He graduated in 1921 and 1922, with a mark of 17 out of 20 in both courses, going on immediately to a career in Law. The death of his grandparents, both in February 1923, caused him to join his parents in Brazil. Returning to Portugal the following year he resumed his practice in Law, and later started on a doctorate in Historical Sciences, while at the same time entering the Escola Normal Superior.

On 19 June 1930 he applied to be examined for his doctorate, in line with a legal requirement that obliged selected candidates to defend additional submissions before the examiners. These were to be included in the same volume with the main dissertation. Apart from him, only one other candidate in the area of History was affected by legislation. The collection was called O Significado das Navegações e Outros Ensaios [The Meaning of the Overseas Voyages and Other Essays]. The public examinations took place in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, on 14 and 16 December 1930, before a panel chaired by Cameiro Pacheco, with Oliveira Ramos and Agostinho Fortes as examiners. According to the newspapers of the time the event was witnessed by a large audience, with the dissertation provoking a lively and brilliant debate. The theses he defended set out to contest various established ideas, showing a historical approach that rejected a fragmentary, sectorial or purely erudite vision of the Discoveries, in sharp contrast to the usual Positivist schema, while making a critical analysis of the connection between the different interpretations and their respective theoretical, or simply doctrinaire, foundations.

Sensitive to the debate around the division of history into periods, Mário de Albuquerque put forward an explanation of a global character, attempting to put the Portuguese Discoveries into a comparative historical perspective. He proposed a “conjunctural architecture” (p. 15), not entirely free of inspiration from the “often very confused work, The Decline of the West” (pp. 233, 282) by Oswald Spengler, whose ideas he attacked, unpicking their contradictions (p. 236) or rejecting, often ironically, its classifications (“Faustian man must have been moulded in the dolls’ factories of Nuremberg ”, p. 284). In an often bruising style, he warned of the complexity of the Expansion, sharply denouncing the critical illogicality of using a single explanatory factor, starting with the “ultra-romantic” (p. 23) thesis of António Sérgio. He methodically laid out Sérgio’s propositions, refuting them in light of the sources and of the mentalities of the times.

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