INTRODUCTION TO A SPECIAL ISSUE ON THE ECONOMIC HISTORY OF PORTUGAL

Abstract

Until the mid-1980s, Portuguese economic history existed in relative isolation from the main international currents. A relationship did exist with the French literature of the Annales school, which had influenced Vitorino Magalhães Godinho and others. And historians such as Borges Macedo or Oliveira Marques were aware of some of the international trends. But in the research being produced in Portugal, a comparative and quantitative approach, firmly rooted in the notion of the counterfactual, was altogether missing from the literature. This picture was about to change abruptly with the appearance of a modern classic, Reis (1984). From then onwards, the modern Anglophone approach to economic history has become more frequent in Portugal, though it has never become dominant relatively to the exclusively narrative, descriptive approach of traditional historians. Portugal’s much improved quality of research infrastructure, including university libraries and archives over the last four decades, has led to much easier access to (and interaction with) international scholarship. Together with freedom from censorship since the implementation of democracy and the later appearance of the internet, these developments have led to noticeable improvements in the quality of the research produced. Most of Portugal’s historians are still very much rooted in Portuguese institutions, and studying economic history outside the country is still the exception rather than the norm, but a generation of doctoral students at the European University Institute and elsewhere has focused on Portugal in a comparative perspective, and many of them now teach in Portugal. All of these developments have led to a noticeable methodological improvement in the type of papers that are written, as well as a more nuanced understanding of Portugal’s history, as a result of having a much more comparative outlook than used to be the case. This monographic issue is representative of the best work done in recent years, and it shows how much more integrated Portuguese