Portuguese campaigns of pacification and occupation

The Portuguese campaigns of pacification and occupation (campanhas de pacificação e ocupação in Portuguese) were a vast set of military operations, conducted between the 1880s and 1910s by the Portuguese Armed Forces in the overseas provinces of the Portuguese Empire. They resulted in the securing of vast territories for Portugal and the creation of modern-day Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Timor-Leste, which came to be known as the "Third Portuguese Empire".

These campaigns took place after the Independence of Brazil and during the Scramble for Africa. They saw action at Chaimite, in Mozambique, where Mouzinho de Albuquerque captured the Vatua king Gungunhana but also at Môngua, in Angola.

Angola, Mozambique, Guinea and Timor were mostly occupied between 1890 and 1909, though operations continued until as late as 1936. The Gaza Empire in southern Mozambique was annexed in 1895 through a campaign organized by António Enes. The pacification of Zambezia followed between 1897 and 1902, culminating in the Barue campaign. The north was occupied between 1899 and 1917. Timor was occupied and pacified between 1894 and 1912. The occupation of Angola was carried out in the north, center and south, with the north being mostly occupied between 1886 and 1912, the center between 1890 and 1902, and the south between 1886 and 1915, though it was only pacified in 1926. Mainland Guinea was fully occupied by 1915, and the Bijagos in 1936, marking the end of the pacification campaigns.

At least 430 operations were carried out in Guinea, Angola and Mozambique between 1841 and 1936, totalling 557 months or 46 years on the field, involving a total of 58,000 soldiers and hundreds of thousands of African militiamen and auxiliaries. A further 56 campaigns were carried out on Timor between 1847 and 1913, involving 2,200 soldiers and about 114,000 Timorese militiamen and auxiliaries. Though numerous, the pacification campaigns were usually small in scale and involved mostly native troops. Relatively large expeditions of well-equipped European troops were dispatched directly from Europe whenever Portuguese sovereignty over the claimed territories was seriously contested. They were otherwise marked by the mass participation of native troops on the side of Portugal, which led some authors to comment that the new territories "conquered themselves".