The Internationalization of Portuguese Historiography

I shall begin with a true and curious story. In March 2003, I went to give a lecture in an European university, as part of a seminar on the Far Right in the 20th century. In the room was a Portuguese student whom I barely knew and who had landed in that University some months earlier. In the course of the customary conversation after the seminar, she told me about her great perplexity when she realised that many of the leading figures from the Portuguese intellectual and historiographical world who had passed through that University were unknown to their peers abroad. She was even more surprised when she submitted their names to the “tyranny” of the gigantic databases at the university library and discovered that these names were not even mentioned in the summaries of the thousands of articles and books published in English over the last 20 years.