Roots of public relations in Portugal: Changing an old paradigm

This article examines the roots of public relations (PR) in Portugal, which for the last three decades have been consensually placed in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It argues that such a historical paradigm is contradicted by thorough archival research and needs to be revised. In fact the origins of PR activities can be traced back as far as the 1900s, having evolved initially under the terms of propaganda and press relations, with no apparent influence from the United States (U.S.). The specific term and the concept of PR arrived in Portugal only in the 1910s and matured from the 1930s to the late 1940s. They were first imported from the U.S., where in 1915 a Portuguese professor witnessed the PR activities carried out by the agricultural system. However, the modern concept, theory and practice of PR were mostly influenced by the United Kingdom (U.K.). The connecting link was The Anglo-Portuguese Telephone Co. Ltd. (APT), which pioneered the development of PR in Portugal. It directly benefited from the PR work that Basil Clarke did for a British pressure group whose chairman also managed APT. Regarding PR historiography this paper reinforces the thesis that PR developed in Europe independently from the U.S. tradition and long before World War II. It also places Portugal among the first European countries where PR emerged.