Edited by David Higgs

The Portuguese are among the most migratory of European peoples. For many centuries they set out from the homeland by land and sea, and they carried their language, culture and initiative to the ends of the earth. However, it is really only in the last century that serious studies of those who left have been undertaken. How many were they? What part of Portugal did they come from? What were their skills? Where did they go? These were questions asked by bureaucrats, sociologists, and economists about their contemporaries. Historians were much slower to show an interest in the effects of the departures from Portugal by ordinary people.

This collection of essays arose from the efforts of a group of specialists with diverse interests to discuss Portuguese migration in a longer perspective than that of the contemporary era, and with a sense of the global diversity of that movement. Read together these essays attest to the continuities but also to the complexities and changes in patterns of migration from modern Portugal and her Atlantic islands. They illuminate new themes and problems for analysis over time to the present, both in the sending nation and those that received Portuguese migrants. They remind us of intermarriage and racial mixing which took place in the Portuguese world. They enrich our understanding of the Portuguese contribution to many regions of the world, prominent among them Ontario.

Published: 1990
Type: Paperback
Language: English
Category: History, Portuguese Immigration in Canada

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