The proposed research will examine Portuguese colonial policies towards livestock populations in Angola and Mozambique, examining the strategies used by the colonial administrators to transform their way of life and commercial practices, with the aim of changing the pastoralists from supposedly irrational and anti-economic actors (collecting cattle for prestige and other social purposes) into "progressive" or "evolved" peasants and market-oriented entrepreneurs. In addition, the research will also examine how the livestock populations, at both locations, responded to such interventions and impositions, by evading and/or resisting the policy or by accepting it and even using it to their advantage.

The research will analyze these historical processes at both sites using and further developing new concepts and perspectives derived from world history, particularly those of resource frontiers, integrating African cattle into a global context and showing the limits of the history of global circulation to understand global processes.

It will be a comparative study of an underexposed subject within an underexposed colonial empire. It will reveal whether and to what extent the Portuguese pastoral policy differed from the policies of the other colonial imperialist powers. It will also clarify 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.