Furtado was a reader of António Sérgio (1883-1969), João Lúcio de Azevedo (1855-1933), Oliveira Martins (1845-1894), Teófilo Braga (1843-1924) and Alexandre Herculano (1810-1877)—a group of authors he had already referenced during his doctoral defence in 1948—and followed the thinking of António Sérgio in affirming the precociousness of the development of the Portuguese maritime commercial bourgeoisie and its importance in maritime expansion. His interpretation of Brazil was based on Sérgio's hypothesis regarding the precocity of the Portuguese bourgeoisie, the process of Portuguese national emancipation, the great navigations and the process of colonisation in Brazil. In this logic, the Brazilian colony was built as an attachment of the metropolis, and the occupation and colonisation of the territory that would become Brazil was just another episode in European commercial expansion. Thus, a study that aims to historicise Brazilian underdevelopment should begin by showing the historical processes that brought the Portuguese to Brazilian lands. In the study of these processes, both in his 1948 doctoral thesis and in his most important text, A formação econômica do Brasil written in 1957, the weakness of the Portuguese economy—learned from reading Oliveira Martins and António Sérgio—as well as the affirmation of the poor Lusitanian arms in their imperial conquest would land on this side of the Atlantic and create a system of exploitation of land, wealth, and labour that would make up the general meaning of Brazilian colonisation and the historical origin of Brazilian underdevelopment. The Colony—a large enterprise designed to feed the Metropolis' trade with tropical products—was exploited for metropolitan interests from the very beginning. This would leave its mark on the organisation of production and the distribution of wealth. Moving around an axis located outside its own territory, the Colony was an answer to the interests of foreign trade and did not observe its internal possibilities and interests. The comparison with the so-called settlement colonies was inevitable: the autonomy of the colonisers established in the English colonies of North America in relation to the Metropolis would explain a strong and productive economy built as early as the colonial era, which anchored its development in the contemporary world. Thus, in an attempt to escape the interpretations of European economic models and to historicise the experience of the underdevelopment process in Brazil, Furtado used the Portuguese 19 th -century decadent theses to declare the original evil brought by the Portuguese coloniser. These theses were tempered with readings of John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) and defined the terms of his public intervention in the aforementioned positions: there was a need for strong state action to overcome the colonial liabilities, promote development, and rectify the unequal distribution of wealth represented by the technologically lagging monoculture latifundia.

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