The proposed research will explore the Portuguese colonial policies towards cattle pastoralist populations in Angola and Mozambique, investigating the strategies employed by the colonial administrators to transform their way of life and commercial practices, with the aim to turn the pastoralists from allegedly irrational and anti-economic actors (accumulating cattle for prestige and other social uses) into "progressive" or "evolved" farmers and market oriented entrepreneurs. Besides this, the research will also examinate how the cattle pastoralists, in both sites, reacted to such interventions and impositions, by eluding and/or opposing the policies or by accepting and even using them to their advantage.

The research will analyse these historical processes in both sites using and further developing novel concepts and perspectives derived from global history, in particular that of commodity frontiers, that integrate African cattle in a global context and show the limits of the histories of global circulation to understand global processes.

It will be a comparative study of an under-studied subject within an under-researched colonial empire, that will reveal if and to what extent the Portuguese pastoralist policies were distinct from the policies of the other colonial imperial powers and will elucidate the different perspectives between and within the Portuguese colonies, due to the different socio-economic, environmental and (geo)political conditions, as well as different regional networks of expertise and inter-imperial learning, influence and political and economic constraints.