Colonial History
Depiction of diggers at work in Transvaal gold rush
With the decline of Portuguese power, especially during the period when the crown of Portugal was combined with the crown of Spain (1580–1640), the Portuguese coastal settlements were ignored and fell into a ruinous condition. Into the 19th century, a system prevailed of dividing the land into large agricultural estates which the natives cultivated for the benefit of the European leaseholders, who were also tax-collector for each district and claimed the tax either in labor or produce, a system that kept the sharecropping farmers in a state of serfdom. Direct Portuguese influence was limited. On the coast between several native ports of call and Madagascar a large surreptitious trade in slaves was carried on until 1877, supplying slaves for Arabia and the Ottomans. European traders and prospectors barely penetrated the interior regions, until the Transvaal gold rush.
stamp made by the Mozambique Co.
In 1891, the Portuguese shifted the administration of much of the country to a large private company, under a charter granting sovereign rights for 50 years to the Mozambique Company, which was controlled and financed by the British. The ‘Mozambique Company’ issued postage stamps and established railroad lines to neighboring countries. It supplied cheap, and often forced, African labor to the goldmines and plantations of the nearby British colonies and South Africa. It was under the British power too that the new the cotton concessionary system started to occur. This brought intense periods of poverty and starvation because prices were fixed at extremely low prices, regulations were set upon the native Africans, and inhabitants were forced to work up to 150 days a year on their fields. With this change in power, more disorganization took place in the country. Also, because policies were now designed to benefit white settlers and the Portuguese homeland, little attention was paid to the integration of Mozambique's indigenous population, its economic infrastructure, or the skills of its indigenous rural population.
Portugal instituted another form of cash crop creation called the concession system. The cotton concessionary system was government run. Prices were fixed at extremely low prices, regulations were set upon the native Africans, and inhabitants were forced to work up to 150 days a year on their fields. Africans could only sell their cotton for African (low) prices, while Europeans had special high selling prices. Mozambicans knew cotton as the "mother of all poverty" during this time, and intense periods of poverty and starvation were fairly common.