Free Spain: A Unique History by Stanley G. Payne Page B

Asia;
    3. Establishment of the first maritime constellation to span much of the globe;
    4. Introduction of a new program of administered monarchist capitalism, though in the long run this proved a failure;
    5. Beginning the transatlantic slave trade;
    6. Initiating the development of the plantation economy of the Atlantic islands and of the Western Hemisphere;
    7. Carrying out the first peaceful decolonization in the Western Hemisphere;
    8. Becoming the first Iberian country to resolve the liberalism/traditionalism conflict in the nineteenth century;
    9. Becoming the first Iberian country to stabilize nineteenth-century liberalism;
    10. Introducing the first permanent new republic of the twentieth century in Europe (1910);
    11. Establishing the first new-style twentieth-century authoritarian regime in Europe (1917-18), though it did not last;
    12. Introducing Europe's first corporative constitution in 1933;
    13. Initiating the first overthrow of an authoritarian regime in southern and eastern Europe during the late twentieth century (1974).

    Some of the internal political achievements or innovations were no doubt facilitated by the small size of the country, and one or two of them possibly encouraged more by weakness than by strength. Moreover, several of these innovations were destructive, as has been the case in the history of most human societies. In general, however, they indicate a degree of initiative that has been overshadowed in foreign perceptions by Portugal's social and economic backwardness. These more precocious features of change, however, reveal a not inconsiderable degree of continuing activism, despite the limitations of the socioeconomic context.
Land of the "Negative Superlative"
    At the first meeting of the International Conference Group on Portugal, held at the University of New Hampshire in October 1973, the sociologist Herminio Martins referred to his native country as the land of the "negative superlative." By this he meant that while some countries are referred to in terms of positive superlatives such as the most, the biggest, and the like, comparative references to Portugal in modern times have been in the negative superlative as the most backward, most underdeveloped, poorest, most illiterate of the west European countries. So long as one is looking at the main part of Europe north and west of the Balkans, such negative comparisons have usually been statistically justified.
    At no time has Portugal been an economic or a technological leader (except for certain aspects of maritime science in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) and, from the seventeenth century on, it has been a relatively underdeveloped country that in comparative terms lost rather than gained ground during the nineteenth century. This is a story somewhat reminiscent of Spain, save that the comparative Portuguese statistics in modern times have been rather lower than those for Spain as a whole. Only in a few other parts of southern and eastern Europe has economic development been slower.
    During the Middle Ages Portugal experienced the relative economic marginality common to most of the Christian kingdoms in the peninsula, though, as we have seen, in a time of generally slow economic change this did not result in a situation of profound underdevelopment. In the fifteenth century, Portugal, like Castile, probably ranked not much lower than a "low medium" on the general comparative scale of western economic development. Moreover, it momentarily took the lead in several specific areas of maritime technology and of long-range commercial organization, though these advantages would not long endure.
    A fundamental question in Portuguese history is why the income generated by the thalassocracy for several generations was not used to stimulate positive economic growth. Several factors seem to have been important. One was that the maritime enterprise of the "first empire" was not as profitable as might have been thought. Certain voyages