This book provides a rich and complex picture of Portugal through various lenses.

The book highlights the long shadow of the Salazar regime, the enduring legacy of its history and culture, the transformative impact of the Lisbon earthquake and its reconstruction, the struggles and ultimate end of its colonial empire, and the evolving perspectives on its past as seen through the eyes of historian Kenneth Maxwell.

The book underscores the tensions between tradition and modernity, authoritarianism and the desire for change, and national pride and the challenges of a globalized world.

Carlos Gaspar, senior researcher at the Portuguese Institute of International Relations (IPRI NOVA) and political advisor to the first three elected Presidents of the Portuguese Republic between 1977 and 2006 commented on the book:

“Kenneth Maxwell is the doyen of historians of the revolution, decolonization and Portuguese democracy and as such was honored at the conferences held in Portugal and Brazil to commemorate the 50th anniversary of 25 April.”

In 2024, Maxwell travelled to Brazil, to the United States and to Portugal to give three keynote lectures at three different occasions. The first was done in the University of São Paulo (USP) and focused on the international dimension of the Portuguese revolution in 1974.

He would return to that theme but explore additional dimensions in his keynote presentation at an October 2024 conference in Lisbon.

And in between, he would return to Harvard University and participate in an international colloquium on Luso-Brazilian Art and Literature. His lecture focused on a subject which encompassed how the rebuilding of Lisbon after the great earthquake in 1755 fit into to the rebuilding of two other greater European cities, namely London and Paris.

This book contains the full text of these lectures along with associated materials with regard to the conferences themselves.

This book contains the full text of these lectures along with associated materials with regard to the conferences themselves. Each lecture is published in English in one chapter and then published in Portuguese in the following chapter. It provides for both English speaking and Portuguese speaking readers a unique overview of developments in the 18th and 20th centuries.

The book begins with a prologue essay which Dr. Maxwell wrote after visiting Portugal in 1964. This essay provides a sense of Portugal a decade before the 1974 revolution.

Carlos Gaspar highlighted the importance of this book as follows: “Kenneth Maxwell returns to these themes in his latest interventions on the Portuguese revolution published in this book, which also includes an essay on Portugal written in October 1964, as well as historical essays on relations between Portugal and Brazil and on the reconstruction of London, Lisbon and Paris in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries respectively, uniting the Marquis of Pombal and the Baron of Haussmann in the same class of visionaries who restored the capital of the state after a catastrophe – the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 and the Paris Commune in 1871.”

And he concluded his forward to the book as follows:

“E. H. Carr wrote that facts without their historian are dead and meaningless. Kenneth Maxwell has ensured that the first democratic revolution of the 20th century and its international consequences are alive and kicking.”