Portuguese Journal of Social Science - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2007

This paper aims to assess the effect on Angola of the penetration of its borders by individuals, religious bodies and military forces from neighbouring German South West Africa. It covers the period of the creation of the German colony in 1883 and its attempts at self-sufficiency up to the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. It recounts the ill-starred attempts by Portuguese civil and military authorities to securely occupy the southern region culminating in the successful military occupation of the border area in 1907. It examines the period of the creation and role of the German Angola Bund and of the Joint Portuguese-German Economic Commission to southern Angola and their impact on Portuguese governorgeneral Norton de Matos and on Portuguese policy. The paper catalogues German military aggression in southern Angola prior to 1914. It recounts the circumstances leading to the dispatch to Angola by Lisbon of Portuguese troops and of their defeat by inferior German forces and the ensuing chaos leading to the consequent fall in Portuguese prestige in the entire southern Angolan region.

Looking more closely at the way people form expectations about the possible outcome of the election in their electoral district I will provide evidence for the first time that strategic voting can be observed and predicted even in PR systems with large districts magnitudes, such as in Portugal. Employing district-level data from 19752002 I estimate that a party, who is expected to win no seat, will be strategically deserted on average by about 3 per cent of the voters. This number does systematically vary with the district magnitude of each district. Nevertheless even in Portugal's largest electoral district, Lisbon, strategic voting can be observed to have a systematic impact on parties vote shares. Moreover there is evidence that strategic voting can partly account for the majoritarian trend that can be observed within the Portuguese party system.

According to common sense, a book is a way of conveying ideas. On their own books do not alter or add anything to what authors want to communicate to readers. The most recent history of books has produced a Copernican shift from this simplistic view of the nature of these companions. Books do matter. Their material naturefrom page-layout, to typographical devices, graphics, format and even their bindingconveys meaning. This article seeks to relate intellectual shifts in early modern legal theory to actual changes in the ideas dominating the understanding of law. The paper would like to examine the problematic the imperial position traditional legal history gives to an individual author (reviving the question once posed by Foucault: what is an author?). Is the author merely an intellectual evolution in the creation of new figures of legal discourse?