At Vanderbilt University he organised, in association with T. Lynn Smith, a significant collection of works on Brazil with the collaboration of Americans and Brazilians: Brazil, Portrait of Half a Continent (1951). He wrote the first chapter, "The Unity of Brazilian History". Shortly afterwards he also wrote the chapter "Colonial Brazil" for a work organised by Livermore— Portugal and Brazil: An Introduction (1953)—and edited the book Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Luso-Brazilian Studies (1953), in which took part great historians such as Charles R. Boxer and Robert C. Smith. Finally, he collaborated on the work organised by Arthur P. Whitaker, Latin America and the Enlightenment (1942) with a chapter on Brazil. In recognition of his work, he was awarded the Order of the Southern Cross by the Brazilian government in 1952.

Even though Marchant worked on various topics from the history of Brazil from the 16th to the 19th century, it's his work on the first century of Portuguese colonisation that stands out from his oeuvre as a whole. As is well known, the Portuguese Crown did not undertake any major action in the American lands in the decades following Cabral's voyage. The rivalry with the Spanish and French, however, forced the Crown to take a new approach given the risk of losing territory, since the priority at the time was the East. The solution found was to grant large swathes of land to vassals with experience in overseas activities. This was a recreation of the colonisation model based on the so-called hereditary captaincies, which had previously been applied to the Atlantic islands. However, the colonisation process undertaken by the grantees from the 1530s onwards was unable to overcome all the difficulties encountered, most of all the indigenous resistance—the central theme of Marchant's work—or achieve the objectives of guaranteeing the defence of the territory, thus forcing the Portuguese Crown to intervene with the creation of the General Government in 1548. The hereditary captaincies did not cease to exist, but from that moment on they lost importance and were gradually incorporated into the royal patrimony in an enduring process that only ended in the 18th century. In general terms, it's fair to say the captaincies failed or, in a more nuanced view, that—given the difficulties encountered—they ended up serving as a preliminary stage in the colonisation process, facilitating in some way the efforts made later under the aegis of the Crown. In any case, the initial choice of the hereditary captaincies system marked the process of colonisation in Brazil, especially until the mid-17th century, and consequently generated an immense historiographical debate, of which Marchant's work is a significant part.

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