It's fair to say that he followed the path opened by Jaime Cortesão, which emphasised the role of Portugal in the global process of maritime expansion and, in the midst of seas never sailed before, the formation of Brazil. Even if we consider the greater emphasis placed by the Portuguese historian on the development of Western civilisation, and by the Brazilian historian on the rooting of capitalism, the path opened by interpretations on the long term and of large structures was the major inspiration for both authors. In the same vein, he followed Vitorino Magalhães Godinho's concern with studies that pointed to the conditioning elements of the expansionist nation regarding the regions it targeted and/or conquered as a criterion for understanding the forms of production and labour that were established based on the first contacts and subsequent relations. The warning given by the Portuguese historian was included in a 1957 article entitled "Colonização e desenvolvimento econômico" [Colonisation and economic development]. In his doctorate, Portugal e Brasil na crise do Antigo Sistema Colonial (1777-1808) [Portugal and Brazil in the Crisis of the Old Colonial System (1777-1808)], which he defended in 1973, the fine articulation between these readings in the formulation of the concept of the Old Colonial System presented readers with an explanation of maritime expansion and the resulting colonisation of Brazil as elements of the process of primitive capital accumulation— which would be the foundations for industrialisation and the rooting of capitalism in the contemporary world. In his view, this was a system created from the 16th century onwards. Its development in the 18th century was the basis for its own evolution, a process made evident with the opening of Brazilian ports to friendly nations in 1808, and ultimately— in a line of thinking he would come to develop in other texts— with the independence of Brazil in 1822. Since Brazil was the result of European colonisation, its independence would also become a part of the broader crisis of the European Ancien Régime, which had generated the colonisation processes studied by the author. In a response to his critics, who sought cyclic reasons for the opening of the ports and the independence of Brazil (Valentim Alexandre, 1942-), highlighted the aspects of interiorisation present in the process of Brazilian colonisation since its beginning (João Fragoso, 1959-), or considered the King's powers to be too distant from the many parts of the Portuguese Empire and, therefore, ineffective in the constitution of colonial companies (António Manuel Hespanha, 1945-), Fernando Novais dialectically observed that the colony — as an extension of the Metropolis — was also, and especially, its negation, a fact that would explain endogenous processes and the conditions of privacy in the lives of the colonisers and the generations that succeeded each other and moved through the vast Brazilian land, creating unforeseen circumstances in the original reasons behind colonisation.

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