The central theme of René Pélissier's research, which was globally groundbreaking at the time, lay in deconstructing the "myth of five centuries of Portuguese colonisation" ( Mesquitela Lima, “À propos de deux ouvrages ,” 1980: 512). He highlighted the theory that "Lusophone Africa" was only truly conquered and, consequently, colonised from the beginning of the final decades of the 19th century. In this context, he demonstrated how the "first age" ( Pélissier , Les campagnes coloniales du Portugal , 2004: 21) of Portuguese presence, both in Asia and Africa, was primarily based on trading posts and the slave trade, occupying only a minuscule fraction of the territories that would eventually be effectively colonised from the mid-19th century onwards. Similarly, the historian emphasised the ongoing conflicts that arose from that time between Lisbon and the colonised populations. Challenging the focus that the years 1961–1974 placed on studies related to the "Overseas War," René Pélissier advanced another original theory: that the outbreak of conflict in 1961, particularly in Angola, was merely the final phase of a nearly century-long cycle of resistance wars against Portuguese presence. From this perspective, he concluded that the 25th of April 1974 (the Carnation Revolution) was simply the end point of a colonial project that had repeatedly failed under the Constitutional Monarchy, the First Republic, and the Estado Novo , due to a lack of economic, military, and social resources to keep pace in Africa with the colonising momentum of the major European powers.

Pélissier’s study of a century of recurrent Luso-African wars also allowed him to demonstrate how the Portuguese colonisation of the 19th century, particularly in Angola (1979) and Mozambique (1984), replicated the old practices of maritime empire-building from the 15th century. This colonisation relied on the one hand, on negotiation with indigenous authorities and, on the other, on collaboration with the local elites descended from the Portuguese expansion on the continent during the 15th and 16th centuries. Thus, the historian underscored the crucial importance of the mixed-race elites in the Portuguese colonial administration of the 20th century, as well as their progressive break with Lisbon and the emergence of independence movements from within these elites (1979, 1984, 2004).

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