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THE TEAM
CONTACT
His international contacts continued. He attended the International Colloquium on Maritime History in Seville (1967) at which he presented, along with Teixeira da Mota and Prof. Frédéric Mauro, a fundamental paper on the Portuguese sea-routes of the south Atlantic. At a meeting of the Commission Internationale d’Histoire des Mouvements Sociaux et des Structures Sociales, in Naples (1969), he gave a paper on agrarian movements in Portugal, as well as taking the opportunity to carry out research in the archives of Florence. In the same year he received an invitation from the Brazilian Historical and Geographic Institute to go to Brazil, he went to Madrid, and he made an official visit to NATO headquarters in Brussels. The following year, 1970, he went to London, and also to the World Congress of Historical Sciences, in Moscow, as Joint Secretary of the Portuguese Section of the Société Internationale des Sciences Historiques. In 1972 he was invited to participate in a meeting of historians and sociologists on Spanish and Portuguese topics in the University of Madison (Wisconsin).
With the revolution of 25 April 1974, JBM temporarily left the Faculty of Letters, though he was still in demand from the Universities of Coimbra and Porto as an examiner. In 1976 the Portuguese Catholic University invited him to organize a course in Economic History and to be involved in it personally as an Ordinary Professor (with a Chair). In the same year the Centre for the Hotel Trade and Tourism invited him to teach two courses, in History of Art and Portuguese Culture, and the Adenauer Foundation charged him with leading a study group on Fontes Pereira de Melo. In 1977, the Air Force High School invited him to take part in training its senior staff, while similar requests also came from the Institute of National Defence, the Institute of Higher Military Studies and the Higher Naval Institute of War. This was to provide the impulse and occasion for delivering his studies of strategy and comparative history which would lead to the publication of one of his most original and most cited productions, the “Constants and Force-lines in Portuguese Diplomatic History: A Study of Geopolitics”.
In 1978 he was designated Vice-President of the Portuguese Commission of the Comité International des Sciences Historiques. In 1980 he returned to the Faculty of Letters, in Lisbon, where he resumed his activities in teaching and research, favouring from then on the contemporary period. He was coordinator in the areas of Contemporary History and Methodology, taught History of Portugal (seventeenth and eighteenth century) and Methodology of History, and gave seminars in Contemporary History of Portugal, Business, economic areas and legislation (eighteenth to twentieth century) and Diplomatic History of Portugal.
