Imperialism of jackals and lions. The fiscal-military state in Portuguese Africa in the British and French African mirror, c. 1850–1940
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1344/rhiihr.44736Keywords:
colonial rule, imperialism, Africa, military history, public finance, satate formationAbstract
We adopt the metaphor of the “jackal” and the “lion” to explore whether variation in geo-political power of metropoles affected fiscal and military capacity building in colonial Africa. Zooming in on Portuguese Africa, we hypothesize that indigenous taxpayers in Angola and Mozambique were forced to invest more in order, security and their own subjugation, as Portugal lacked the wealth, the scale economies, the imperial cross-subsidies and the means of credible deterrence underpinning British and French imperial security policies. We show that military and police force expenditures extracted larger proportions of the colonial budget in Portuguese Africa. The Portuguese African army was also relatively large, relied extensively on forced labour recruitment and remained poorly equipped. While Britain and France supported African colonial armies with substantial metropolitan and imperial subsidies, and Britain also kept far fewer troops on African soil, the conditions of “jackal imperialism” placed greater burdens on long-term colonial state finances.
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