The historical agent ‘Portugal’ was really a mix of national and supranational forces

Evidence

Fifteenth-century “Portugal,” the singularly ambitious historical agent one encounters in countless scholarly studies, is a metaphor. It is, as we have already seen, largely a convenience, an appropriately deceptive categorical referent to what in actuality was a mixture of political and economic forces, both national and supranational in origins. The term “Portugal,” while symbolizing a nation, has as well obscured these forces and their significance for what was a little nation of less than one million people. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 521

Categorization

• DEFINE: Robinson reframes ‘Portugal’ as a deceptive category hiding royal-bourgeois and Italian merchant alliances, not a unified nation.
• XREF: connects to: Capital inflows had masked Portugal’s underlying demographic and growth deficits — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 194