The book title comes from Aubrey Bell’s Portugal of the Portuguese (1916): “Since the murder of King Carlos and of the Crown Prince Luis Felipe on the 1st of February 1908… A swarm of writers have descended like locusts on the land…" The methodology is to connect a specific group of critics in the years before the First World War to a constellation of general attitudes about Portugal and the Portuguese-speaking world. The primary focus is to explain how the critical context of Portugal’s history that incubated The Locusts crystalized into the pressure group to free political prisoners. E. M. Tenison, the Secretary of the British Protest Committee, left a unique 200-page unpublished personal memoir. There are no comparative studies in book form. This book problematizes Anglo-Portuguese relations around the concept forwarded by Amilcar Cabral, and others, that Portuguese colonialism was ‘the colonialism of the semi-colonized’. It makes a broader contribution to the causes of the First World War in Anglo–Portuguese–German relations. | The Locusts by Gary Thorn, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters