within 200 years, almost the entire peninsula had been annexed to the Roman Republic, starting the Romanization of Hispania.
Carthage & Portugal - Phoenician City-State in Tunisia. An ancient Phoenician city-state and civilization located in present-day Tunisia. Carthage was founded around 814 BC as a colony of Tyre, it was one of the richest and most powerful cities in antiquity, and the centre of a major commercial and maritime empire that dominated the western Mediterranean until the mid third century BC.
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.
