Anyone familiar with Latin America who goes to Portugal immediately feels in recognisable territory. It seems worth exploring the applicability of development theory to such countries of the European periphery and studying their relationships with the core of Europe. We should abandon the convention that development is a problem only of the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America which are eligible for aid. This approach, which has been rooted in political expediency and paternalism, now hinders the professionalisation of the subject. To progress further the coverage of development studies needs to be world‐wide. The significance of the European periphery is that it provides a bridge across which the subject can escape from its conventional, essentially tropical, boundaries. It is hard to deny that Portugal is part of the development field—and if Portugal, why not Greece, Spain, Italy, Britain ... ?