“Portugal is not a Small Country”: Maps and Propaganda in the Salazar Regime

The representation of territory is one of the most important elements in the construction of national identities. It is impossible to imagine a nation without territory, as every irredentist movement reminds us. Territory is the “real” body of the nation, at least in nationalist iconography. Some recent works show that cartography has been a tool of propaganda for the European dictatorships in the 1930s and 1940s. Political propaganda in a modern sense began in Portugal with the New State (Estado Novo), and the use of cartography was relevant, although it did not have a central role as in Germany. This paper tries to describe and analyse the ways to see the empire as a nation in Portugal during the Salazar regime. It discusses mainly the use of maps in the great exhibitions of the time, and also the school cartography and its insertion in the general discourse of colonialism in Portugal. Finally it also deals with the resistance to imperial narratives, showing its entanglement with them.