The book is the first comprehensive study of race relations in Angola. It covers the entire five-century-long relationship between the peoples of Angola and Portugal. Portuguese imperial thinkers asserted that they were unique among European colonizers in their ability to establish and maintain egalitarian and non-discriminatory relationships with tropical peoples. This concept was elevated to a philosophical plateau and given the name Lusotropicalism. Propagated with fervor by Portuguese colonial thinkers, Lusotropical doctrines were widely accepted as being valid by twentieth-century diplomats and political thinkers in both Europe and the United States, many of whom believed that Portuguese colonialism in Africa would continue indefinitely. The evidence presented in this work indicates that Portuguese rule in Angola was deeply racist. This conclusion is based on a considerable body of data gleaned from archival sources, personal collections, and systematic interviewing of racially diverse Angolans and Portuguese functionaries in the colonial administration and the private sector. Special emphasis is placed on devices that the Portuguese used to delude themselves and others about the realities of their attitudes and behavior as ruling elites. The study concludes with an assessment of the impact of Lusotropical myths on independent Angola.

This history by celebrated Africanist David Birmingham begins in 1820 with the Portuguese attempt to create a third, African, empire after the virtual loss of Asia and America. In the nineteenth century the most valuable resource extracted from Angola was agricultural labor, first as privately owned slaves and later as conscript workers. The colony was managed by a few marine officers, by several hundred white political convicts, and by a couple of thousand black Angolans who had adopted Portuguese language and culture. The hub was the harbor city of Luanda which grew in the twentieth century to be a dynamic metropolis of several million people. The export of labor was gradually replaced when an agrarian revolution enabled white Portuguese immigrants to drive black Angolan laborers to produce sugar cane, cotton, maize and above all coffee. During the twentieth century Congo copper supplemented this wealth, by gem-quality diamonds, and by offshore oil. Although much of the countryside retained its dollar-a-day peasant economy, new wealth generated conflict which pitted white against black, north against south, coast against highland, American allies against Russian allies. The generation of warfare finally ended in 2002 when national reconstruction could begin on Portuguese colonial foundations.

The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670 brings together a collection of documents - all in new English translation - that illustrate aspects of the encounters between the Portuguese and the peoples of North and West Africa in the period from 1400 to 1650. This period witnessed the diaspora of the Sephardic Jews, the emigration of Portuguese to West Africa and the islands, and the beginnings of the black diaspora associated with the slave trade. The documents show how the Portuguese tried to understand the societies with which they came into contact and to reconcile their experience with the myths and legends inherited from classical and medieval learning. They also show how Africans reacted to the coming of Europeans, adapting Christian ideas to local beliefs and making use of exotic imports and European technologies. The documents also describe the evolution of the black Portuguese communities in Guinea and the islands, as well as the slave trade and the way that it was organized, understood, and justified.

Three lectures given at the University of Virginia in November, 1962.