Kenneth Maxwell: “This is always my recommendation: never underestimate the Portuguese.”

On February 24, 2026, an interview by Leonídio Paulo Ferreira was published in Diário de Noncias entitled: “Kenneth Maxwell: “Esta é sempre a minha recomendação: nunca subestimem os portugueses” which highlighted his recent books.

This is our translation of the article.

His first visit to Lisbon was in 1964, at the height of the Salazar regime, and since then Kenneth Maxwell has studied Portugal, writing about the Marquis of Pombal and the 25th of April Revolution, as well as the Portuguese Empire. Brazil is another of the great British historian’s interests. He has now published three more books, including Perspectives on Portuguese History.

You have just published three new books. One of them is entitled Perspectives on Portuguese History. How did an Englishman become interested in a small country isolated by the Salazar dictatorship in the 1960s?

Professor Sir Harry Hinsley encouraged me to “look south,” but I needed to learn Spanish and Portuguese to do so. I spent six months in Madrid at the local university, and then planned six months in Lisbon. Both Spain and Portugal were very isolated at the time. Spain, as a result of Franco’s dictatorship after the Civil War, and Portugal, under Salazar’s regime. The book on Perspectives is in English and Portuguese, and begins with an essay written in October 1964 with my observations on Portugal a decade before the events of 1974.

Do you remember that first visit to Portugal?

I arrived in Lisbon on the Lusitânia Expresso night train from Madrid in 1964. I wanted to learn Portuguese, but that was very difficult because no one would talk to me! Portugal was much more closed than Spain at the time, and the power of the PIDE and informers was everywhere. And an English student was not someone anyone wanted to talk to. Finally, I placed an ad in Diário de Notícias looking for an exchange of experiences with a Portuguese student, to see if it would work.

And then I received an unexpected invitation to visit the Gulbenkian Foundation, then in temporary premises, where Dr. Monteiro, director of international services, offered me support for five months during my stay in Portugal. This was very welcome, as I was practically penniless at the time and my earnings as a columnist for an English provincial newspaper amounted to only five pounds and five shillings…

Salazar died in 1970, but the regime survived until 1974. Was the Revolution a surprise to you as a historian?

No, it wasn’t a surprise. When General Spínola published his book Portugal and the Future, I thought something important had happened. I was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton at the time when Robert Silvers, the editor of the New York Review of Books, sent me to Portugal to find out what was going on, which I did. I spent some time in London on the way, analyzing everything. The international press coverage of Portugal, present in the then wonderful collection of clippings at the London Library, brought to my attention by a friend who was editor of The Economist magazine. In Lisbon, I met many people, and one of my closest friends from 1964 was a militia officer based in Lisbon…

A few years ago, you also wrote a book about the construction of Portuguese democracy. Was Mário Soares decisive in confronting the communists and obtaining the support of the United States? Is Soares the father of our democracy?

It’s more complex than that. The key role in 1975 was played by Frank Carlucci, who was the American ambassador, and his deputy, Herb Okun. Both spoke Portuguese and both had served in Brazil. Their role, especially Carlucci’s, was absolutely crucial in countering Henry Kissinger in Washington, who wanted to make Portugal an example of how to prevent the spread of the communist threat in southern Europe.

And General Spínola was plotting to invade Portugal from northern Spain, with his headquarters in Salamanca. But, crucially, the US did not support him, nor did Brazil itself under General Geisel. And at that moment, Mário Soares proved to be much more resilient than even his friends had expected. But the role of the military was crucial, and especially the role of Ramalho Eanes and Melo Antunes was fundamental at that moment.

Another recently published book, A History of Three Cities, discusses the reconstruction of Lisbon, London, and Paris. Was what was done in Portugal after the 1755 earthquake a rare event in history?

Yes, it was. Pombal played a crucial role. He held practically absolute power after the earthquake and was largely responsible for the planned city that Lisbon later became, a city closely linked to the Enlightenment. Pombal was advised on public health by Ribeiro Sanches, a Portuguese New Christian exiled from Paris, who was Pombal’s paid consultant (of course, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo only later became known as the Marquis of Pombal).

But the plans for the new Lisbon were also made by Portuguese military engineers, and were highly utilitarian, austere, and uniform, which probably only an enlightened despot could have imposed, unlike what happened in London after the Great Fire. Although Pombal’s experience in London, when he was Portuguese ambassador, was also crucial. As was his time as Portuguese representative in Vienna. Pombal also expelled the Jesuits, which led to similar actions in France and Spain, and to the suppression of the order by the Pope ( ).

Pombal’s historical image is still greatly influenced by these measures: his attack on the Jesuits and his attack on the aristocratic conspirators who attempted regicide against King José.

The book is published in English, Portuguese, and French, and in it I recount how the streets of London remain as they were before the Great Fire, when Christopher Wren was denied the opportunity to redesign the capital. But Lisbon and Paris remain as the Marquis of Pombal, Napoleon III, and Baron Haussmann imagined them, Lisbon rebuilt after the catastrophic earthquake of 1755, and Paris rebuilt between the revolutionary uprising of 1848 and France’s catastrophic defeat by Bismarck and a resurgent Prussia, the siege of Paris, and the bloody days of the Paris Commune.

Another of your areas of interest is Brazil. To understand Brazil, a country that remains enormous to this day, is it essential to understand the impact of the court’s transfer to Rio de Janeiro?

Yes. The transfer of the Portuguese court to Brazil at the end of 1807 and its establishment in Rio in 1808, until the early 1820s, explain the continuity and preservation of Brazil’s territorial integrity during the period of independence. My most recent book, The Globalization of the Eighteenth Century, was published on my 85th birthday and the 250th anniversary of American independence.

It relates Benjamin Franklin’s translation of American constitutional documents and their publication in French to encourage France to support the American colonies in their struggle against Great Britain, and the role of Thomas Jefferson, who, as Franklin’s successor as American envoy in Paris, met secretly in Nîmes with a young Brazilian student at the University of Montpellier who was seeking American support for an anti-colonial revolt in Brazil against Portuguese rule.

The revolt was planned in Minas Gerais for 1789, but the plan was denounced and failed. Jefferson was ambiguous in his response, preferring a trade agreement with Portugal and Portuguese naval support in the Mediterranean against the Barbary States.

This is also a story from the book   Recueil des Loix Constitutives de Colonies Angloises, confédérées sous la dénomination D’Etats-Unis, de 1778), which I discovered at the Newberry Library in Chicago when I was a Newberry-Gulkbenkian Fellow in 1968.

Subsequently, the original Recueil of the Minas conspirators ( ) was rediscovered and now, since 1994, is in the Museum of the Inconfidência in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil.

After losing Brazil in the 19th century, Portugal built an African empire in the 20th century. Even fighting on three fronts, Portugal was powerless, not least because its colonies were an important theater of competition in the Cold War between the US and the USSR, especially Angola.

During a period in the mid-1970s, both Portugal and Angola became the focus of Cold War tensions between East and West. In Portugal, however, Western democracy triumphed, despite Kissinger, the Soviets, and Spínola, leading to the incorporation of a democratic Portugal into the European Community. In Africa, however, and in Angola in particular, Cuban intervention was crucial to the MPLA’s victory against the clandestine armed intervention supported by the United States and South Africa, which later led to the fall of the white regime in Rhodesia and South Africa. These were important international consequences.

Portugal will celebrate 900 years in 2043. How do you view the historical survival of a country born of the Reconquista and without natural borders with Spain? Is much owed to the alliance with England?

It is a complex picture. Certainly, English and, later, British support helped at critical moments. And it should be remembered that, in the 1640s, it was Oliver Cromwell’s English Parliamentary Republic that signed the treaty with the newly independent Portugal after Spanish rule. But Portugal always ends up making its own history. This is always my recommendation: never underestimate the Portuguese.

One last, more personal question for the historian who has known the country for six decades. When you visit Portugal, what do you like most? The monuments, the landscapes, or a good plate of cod?

Bacalhau à Brás with a glass of Alvarinho wine.

 

18th Century Globalization: The American Revolutionary Ideal Comes to Brazil

Perspectives on Portuguese History: The 2024 Lectures by Professor Kenneth Maxwell

The Tale of Three Cities: The Rebuilding of London, Paris, and Lisbon