In 1822, Portugal lost its main overseas territory, Brazil. The transition from absolutism to a parliamentary monarchy involved a devastating Civil War from 1828-34. The governments of the constitutional monarchy were not able to truly industrialise and modernise the country; by the dawn of the twentieth century, Portugal had a GDP per capita of 40% of the Western European average and an illiteracy rate of 74%. Portuguese territorial claims in Africa were challenged during the Scramble for Africa. Political chaos and economic problems endured from the last years of the monarchy to the first Republic of 1910–1926, which led to the installing of a national dictatorship in 1926. While Finance Minister António de Oliveira Salazar managed to discipline the Portuguese public finances, it evolved into a single-party corporative regime in the early 1930s—the "Estado Novo"—whose first three decades were also marked by a relative stagnation and underdevelopment; as such, by 1960 the Portuguese GDP per capita was only 38% of the EC-12 average.