A Paper Empire: Late-Colonial Development and Its Limits in Angola, 1955–74

Abstract

This article examines the Companhia de Celulose do Ultramar Português (CCUP), founded in Angola in 1955, as a case study of late Portuguese colonial developmentalism. It argues that the company is best understood within the wider infrastructural formation that sustained it, linking eucalyptus plantations, railway transport, hydroelectric power, concessional land policy, and state-backed finance on Angola’s Central Plateau. Drawing on archival documentation and official company and banking reports, the article reconstructs the material, political, and institutional conditions that shaped the project between the mid-1950s and 1974. It shows that the CCUP’s projected competitiveness rested less on natural abundance than on a form of institutional fertility produced through inherited infrastructure, selective credit, politically structured energy prices, and the structural devaluation of African labour. Its history reveals how the very conditions that made late-colonial industry viable also imposed its structural limits.