Coming from a working-class family and a veteran of the Second World War, Dauril Alden obtained a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1950. He went on to earn his doctorate in 1959 with a thesis on the administration of the Portuguese viceroy, the Marquis of Lavradio , in 18th-century Brazil. To complete this work, he conducted research in the archives located in Rio de Janeiro.

Alden is one of several foreign researchers who, from the mid-20th century onwards, focused their studies on Brazilian history and are known as Brazilianists . Among them are the French scholars Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Monbeig , and Roger Bastide, as well as American historians Ralph Della Cava, Thomas Skidmore, and Werner Baer. The works of these Brazilianists significantly advanced the field of comparative history in Brazil.

At the end of 1959, Alden was hired by the University of Washington to work in the History Department, where he developed various courses on Latin America and organised the university library's collection specialising in this area.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Alden analysed a series of colonial statistical data from Brazil — sourcing information from both Brazilian and Portuguese archives — which enabled him to conduct pioneering quantitative studies on various colonial economic activities in different regions of Brazil. His notable works include The Growth and Decline of Indigo Production in Colonial Brazil: A Study in Comparative Economic History and O significado da produção de cacau na região amazônica no fim do período colonial [The Significance of Cocoa Production in the Amazon Region at the End of the Colonial Period]. In these studies, he supports Celso Furtado's thesis, arguing that the Brazilian economy experienced a shift from its peak to a crisis in the final years of the Portuguese colonial era (1750-1808) due to the decline of gold mining, a period he terms the "late colonial" era. This crisis in gold production led to a return to the traditional model of colonial exploitation, namely agricultural production. Alden asserts that another key factor during this period was the Pombaline reforms, which aimed to identify a product widely accepted in the European market. He points out that these reforms reinforced the colony's dependence on the metropolis, as production oriented towards external interests strengthened the ties between the centre and the periphery — not only in the context of the Portugal-Brazil relationship but also regarding the dynamics between the colony's centre (Rio de Janeiro) and its peripheral territories. The crisis in gold mining, the resurgence of agricultural production, and the implementation of the Marquis of Pombal's reforms led to significant changes in the Luso-Brazilian institutional landscape, increasing administrative centralisation and exacerbating the disparities between centre and periphery.

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