The Locusts – British Critics of Portugal before the First World War

The book title comes from Aubrey Bell's Portugal of the Portuguese; (1916): "Since the murder of King Carlos and of the Crown Prince Luis Felipe on the 1st of February 1908 A swarm of writers have descended like locusts on the land" The methodology is to connect a specific group of critics in the years before the First World War to a constellation of general attitudes about Portugal and the Portuguese-speaking world. The primary focus is to explain how the critical context of Portugal's history that incubated The Locusts ;crystalized into the pressure group to free political prisoners. E. M. Tenison, the Secretary of the British Protest Committee, left a unique 200-page unpublished personal memoir. There are no comparative studies in book form. This book problematizes Anglo-Portuguese relations around the concept forwarded by Amilcar Cabral, and others, that Portuguese colonialism was 'the colonialism of the semi-colonized'. It makes a broader contribution to the causes of the First World War in AngloPortugueseGerman relations.