À la rentrée

After my MSc dissertation, in 2013 I began developing the structure for a PhD project that would carry further some of the issues I touched on the relations between scientific endeavour and political building. This project is now titled «Bocage's Africa» with the explanatory sub-title «Empire, Scientific Expertise and Colonial Administration (1865-1895)». I am now almost finishing my first year working on it and I hope to re-engage with the blogging habit. Here I am again.

Between a rock encrusted with oysters and a diplomatic hard place, I am trying to learn more and write on two different aspects of what is going to (hopefully) become my PhD dissertation. On the one hand I want to explore the arterial network of connections between private interests and individual enterprises, and governmental legislation procedures and administration on the subject of the Portuguese colonial territories in Africa. Mainly I am talking about the Chartered Company of Mozambique and how it came to be. Privately owned lands and resources as substitute for state administration is also what happens in the Oyster Question I am now focusing on. More on that soon. The other main topic of my project is scientific expertise and how it is both accumulated and perceived during the period of the Regeneração and specifically regarding African issues of territorial knowledge and appropriation by the elite of scientific men that Barbosa du Bocage was a part of. 

L-J. Soubeiran, “L’ostreiculture à Arcachon”, Bull. Soc. Zool., Ser. 2, T.3. (1886) pp. 1-18, illustration from page 15.

R. Bordalo Pinheiro, "O tratado do Zaire", António Maria (March 13th 1884), page 81.