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e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº.1, TD4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026

198

LEGACIES OF PORTUGUESE COLONIAL RULE: POLITICAL VOLATILITY,

WELFARE, AND STATE FORMATION IN MOZAMBIQUE AND GOA (INDIA)

ALISHA DHINGRA

alishadhingra@satyawati.du.ac.in

Assistant Professor at Department of Political Science, Satyawati College, University of Delhi

(India) since January 2020. She has earlier served as Assistant Professor, Department of Political

Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Delhi from 2014 to 2016 and 2017 to 2019. She

has pursued her graduation and post-graduation from Hindu college and Master of Philosophy and

Ph.D. from Department of Political Science, University of Delhi. Her research interests include

Gender Studies, Constitutionalism, Federalism and Rule of Law. She has presented papers in

National and International seminars and workshops and has participated in the Summer University

on Federalism at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland and received diploma on “Federalism,

Decentralization and Conflict Resolution”. Alisha has published more than ten research papers and

three book reviews in reputed national and international journals. She has contributed chapters in

books published by Routledge, Sage, Pearson and Orient Blackswan among others. She was part of

Leverhulme International Research Network Project titled “Continuity and Change in Indian

Federalism” coordinated by Prof. Rekha Saxena, University of Delhi. https://orcid.org/0009-0007-

5664-9342

SAURABH RAI

saurabhrai.du@gmail.com

PhD student in the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi (India). He completed his

undergraduate studies at St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi, and obtained his Master's

degree in Political Science from the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi. His

research focuses on comparative government, federalism, and Indian political thought.

Https://orcid.org/0009-0004-5845-0837

ANANT PRAKASH

anantprakash.kmc@gmail.com

Assistant Professor at Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi (India). Holding a PhD from the

University of Delhi with research on bicameralism in Germany and India, his work focuses on

federalism, political institutions, and public policy. He has participated in prestigious International

academic forums. His scholarly engagements extend to participation in globally renowned

academic programmes, including the EURAC Research Winter School (Italy/Austria), the Summer

University on Federalism at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, Summer University on Good

Governance at University of Passau, Germany and the International Political Science Association

(IPSA) World Congress in Seoul. He is also the Founder and Director of the House of Political

Empowerment (HoPE) Foundation, an initiative dedicated to fostering political literacy,and civic

awareness.In addition to his teaching and research, Dr. Prakash is a frequent contributor to

leading national newspapers and scholarly journals, where he writes extensively on public policy,

political processes, governance, and contemporary socio-political issues. https://orcid.org/0009-

0007-8520-0771

Abstract

Despite of growing body of scholarship on colonial legacies, Portuguese colonialism remains

relatively under-theorized in the field of global comparative colonial studies. Moreover, the

scholarship on colonialism in India has undermined the colonial past of Goa, alongside Daman

and Diu (another Indian state formerly under Portuguese rule). The colonial history of these

states has received limited scholarly attention and is often treated as a peripheral case rather

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 198-219

Legacies of Portuguese Colonial Rule: Political Volatility, Welfare,

and State Formation in Mozambique and Goa (India)

Alisha Dhingra, Saurabh Rai, Anant Prakash

199

than being situated within broader debates on colonial governance and postcolonial state

formation. The research demonstrates the importance of decolonisation in Mozambique and

Goa, through the use of the comparative-historical approach and the concept of contingent path

dependence. Whereas Mozambique's violent decolonisation resulted in a bureaucratic capacity

vacuum associated with decades of political instability, on the other hand Goa's negotiated

integration into India produced comparatively stable institutions, due to the continuity of the

bureaucratic, legal, and educational systems. This divergence in state formation and welfare

provisions is caused by the way in which decolonisation has occurred in these two contexts. The

study does not regard decolonization as a single moment of rupture, but rather as an extended

and uneven process through which postcolonial states reworked and inherited institutions.

Keywords

Portuguese colonialism; comparative colonial legacies; contingent path dependence;

postcolonial state formation; Mozambique; Goa.

Resumo

Apesar do crescente corpo de estudos sobre os legados coloniais, o colonialismo português

continua relativamente pouco teorizado no campo dos estudos coloniais comparativos globais.

Além disso, os estudos sobre o colonialismo na Índia têm negligenciado o passado colonial de

Goa, juntamente com Damão e Diu (outro território indiano anteriormente sob domínio

português). A história colonial desses territórios recebeu atenção acadêmica limitada e é

frequentemente tratada como um caso periférico, em vez de ser situada nos debates mais

amplos sobre a governação colonial e a formação do Estado pós-colonial. O artigo demonstra a

importância da descolonização em Moçambique e Goa, através da utilização da abordagem

histórico-comparativa e do conceito de dependência contingente da trajetória (contingent path

dependence). Enquanto a descolonização violenta de Moçambique resultou num vazio de

capacidade burocrática, associado a décadas de instabilidade política, por outro lado, a

integração negociada de Goa na Índia produziu instituições comparativamente estáveis, devido

à continuidade dos sistemas burocrático, jurídico e educacional. Esta divergência na formação

do Estado e na provisão de bem-estar é causada pela forma como a descolonização ocorreu

nesses dois contextos. O artigo não considera a descolonização como um único momento de

ruptura, mas antes como um processo prolongado e desigual, através do qual os Estados pós-

coloniais reformularam e herdaram instituições.

Palavras-chave

Colonialismo português; legados coloniais comparativos; dependência contingente da

trajetória; formação do Estado pós-colonial; Moçambique; Goa.

How to cite this article

Dhingra, Alisha, Rai, Saurabh & Prakash, Anant (2026). Legacies of Portuguese Colonial Rule:

Political Volatility, Welfare, and State Formation in Mozambique and Goa (India). Janus.net, e-journal

of international relations. Thematic Dossier – Geopolitics of Anxiety: Ideology, Identity, and

(Un)Bordering in Contemporary Europe and Asia, VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD4, October 2026, pp. 198-219.

DOI https://doi.org/10.26619/1647-7251.DT0726.9

Article submitted on 27 July 2026 and accepted on 28 August 2026.

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 198-219

Legacies of Portuguese Colonial Rule: Political Volatility, Welfare,

and State Formation in Mozambique and Goa (India)

Alisha Dhingra, Saurabh Rai, Anant Prakash

200

LEGACIES OF PORTUGUESE COLONIAL RULE: POLITICAL

VOLATILITY, WELFARE, AND STATE FORMATION IN MOZAMBIQUE

AND GOA (INDIA)

ALISHA DHINGRA

SAURABH RAI

ANANT PRAKASH

Introduction

“We base our struggle on the concrete realities of our country. We appreciate the

experiences and achievements of other peoples and we study them. But revolution or

national liberation is like a dress which must fit to each individual's body. Naturally,

there are certain general or universal laws, even scientific laws, for any condition, but

the liberation struggle has to be developed according to the specific conditions of each

country."

Amilcar Cabral (1973, p. 77)

The words of Amílcar Cabral provide a conceptual core premise for understanding the

trajectories of anti-colonial struggles in different parts of the Portuguese empire. Cabral

rejected the idea of a universal model of decolonisation, insisting that all liberation struggle

Declaration of Interest - The authors declare that there are no known financial, professional, or personal conflicts

of interest that could have appeared to influence this research. The authores have no competing interests to

declare.

Acknowledgments - The authors dedicate this study to the memory of Amélia Sanches Araújo (1933–2026),

whose voice became an instrument of liberation. In 1967, she took up a microphone in an improvised studio in

Conakry and helped free two peoples. Her voice continues to resonate far beyond the physical space she once

inhabited, remaining alive in the histories and memories she helped shape. This research was supported by the

University of Macau through Start-Up Grant SRG2024-00008-FAH “Avant-Garde Movements in Non-hegemonic

Portuguese-Speaking Contexts”. The authors gratefully acknowledge this support. Furthermore, the authors

acknowledge the use of Microsoft Copilot in assisting with the formatting of references and the standardization

of source citations in this work.

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 198-219

Legacies of Portuguese Colonial Rule: Political Volatility, Welfare,

and State Formation in Mozambique and Goa (India)

Alisha Dhingra, Saurabh Rai, Anant Prakash

201

must arise from the “concrete realities” of their own country. Although colonial domination

frequently exhibited common patterns of exploitation and hegemony, the forms of

resistance, the strategies adopted by nationalist movements and the character of post-

colonial state formation were heavily conditioned by local historical, social and political

circumstances. A comparative study of former Portuguese colonies therefore demands

attention not only to the common legacy of Portuguese colonialism but also to the different

contexts in which decolonisation occurred. With this point of departure this paper attempts

to understand the legacies of Portuguese colonial rule and in light of it the political

volatility, welfare, and state formation in Mozambique and Goa (India).

Portugal's colonial empire legacies stand apart from its European counterparts in one

decisive respect, that is its sheer longevity. Portugal Maritime expansion began in the

fifteenth century, and Portugal was among the very last imperial powers to relinquish

colonial territory of Goa (along with Daman and Diu), which became part of India in

December 1961. On the other hand, Mozambique gained independence only in June 1975

following the collapse of the Estado Novo regime in Lisbon. This longevity over four

centuries of continuous rule in both territories makes Mozambique and Goa as an

interesting pair for studying how colonial institutions work their way into the political and

developmental fabric of successor states.

The curiosity in the study of colonial legacies has grown substantially since the 1990s,

driven by a wave of quantitative and comparative historical scholarship linking colonial-

era institutions to present-day governance and economic outcomes. However, within this

literature Portugal's empire occupies a peripheral position, often noted in passing

references but rarely subjected to sustained comparative analysis. This neglect is

especially pronounced in the Indian case: the colonial history of Goa has been largely

subsumed within nationalist narratives centred on British India, treated only as an oddity

rather than a substantive comparative site.

This study addresses both these gaps simultaneously. By comparing Mozambique and Goa

within a shared analytical framework, it situates the Portuguese imperial case more firmly

within comparative colonial studies while also recovering the colonial experience of Goa as

analytically consequential in its own right. The two cases are fascinating in their

combination of deep structural similarity and sharp postcolonial divergence, shared

Lusitanian legal, administrative, and religious frameworks on one side and profoundly

different decolonization processes, postcolonial ideologies, and developmental outcomes

on the other.

Methodology and Limitations of the study

This paper uses a comparative historical method deriving from the tradition of Barrington

Moore (1966), Skocpol (1979), and Tilly (1990), and continued more recently in the

comparative colonial legacies literature (Mahoney, 2010; Lange, Mahoney and vom Hau,

2006). This approach is not based on statistical analysis of a large population of cases, but

on the careful selection of a few cases on theoretical grounds for close, structured

comparison, to develop and test causal arguments about how colonial institutions influence

postcolonial outcomes. The analysis is based on secondary sources on Mozambique and

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 198-219

Legacies of Portuguese Colonial Rule: Political Volatility, Welfare,

and State Formation in Mozambique and Goa (India)

Alisha Dhingra, Saurabh Rai, Anant Prakash

202

Goa, colonial and post-colonial administrative and census data, as reported in the

literature, and existing cross-national measures of state capacity, literacy and welfare

outcomes.

The African case is Mozambique and the Asian subnational case is Goa. The case selection

is based on the fact that both territories had been under the Portuguese for four hundred

years. There are two reasons for the case selection. First, it fills a gap in the literature on

comparative colonial legacies, which, although longer-lasting than the British, French, or

Belgian empires and covering territory in Africa, Asia, and South America, has only

received intermittent attention (Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson, 2001; Nunn, 2008;

Lange, Mahoney and vom Hau, 2006), while the field of comparative colonial and

precolonial legacies has expanded greatly (Wilfahrt, 2021; Chlouba, Pierskalla and

Wibbels, 2023; Neupert-Wentz and Müller-Crepon, 2024). Second, it brings a South-South

comparative perspective that is lacking in the decolonisation literature, comparing an

African sovereign state with a South Asian subnational territory, both having a Lusophone

colonial past. Along with , this paper adopts the concept of contingent path dependence

as an analytical tool. This conception lies somewhere between the strong path dependency

accounts which suggest that the colonial past leaves little space for the postcolonial

present, and the voluntarist accounts which emphasize that the colonial past did not fix

the postcolonial present trajectory, but rather restricted the choice of options for

postcolonial actors. This is done through three analytical lenses: bureaucratic capacity,

legal continuity, and centre-periphery relations, rather than the one lens found in previous

comparative studies (Acemoglu, 2001; Lange, 2006; Mahoney, 2010), which allows for a

comparison that includes the various ways in which the same colonial architecture

generated different outcomes in the domains of administration, law, and political economy.

Colonial Legacies: Theoretical Frameworks

There has been an enormous amount of literature on the impact of colonialism on

postcolonial politics and development, and considerable disagreement over the same. In

the mid-twentieth century modernisation theorists (Rostow,1960) tended to see colonial

institutions as potential vehicles of development, as they carried over property rights, legal

order and infrastructure to the successor states. On the other hand, dependency and

world-systems theories saw colonialism as a structural cause of underdevelopment, as

they extracted surplus and precluded autonomous industrialisation, continuing into the

postcolonial phase (Frank, 1967; Wallerstein, 1974).

Recent scholarship in this area has transcended this two-sided perspective by examining

the impact of colonialism in specific institutional terms. The paper by Acemoglu, Johnson

and Robinson (2001) rely on the variation in settler mortality across Europe to isolate the

long run effect of the type of colonial institutions on income, with inclusive 'settler colonies'

versus extractive ones with predatory institutional arrangements set up by Europeans. On

the other hand, Lange, Mahoney and Vom Hau (2006) offer a different view, demonstrating

that the extent of colonial state-bureaucratisation rather than simply the presence of

settlers is a more important determinant of postcolonial development pathways. Herbst

(2000) emphasizes the territorial dimension, claiming that the inability to establish control

over sparsely populated African territories led to structural weaknesses in postcolonial

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 198-219

Legacies of Portuguese Colonial Rule: Political Volatility, Welfare,

and State Formation in Mozambique and Goa (India)

Alisha Dhingra, Saurabh Rai, Anant Prakash

203

states' capacity. While Nunn (2008) has demonstrated that the slave trades in Africa,

which were largely pre-colonial were harmful in the long run because they wrought havoc

on social trust and political institutions.

Some of these arguments are substantiated by the Portuguese colonial case, and others

are complicated. Portuguese colonialism was extractive: the indigenato system, forced

labour (chibalo in Mozambique), compulsory cultivation of cash crops, and the use of

concessionary companies as agents of economic extraction were all part of the extractive

model. The Estado Novo regime under Salazar, meanwhile, added a unique ideological

gloss: lusotropicalism, an ideology of Brazilian sociology by Gilberto Freyre (1993), which

claimed that Portuguese colonialism was an unprecedentedly humane enterprise, marked

by miscegenation, Catholic universalism and a supposed absence of racial hierarchy. This

ideological construction has also led to creation of certain institutional structures, including

the “assimilado” system and the Catholic missionary educational structure, which were

different in significant ways from the French or British colonial models.

This paper focuses on two additional theoretical streams. Young (1994) provides a multi-

dimensional analysis of the colonial state as an ideological project, a legal-bureaucratic

structure and a security apparatus, positing that the postcolonial states inherited the three

legacies in varying amounts. A feature of Portuguese colonial governance, formalised by

the indigenato system, is captured by the concept of the bifurcated colonial state

developed by Mamdani (1996) between the ‘civic’ sphere of citizens subject to civil law,

and the ‘native’ sphere of subjects governed through customary authority. The

decolonization and re-negotiation of this dichotomy was a central issue in both

Mozambique and Goa.

In addition, Mahoney's (2010) comparative historical study of Spanish American

colonialism, study, in which he demonstrates the interaction between path-dependent

colonial institutional legacies and ‘reactive sequences' – a series of contingent political

decisions that either amplify or mitigate initial colonial legacies. The framework will help

in this paper to explain the Mozambique-Goa divergence, which resulted in divergent

outcomes despite the same colonial beginnings and contrasting decolonisation processes

and postcolonial political decisions.

Portuguese Colonial Rule: An Overview

Administrative Structures

Portugal's involvement in Mozambique goes back to the early sixteenth century, when

trading posts were established along the coast and prazos (lands granted to private

individuals) and the gold and ivory business of the Swahili coast were developed. This

loose network evolved into a formal colonial state over the course of four centuries, a

process that was most pronounced during the Estado Novo regime of the 1930s and 1940s.

The Portuguese colonial administration in Mozambique was highly dualistic, with a formal

structure based on a metropolitan Portuguese bureaucracy with its headquarters in

Lourenço Marques (Maputo) and indirect administration through the régulos (traditional

chiefs), who were based in the rural interior and who acted as intermediaries in tax

collection, forced labour recruitment and maintenance of order.

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e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 198-219

Legacies of Portuguese Colonial Rule: Political Volatility, Welfare,

and State Formation in Mozambique and Goa (India)

Alisha Dhingra, Saurabh Rai, Anant Prakash

204

In Goa, the Portuguese took over in 1510, when Afonso de Albuquerque conquered the

city of Goa and the Estado da India (state of India) – the name given to the Portuguese

empire in Asia – was administered with a relatively high degree of administrative centrality.

The territory was divided into concelhos (administrative districts) headed by a Governor-

General, who had executive powers with the oversight of Lisbon. In the twentieth century,

Goa's administration was more directly controlled from the metropole than Mozambique's

and civil law was applied more comprehensively to a larger fraction of the population,

which was a result of the longer period of Portuguese settlement and missionary activity.

The Indigenato System and Social Policy

Juridically, the indigenato system, enshrined in the Estatuto dos Indígenas (1926, revised

in 1954), was the basis of Portuguese colonial social policy. In this system, the colonised

majority were considered indígenas and deprived of Portuguese citizenship, forced to work

under the Portuguese and limited in their freedom of movement, with their affairs managed

by régulos via customary law. A small minority whose Portuguese literacy and economic

independence and whose adoption of 'civilised' practices could be proven could petition for

“assimilado” status, which meant they would become Portuguese citizens and no longer

be subject to indigenous law. The assimilation rates were very low in Mozambique:

according to official statistics, in 1950, the number of “assimilados” did not exceed 5,000

in a population of more than five million. In Goa, a slightly larger share of the population

had become part of the Portuguese civic order, which had been the case for a longer time

due to the Catholic missionary activity and the consolidation of a Lusophone Catholic elite

in the Old Conquests territories around the original capital.

The legal frameworks and land tenure

The Portuguese colonial law in both territories established a complicated overlapping of

legal systems. In Mozambique there was a split between civil law (applicable to assimilados

and Europeans) and customary law (applicable to indígenas). The state's assertion of

ultimate sovereignty over all land under the doctrine of terra nullius, which legitimised

widespread alienation of land to European settlers, prazo holders, and concessionary

companies such as the Mozambique Company and the Zambezia Company, which enjoyed

quasi-governmental authority over large tracts of land under royal charter. In Goa, the

law was more reflective of the longer colonial presence. Under Portuguese law, the

communidades, pre-colonial village-level land commons, were codified and regulated, and

a landowning class of Goan Catholics (the bhatcars) has consolidated the control over

agricultural land within a legal framework that hybridised Portuguese civil law with pre-

existing social arrangements. The communidades system in Goa and the division of

customary law and civil law in Mozambique were resilient and contested aspects of the

postcolonial legal landscape. In Goa, the “comunidades” have managed to resist the

process of integration with India, and continue to be active areas of land tenure conflict

and local identity politics. In Mozambique, the land issue emerged as one of the main

battlegrounds of postcolonial political struggle, since the nationalisation policy of FRELIMO

was challenged by customary rights and the aspirations of the former settlers.

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 198-219

Legacies of Portuguese Colonial Rule: Political Volatility, Welfare,

and State Formation in Mozambique and Goa (India)

Alisha Dhingra, Saurabh Rai, Anant Prakash

205

Decolonisation: Contrasting Paths

This section will analyse the processes through which Mozambique and Goa liberated from

Portuguese rule. There is excessive divergence, and they are almost different historical

phenomena, and this difference was one of the most potent ones to shape the subsequent

postcolonial courses.

The quest for freedom was part of the larger wave of anti-colonial Indian nationalism and

non-alignment foreign policy in Goa. Following India's independence in 1947, Nehru's

government sought the return of Goa, Daman and Diu, but Salazar rejected this demand,

claiming the territories were provinces of Portugal and not colonies. After years of peaceful

satyagraha protests, transborder marches and rising international pressure, Operation

Vijay was launched on 18th December 1961 by India. The Portuguese resistance was

quickly defeated in 36 hours. The integration was fast, non-violent and, most importantly,

left the existing administrative structure largely intact. Portuguese officials, judges and

civil servants stayed in their offices, and were permitted to remain in service of the state

of India. Importantly, this was a transition and not a rupture.

Mozambique, however, had taken a different route to independence, having fought an

armed struggle for over a decade. The FRELIMO was established in exile in Dar es Salaam

in 1962 and its armed struggle began in September 1964. The Portuguese military strategy

was to send over 50,000 soldiers, to conduct forced villagisation programmes

(aldeamentos) aimed at eliminating civilian support for the guerrillas, and to carry out

counter-insurgency operations, including the Wiriyamu massacre in December 1972,

where Portuguese forces killed several hundred civilians in Tete Province. With the war in

Mozambique and the Angolan and Guinea-Bissauan wars raging at the same time, it

became impossible to continue the war financially and politically. On 25 April 1974, the

Carnation Revolution, the military coup in Lisbon, led to the end of the Estado Novo and

paved the way for a quick decolonisation. Under the Lusaka Accords of September 1974,

FRELIMO was acknowledged as the sole negotiating partner and Mozambique was formally

independent on 25 June 1975, with Samora Machel as the first President.

The nature of FRELIMO's struggle for liberation had a significant impact on the nature of

the postcolonial state that it created. During the war years, the organisation had built up

a military-political apparatus and had gained power with a definite Marxist-Leninist

ideology of changing the social structures of the colonies, mobilising the peasantry and

establishing a one-party state. Shortly after independence FRELIMO nationalised land,

housing, education, health services and the banking system, and expelled most of the

Portuguese settler population (around 200,000 people left within a year) and embarked

on a bold state-led socialist development programme. This represented a deliberate and

radical rupture with colonial institutional arrangements a choice that both reflected

FRELIMO's political ideology and stored up considerable postcolonial conflict.

Political Stability: Contrasting Trajectories

One of the main concerns of the colonial legacies literature is: whether there is any

relationship between colonial rule and postcolonial political instability? Mozambique and

Goa provide interesting cases to explore this relationship.

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e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 198-219

Legacies of Portuguese Colonial Rule: Political Volatility, Welfare,

and State Formation in Mozambique and Goa (India)

Alisha Dhingra, Saurabh Rai, Anant Prakash

206

The civil war has been a devastating event in Mozambique's postcolonial political history.

FRELIMO's radical transformation programme of forced villagisation (Operação Produção),

the repression of religious institutions and the elimination of the chieftaincy system

produced significant rural discontent which was exploited by external actors such as

Rhodesian state. This governance gap and administrative void directly contributed to the

weakness in service delivery systems which is exacerbated by the civil war (Bertelsen

,2016). The ethnographic description of postwar Mozambique by Bertelsen (2016) reveals

that in practice, chiefly authority was never completely eradicated, remaining instead in

local notions of spiritual and territorial legitimacy, which the postcolonial state could not

completely incorporate, and which enabled the reorganisation of RENAMO around

complaints of the chiefs' authority decades after independence. Following the end of the

Rhodesian state in 1979, the apartheid South African government organised, financed and

armed RENAMO (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana), turning what could have been

localised unrest into a full-scale proxy war. This conflict, which began around 1977 and

ended in 1992, claimed an estimated one million lives, displaced nearly five million people

and destroyed a significant portion of the nation's physical and institutional infrastructure.

The political situation remains fragile, with RENAMO periodically resorting to armed

conflict, including resumption of fighting in 2013-2019 and current instability in Cabo

Delgado, following the signing of the General Peace Accord in Rome in October 1992, which

ended formal fighting and introduced a multiparty democratic system.

However, the postcolonial political history of Goa is not the same. Goa became a Union

Territory in 1962 and was granted full statehood in 1987 and has since been part of the

Indian competitive electoral democracy. Political volatility has been significant at the state

level, with changes of coalition, high rates of floor-crossing and corruption associated with

the mining and tourism industries, but this volatility has been dealt with through

constitutional and electoral processes, rather than armed conflict. The mining scandal of

2011-2012, which led to a judicial commission inquiry and temporary suspension of iron

ore extraction, showed the strong linkage between the political elites and extractive

industry, but this was solved through institutional channels.

The pertinent question is how much colonial legacies accounted for this divergence? There

are a number of points which are worth emphasising. The nature of decolonisation is

important: the violent nature of the Mozambican independence, which included a decade

of armed conflict, and the resulting loss of skilled administration left the state capacity

vacuum that made governance very challenging and opened opportunities for external-

sponsored destabilisation. The peaceful and rapid military integration in Goa and the

subsequent absorption in the administrative framework of India was less traumatic.

Second, FRELIMO's ideology (however understandable in the context of the depth of the

colonial oppression and the socialist currents in 1970s African politics) alienated large parts

of the rural population and gave the material basis for RENAMO's mobilisation.Third, apart

from colonial legacy, Cold War geopolitics and regional destabilisation campaigns by

Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa bear the burden of responsibility to Mozambique's

civil war.

Colonialism, however, did also create structural vulnerabilities. The indigenato system's

unbalanced division of society, its failure to allow for autonomous political organisation,

and the lack of development of an educated indigenous middle class, as well as the uneven

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 198-219

Legacies of Portuguese Colonial Rule: Political Volatility, Welfare,

and State Formation in Mozambique and Goa (India)

Alisha Dhingra, Saurabh Rai, Anant Prakash

207

administrative reach, all rendered Mozambique poorly equipped to face the challenges of

postcolonial governance. Contrary in Goa, the presence of a small, but competent, Catholic

educated professional class established in the colonial era, that caused social tensions in

minority-majority relations, also made it easier to make a transition to institutions in Goa.

Another aspect of the political volatility comparison is the importance of ethnic and regional

politics. Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique, which was nominally based on

universalist claims of lusotropicalism, was in practice based on ethnic and regional

differences: labour recruitment was skewed towards certain groups, missionary work was

targeted at particular regions, and administrative appointments were linked to geography

and the ethnic makeup of the FRELIMO leadership. Such patterns created fault lines which

could be exploited by postcolonial political competition, and RENAMO's approach of

regional mobilisation. In Goa, the Old Conquests, predominantly Catholic, and the New

Conquests were, predominantly Hindu, have also been the basis for postcolonial identity

politics in Goa, albeit without a bloody conflict. The political significance of caste, religion,

and sub-regional identity in Goan politics is a result of both the colonial administrative and

social policies that transformed pre-existing social hierarchies into stable political

categories and the salience of these divisions in pre-colonial Goa.

One of the elements that require special attention in Mozambique is the RENAMO

insurgency, which was a way of refracting and magnifying the colonial legacy. RENAMO

was not an automatic outgrowth of pre-existing colonial resentments; it was carefully

created by Rhodesian and South African intelligence as a destabilising force and its political

agenda was largely anti-FRELIMO and not anti-colonial. The civil war is not simply a legacy

of colonialism, but it can't be explained without an understanding of the legacy of

colonialism in terms of its creation of regional inequalities and the postcolonial

government's failure to adequately engage with that legacy.

State Formation: Institutional Legacies and Trajectories

Bureaucratic Capacity

The departure of approximately 200,000 Portuguese settlers, officials, and technicians

following Mozambique's independence in 1975 precipitated an immediate and severe crisis

of state capacity. Under colonial rule, indigenous Mozambicans had been systematically

excluded from senior administrative and bureaucratic positions, leaving a profound

shortage of qualified personnel at the moment of transition. While FRELIMO had developed

an effective cadre of military and political leaders during the liberation struggle, most

lacked experience in public administration, economic governance, and state management.

Moreover, the relatively small number of educated Mozambicans from assimilado

backgrounds was insufficient to sustain the complex functions of a modern state

apparatus. Faced with these constraints, the new government increasingly relied on

advisers and technical experts from Cuba, the Soviet Union, and other Eastern Bloc

countries, while also drawing upon FRELIMO's party structures. However, these institutions

had been designed primarily to support guerrilla warfare and political mobilization rather

than the administration of a national economy or the management of a complex

bureaucratic system. This governance gap and administrative void directly contributed to

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and State Formation in Mozambique and Goa (India)

Alisha Dhingra, Saurabh Rai, Anant Prakash

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the weakness in service delivery systems which is exacerbated by the civil war. The

immediate post-independence vacuum of capacity was exacerbated and in some ways

replicated by the international statebuilding interventions that came after the 1992 peace

accord. Sabaratnam (2017) maintains that donor-led statebuilding in Mozambique was

based on Eurocentric notions of how a ‘functioning’ postcolonial state should be, and that

it tended to marginalise Mozambican political agency, including that of the peasantry, in

similar ways to the colonial and one-party eras.

Goa's smaller size, the higher educational level of its population, and its decisions to give

a choice to have Portuguese administrators who worked under the Indian state after the

integration of Goa, gave it a degree of bureaucratic continuity that was lacking in

Mozambique. The integration of Goa into the Indian Union brought its administration under

the framework of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), providing access to greater

institutional and financial resources while also exposing governance to challenges that

have been identified in the literature on Indian public administration, including political

interference, patronage networks, bureaucratic rigidity, and corruption (Gupta, 2012;

Aiyar & Bhattacharya, 2016).

Legal Continuity

The durability of Portuguese legal legacies has been particularly noticing in Goa. The Goa

Civil Code which incorporates the Portuguese Civil Code of 1867 and relates to family law,

marriage, succession and property continues to be the civil law of Goa for all its

inhabitants, irrespective of their religion. This is a special feature of the Indian

constitutional order – the state of Goa (and now Uttarakhand) have operational uniform

civil code that supersedes the personal laws that apply to India based on religion. The Goa

Civil Code has been hailed as a secular uniformity and condemned as a colonial imposition

which does not reflect local customary practices. The persistence of it is a direct and

inviolate colonial institutional legacy, which has been sustained by successive state

governments and confirmed even by the Supreme Court of India.

The fact that the Goa Civil Code survived also brings to light a larger theoretical issue

concerning the impact of subnational status on the passing on of colonial legacies. Legal

reform in a sovereign postcolonial state depends on political will and capacity, and the

colonial legal legacy is pitted against the national political needs to establish legal

sovereignty through re-coding. In a subnational unit in a federal system, however, the

dynamics are different. The Goa Civil Code's survival after integration was, in part, due to

the fact that it was in the interests of the dominant Catholic landowning community,

because the Indian judicial system did not have the institutional capacity to immediately

enforce a single alternative, and in part because the Code was politically elevated as a

symbol of Goa's distinctiveness in the Indian union. It was not only the colonial legal legacy

which was preserved, but also through conscious political decisions taken in the

postcolonial era, the choices made reflecting the power structure of Goan society and the

special relationship between Goa and the Indian state.

In Mozambique, the first idea of the postcolonial government was to eliminate colonial law

and its replacement by a socialist legal system in its entirety. In practice, some provisions

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Legacies of Portuguese Colonial Rule: Political Volatility, Welfare,

and State Formation in Mozambique and Goa (India)

Alisha Dhingra, Saurabh Rai, Anant Prakash

209

of the Portuguese civil code and the Portuguese commercial code continued to exist

because of institutional inertia, especially where new laws had not yet been passed. Since

the adoption of the post-1990 Constitution, the country has adopted a multiparty

democratic system and a formal rule of law, but legal reform has been inconsistent and

the relationship between formal state law and customary practice in land tenure and family

affairs is still disputed and unresolved. Bertelsen (2016) describes this as a situation of

'multiple sovereignties', in which the state law, customary authority, and other forms of

political legitimacy exist in parallel and compete, but never merge into a single hierarchy.

Centre-Periphery Relations

Mozambique's long coastline and an extensive hinterland linked to the coast mainly for

extraction purposes left it with a postcolonial state with weak centre-periphery ties and

high regional disparities. FRELIMO had been strongest in the northern provinces of Cabo

Delgado and Niassa, and its ethnic and regional strength had been concentrated in the

north, while RENAMO had attracted much support from the centre and south, and aligned

itself with the regional political divisions of the colonial era. The spatial and regional aspects

of political contestation remain in modern Mozambican politics and are a direct, albeit

mediated, legacy of colonialism. This territorial imbalance of state authority is not just a

historical legacy, but a dynamic feature of the Mozambican state's constitution: Bertelsen

(2016) suggests that state power in Mozambique has always been distributed unevenly

across territory, and is produced through ongoing negotiation between the centre and local

sources of legitimacy.

In the case of Goa, territorial integration into the Indian Union answered one aspect of the

centre-periphery question by placing the territory within a working federal structure with

a set of mechanisms for the allocation of resources between the centre and the state.

However, the integration also created fresh conflicts over the issue of cultural autonomy

of the Goans, the inclusion of Konkani as an official language, and the identity issues of

the Catholic minority in a Hindu majority republic. The limits of Goan cultural and political

identity – and the connections between these and the Portuguese colonial history – have

been a constant object of political contestation, as mobilised by regional parties, cultural

associations, and occasionally by economic interests defending legal arrangements specific

to the state.

Welfare Provision Through an Analytical Lens: (Education Healthcare and

Social Protection)

“Always remember that the people are not fighting for ideas, nor for what is in

men’s minds. The people fight and accept the sacrifices demanded by the

struggle in order to gain material advantages, to live better and in peace, to

benefit from progress, and for the better future of their children. National

liberation, the struggle against colonialism, the construction of peace, progress

and independence are hollow words devoid of any significance unless they can

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and State Formation in Mozambique and Goa (India)

Alisha Dhingra, Saurabh Rai, Anant Prakash

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be translated into a real improvement of living conditions” (Amílcar Cabral,

1973, p. 101).

Amílcar Cabral’s believed that National liberation was an achievement but it cannot by

itself satisfy the aspirations of anti-colonial struggles unless it will be translated into a real

improvement of living conditions. Cabral reminds us that the ultimate measure of

independence is not just the transfer of power but the state’s capacity to deliver better life

to its people through accessible, fair and just public services and inclusive development.

From this perspective, we have to analyse how the provision of welfare becomes a critical

indicator of post-colonial state performance. The institutional instruments by which states

translate the promises of independence into improvements in human well-being are

education, healthcare and social protection.

Education

One of the Mozambique's legacies from Portuguese colonization was an extreme dearth of

education. The Church-state educational partnership had resulted in very low literacy rates

at time of independence which was below 10 per cent of the population. In the late 1970s,

FRELIMO responded with an ambitious literacy campaign and rapid primary school

expansion, and made gains in school enrolment in the early post-independence years. The

civil war then set back much of this progress: thousands of rural schools were destroyed

or abandoned and millions of children lost access to schooling. The problem was

compounded by the introduction of school fees and the restriction of the educational

budget as a result of structural adjustment conditionalities imposed since the late 1980s.

The process of recovery has been slow and, although there has been considerable

improvement in net enrolment rates since the 1992 peace accord, quality and completion

rates are still very problematic.

On contrary the educational base of Goa was much stronger when it came out of the

Portuguese fold. The longer the Catholic missionary presence, and the smaller the scale of

the mission area (smaller territory) had resulted in literacy rates of 35.41 per cent at the

time of integration (Indian Budget database, MoF), significantly higher than the Indian

national average(28.3%) of the early 1960s. Reflecting the effects of incorporation into

the federal system of India, access to national education programmes and central

government funding was introduced, and the legacy of colonial-era Catholic educational

institutions, many of which remained in operation even after 1961, contributed to the

continued infrastructural capacity. Goa has consistently high literacy rates (88.7% per

cent) and has a strong network of secondary and tertiary education institutions.

Healthcare

In Mozambique, the provision of healthcare was mainly geared towards the needs of the

European and “assimilado” population, while rural Africans received very little healthcare.

During the postcolonial period, FRELIMO's government focused on health as a socialist

right and created a system of rural health posts, while promoting preventive health care.

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and State Formation in Mozambique and Goa (India)

Alisha Dhingra, Saurabh Rai, Anant Prakash

211

Similar to the realm of education, the health infrastructure was ravished by civil war.

Access was further reduced for the poorest with the implementation of healthcare fees

under structural adjustment. Mozambique faces substantial health-system challenges

characterized by elevated maternal mortality, a high burden of HIV infection among adults,

and the adverse health consequences of the ongoing conflict in Cabo Delgado, which has

displaced populations and disrupted access to essential health services (World Health

Organization, 2025Mozambique: Health data overview).

In comparison to Mozambique, Goa's colonial healthcare system was relatively well

developed, in that there were functioning hospitals, dispensaries and basic medical training

facilities at the time of integration. Post-integration, Goa enjoyed the benefits of Indian

national health programmes, central government investments, and the economic benefits

accruing from remittance and, subsequently, tourism (Bastos, 2002; Menezes, 2008). The

health indicators in Goa today are comparable with the national average of India and close

to those of middle-income countries of Southeast Asia.

Social Protection

A significant formal social protection system was lacking during Portuguese colonial rule in

Goa and Mozambique. In Mozambique, the doctrine of the Estado Novo, inspired by

Catholicism and oriented towards the community, attributed the responsibility for welfare

to family and Church, not to the state. As a result, social protection was mostly absent for

the indigenous people.

Civil war and structural adjustment stunted FRELIMO's postcolonial project of building a

socialist welfare state. Social protection in Mozambique is largely dependent on external

development assistance, and some cash transfer programmes have only a small impact

on the poor. On the other hand, in Goa, integration with India led to access to the national

social protection programmes such as the Public Distribution System, the Mahatma Gandhi

National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, and the state pension programmes. Goa's

relatively high-income levels, due to mining, tourism and remittances from the diaspora

have also allowed for more generous social spending at the state level than most other

Indian states.

South- South Comparative Perspective

The principal axis of comparison in colonial legacies scholarship has been dominated by

North-South axis, as European countries compared to their African, Asian, and/or with

Latin American colonies. Intra-regional comparisons (in Africa or in South Asia) are also

well established. De Juan and Pierskalla (2017), highlighted that existing work “has made

important contributions to understanding colonialism's long-term effects on political,

social, and economic development” but there is need for greater attention to “internal

dynamics of colonial intervention” and “non-institutional transmission mechanisms that

cross-regional comparison is particularly well placed to illuminate”.

While holding the colonial power constant (both regions were ruled by Portugal, under

similar legal, administrative, and ideological structures, particularly after the consolidation

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and State Formation in Mozambique and Goa (India)

Alisha Dhingra, Saurabh Rai, Anant Prakash

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of the Estado Novo in the 1930s), and changing the postcolonial institutional setting (an

African nation-state versus a subnational region of a South Asian federation), the

comparison is close to a controlled analytical experiment. It enables the colonial legacy to

be somewhat separated from the postcolonial factors, and what remains the same, even

when the postcolonial circumstances are so different, can be confidently attributed to the

colonial legacy; where changes illuminate the role of postcolonial choice and context. This

can be seen as the comparative logic of “subnational comparison” as described by Snyder

(2001) and also as the comparative logic of “cross-regional South-South comparison”

where the units of analysis have a shared colonial history.

In a South-South comparison of colonial legacies in higher education between South Africa

and Brazil, Majee and Ress (2020) have shown that “internationalization of higher

education has been largely theorised from a Euro-American perspective, with less

consideration given to the impact of colonial expansion in postcolonial settings”. The same

is true of the wider colonial legacies’ literature: the methodological and theoretical

assumptions embedded in North-South comparisons – where the North is the norm and

the South is the deviant case and this does not always apply to comparisons between two

colonized territories that have been colonized by the same power. A South-South

framework is an analytical approach that moves the analytical baseline from the colonizer

to the experience of colonialism itself, so that the analyst is able to question not what the

colonizer did to these territories but how those territories worked upon and transformed

and what the colonizers left behind.

Colonial Memory, Identity and the Lusophone World

The liberation movement FRELIMO has created an official memory of colonialism in

Mozambique that portrays the Portuguese colonial past as a period of systematic

exploitation and violence (chibalo forced labour, Wiriyamu massacre in 1972, and the

humiliations of the indigenato), in which the armed struggle is presented as the founding

national myth. In this ongoing conflict between this official state memory and the

“insurgent counter-memory practices of civil society”, Peralta (2025) has explored how the

Portuguese state has been hesitant to recognise the damage inflicted by its colonialism,

while civil society actors in Portugal and Mozambique have become more vocal around

demands for postcolonial justice. The Portuguese case is one of the elements of the

transnational nature of colonial memory, linking the metropole to the former colonies.

Colonial memory is much more complex and ambivalent in Goa. A large portion of the

Catholic community has cultural and linguistic ties with Portugal that are still felt today, as

seen in the use of Portuguese in Catholic life and interactions with the Portuguese diaspora.

As Sertler (2020) as documented, Goa's post-colonial situation involves “a far from

straightforward” negotiation of colonial identities, marked by both the persistence of

Portuguese cultural identification among the Catholic elite and the assertion of anti-colonial

Hindu nationalist narratives by other segments of the population. This religious and caste

division of colonial memory is a direct legacy of the Portuguese colonial practice of

differential conversion and administrative integration that carved out Goa's social

geography over four centuries.

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Legacies of Portuguese Colonial Rule: Political Volatility, Welfare,

and State Formation in Mozambique and Goa (India)

Alisha Dhingra, Saurabh Rai, Anant Prakash

213

As Penvenne and Macagno (2022) have pointed out, the right to Portuguese citizenship

(which has been extended to all Goans born prior to 1961 and their descendants, has

become a material force in the context of freedom of movement within the European Union.

In the chapter 'Goans in Portugal', India-EU People Mobility (Cambridge University Press,

2015), Katharya Uma and Bhaumik document in detail that around 90 per cent of those

who applied for Portuguese citizenship in Goa are Catholic and most of them are from the

Old Conquests talukas of Tiswadi, Bardez and Salcete, the very talukas that were first and

most intensively colonised and evangelised by the Portuguese. The citizenship path

therefore extends the postcolonial privilege for those most fully colonised and thus allows

them to continue to enjoy the same privileges as colonials, but in a new form.

Hindu Goan communities and political movements have shaped the colonial past in other

ways, focusing on the forced conversions by the Inquisition (which the scholar Teotonio de

Souza has documented, and which continued to some extent until the eighteenth century),

the destruction of Hindu temples in the Old Conquests, and the long subordination of the

majority Hindu population of Goa to a Catholic institutional framework. This contested

colonial memory is explored in “Goa: A Post-Colonial Society Between Cultures” by Jackson

(2016), who traces how the “problematic yet productive encounter between Europe and

India” of Goa's history is continuing to influence identity claims in the postcolonial present.

On the macro level, the CPLP — The Community of Portuguese-speaking Countries

(Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa), established in Lisbon on 17 July 1996, is

the institutional manifestation of the postcolonial ties of the Lusophone world. It has

expanded to nine member States across four continents and a total population of around

290 million (IOM, 2023, Migration Governance in the Community of Portuguese Language

Countries). However, Nadobnik (2020) has suggested that the CPLP has been limited in

its scope, as it has centred on cultural cooperation, and has also pointed out that the CPLP

is an “institutional emanation of the idea of Lusophony” with its “enormous economic

possibilities” underutilized. Portuguese is also the official language of Mozambique, placing

it in this world-wide Lusophone network, but also maintaining the colonial hierarchy

between Portuguese literate elites and Bantu language speaking majority. It is less direct

in the case of Goa, since it has had a Lusophone relationship since 1961 but the historical

Lusophone connection is a thread that ties the two cases together in a wider comparative

perspective.

Diaspora and Postcolonial Development

The diaspora networks that developed in Mozambique and Goa are not just demographic;

they are institutional products of divergent colonial and decolonising histories and their

developmental implications reveal the postcolonial impact of Portuguese rule, not just

through domestic processes but also across transnational lines.

The character of the Goan diaspora was influenced by multiple concurrent waves of

migration, which were influenced by the legal and cultural heritage of Portuguese

colonialism. In the colonial era, Goans went to Portuguese Africa, mostly to Mozambique,

Kenya and Tanzania, as clerical workers and administrators in an intermediate position

between the blacks and whites in between the colonial hierarchy that were facilitated by

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Legacies of Portuguese Colonial Rule: Political Volatility, Welfare,

and State Formation in Mozambique and Goa (India)

Alisha Dhingra, Saurabh Rai, Anant Prakash

214

their Catholic education and Portuguese citizenship (Chanda & Ghosh, 2012).After India

annexed Goa in 1961, a second wave of migration started to Portugal, and many

Portuguese went to the UK, the United States and Canada – a trend Chanda and Ghosh

(2012) refer to as Goans having a hard time finding permanent employment in Portugal,

and then using Lisbon as a stepping stone to the rest of Europe. A third wave, which is

ongoing until today, is based on the right to Portuguese citizenship for those who were

born in Goa prior to 1961 and their descendants. At the time of their study, according to

a there was a waiting list of 12,000-13,000 persons applying for passports at the

Portuguese consulate office in Panaji and about 17,000 Goans who were already holding

Portuguese citizenship in the United Kingdom. Importantly, this access to citizenship is not

socially homogeneous; as Uma and Bhaumik (2015) show, some 90 per cent of applicants

are from the Catholic community, which is concentrated in the Old Conquests talukas of

Tiswadi, Bardez and Salcete, the areas of earliest and most intensive Portuguese

missionary and administrative settlement (India-EU People Mobility, Cambridge University

Press).Citizenship access in the postcolonial period thus reproduces the colonial hierarchy

of assimilation, the legal legacy of assimilation is most beneficial for those whose ancestors

were the first to be incorporated into the Portuguese civic order.

This diaspora has a substantial impact on development. The funds remitted by the Goans

who have migrated to the Gulf states, the United Kingdom, Portugal and North America

have been a major source of income for the households in Goa and helped in investment

in education, houses etc., which have resulted in the unusually high per capita income in

Goa as compared to the Indian average. The diaspora's cosmopolitan professions have

also helped Goa become part of the international tourism and service industries, with

economic multiplier effects that can be traced, to the cultural capital that has been built

under Portuguese colonization.

The Mozambican diaspora is a different case. Labour migration from Mozambique to South

Africa has a long history, with pre-independence migration to South Africa driven by the

colonial mining economy which systematically recruited labour from southern Mozambique

by bilateral contracts with the mines on the Witwatersrand. The massive colonial-era

migration of labour from Mozambique to South Africa has been maintained and diversified

in the postcolonial era with migrants transitioning from formal employment in the mines

to a range of economic activities, many of which are informal, according to study of

migration and remittances from Mozambique to South Africa during the post-apartheid

era, conducted by Mercandalli, Nshimbi, and Moyo (2017) in the period 2009-2013

(Migration, Cross-Border Trade and Development in Africa, Palgrave Macmillan). The

consequences of this change from formalised colonial era labour recruitment to informal

post-apartheid labour migration are important: it has lowered the proportion of

remittances flowing through formal banking systems, threatened the capacity for deferred

remuneration, and lowered the development potential of what is still a structurally

significant source of household income in southern Mozambique.

The impact of these remittance transfers on development is real but limited. According to

Mercandalli et al. (2017), remittance-receiving households in southern Mozambique are

generally better off than non-migrant households, but that migration does not necessarily

bring about structural transformation of the sending economy, but rather perpetuates a

“dependent relationship” between sending households and the South African labour

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Legacies of Portuguese Colonial Rule: Political Volatility, Welfare,

and State Formation in Mozambique and Goa (India)

Alisha Dhingra, Saurabh Rai, Anant Prakash

215

market. This is consistent with the existing literature on African remittances, which shows

that remittances serve as an important alternative source of development finance that has

a positive direct impact on economic growth, but such impact is moderated by the quality

of the financial sector, which is still weak in Mozambique due to the legacies of the post-

conflict reconstruction and a shallow banking system (International Migration, 60(5), 252–

270).

The comparative analysis of both diasporas is analytically relevant to the argument of this

paper. The Goan diaspora's EU citizenship advantage, in turn, is a direct result of the legal

nature of Portuguese colonialism in Asia, and of Portugal's political choice not to recognize

the annexation of 1961 as legitimate (however this was recognized in 1974 after carnation

revolution), which has created a developmental divergence between the two territories;

not pre-ordained by any aspect of the colonial order. By contrast, the structural

embedment of the Mozambican diaspora in the South African mining economy is a legacy

of the colonial era, that the postcolonial state has yet to overcome; and which continues

to direct Mozambican human resources towards South Africa, instead of directing it to the

purpose of domestic development. In both the contexts, colonial legacies are enacted in

terms of diaspora formations; although in very different institutional forms: -in Goa

through the inheritance of Portuguese citizenship, and in Mozambique through the

inheritance of migrant labour's spatial economy

Conclusion

The Portuguese colonial rule which lasted for over four centuries in Mozambique and Goa

(India) profoundly altered their political and social structures, leaving enduring legacies.

The paper has demonstrated how shared colonial edifice led to diverse political and

developmental outcomes in these two regions after decolonization owing to political

volatility, postcolonial state formation and bureaucratic capacity, welfare provisions for

education, health and social protection. The divergent paths to decolonization are

significant: a decade of armed conflict in Mozambique resulted in the loss of skilled

administration and created vacuum in state bureaucratic capacity; opening opportunities

for external-sponsored destabilisation. On the other hand, Goa witnessed a degree of

bureaucratic continuity woing to several factors such as the smaller size of territory of Goa

,the higher educational level of its population, and the decision to continue administrators

hired under Portuguese rule to work under the Indian state after the integration of Goa.

This eventually led to better state and administrative capacity.

This study has examined the legal, administrative and social policy arrangements put in

place under Portuguese rule in Mozambique and Goa and the legal and administrative

continuity and disjuncture following the divergent paths of decolonization. As the

scholarship on decolonization has demonstrated that decolonization should not be viewed

as a single moment of rupture, but regarded as an extended and uneven process through

which postcolonial states reworked and inherited institutions. This research has analysed

how divergent route to decolonization influenced state capacity, welfare provisions, and

political order in different ways in Mozambique and Goa. This perspective allows us to

engage more sensibly with ongoing debates about colonial legacies in general and more

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Legacies of Portuguese Colonial Rule: Political Volatility, Welfare,

and State Formation in Mozambique and Goa (India)

Alisha Dhingra, Saurabh Rai, Anant Prakash

216

specifically, the influence of colonial legacy in generating political instability and/or

supporting forms of institutional continuity and postcolonial development.

By examining a Lusophone African nation state alongside a postcolonial subnational state

in South Asia, the paper brings a South-South comparative perspective that is essentially

absent from existing studies on decolonization.The paper has focussed on the political and

institutional realities of both regions, tracing how colonial legacies were shaped by local

political agency, distinct paths to decolonization, and postcolonial policy choices over time.

This allows us to argue that colonial legacy is not necessarily deterministic of the future

processes and outcomes. However, the influence of colonial rule cannot be treated as

insignificant and more attention need to be paid to the path and process of decolonization.

The comparison of Mozambique and Goa provides evidence for contingent path

dependence theory; emphasizing that the effects of colonial legacy are mediated by

historical contingencies and actor choices.

References

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