Caio Prado Júnior's historical studies are closely linked to his communist militancy. At the age of 26, the author published Evolução política do Brasil [Brazil's Political Evolution] in an edition financed by himself, with a restricted circulation, which generated feedback among critics in the newspapers and in political and intellectual circles. The innovative features of the work earned the historian the epithet of initiator of the interpretation of Brazilian history according to the methods of historical materialism. The pioneering spirit is coherent with the facts, with the exception of the sparse and generic articles and essays published by PCB activists in the 1920s, which are devoid of research and analytical rigour and confined to a small circle of readers. Divided into four chapters, the book provides a summary assessment of the distinctive features of Portuguese colonisation, the political turbulence started by the arrival of the royal family and the seat of the monarchy in its largest possession in the tropics, all under the aegis of the Revolution, and finally the imperial period in the 19th century until the proclamation of the Republic in 1889. Portuguese historiography is present in the first two chapters, with João Lúcio de Azevedo in Épocas de Portugal económico [ Economic Epochs of Portugal ], which provides interpretative guidelines for the periodisation of colonisation, alongside the three volumes of the commemorative work organised by Carlos Malheiros Dias, Ernesto de Vasconcelos, and Roque Gameiro— História da colonização portuguesa do Brasil [History of the Portuguese Colonisation of Brazil] — published in 1921, which provides information on the colonisation from the very beginning. The focus on Portuguese historians was due to two factors. The first was, of course, given by the thematic imposition of the study of Portuguese colonisation. The second came from the search for an aesthetic and intellectual renewal with an avant-garde orientation, which had been pulsating in Brazil since the 1920s. The aim was to rethink the Portuguese affiliation of Brazilian society and culture in the name of national identity and specificity. With this motivation and concern, the study of colonial formation remained in the historian's work, marking it definitively. The book favoured the understanding of the failure of popular rebellions in 19 th -century Brazil, which is why half of its pages are devoted to the chapter entitled "A revolução " [The Revolution]. The chapter discusses the Porto revolution, the Brazilian independence revolution, and three major uprisings that had recognised popular participation and demands between 1831 and 1848: Cabanos, in Pará; Balaiada , in Maranhão; and Praieira , in Pernambuco. The causes of change and continuity in national political life and the prospects for radical social transformation of hierarchies and power structures were on the agenda of the debates held in the 1930s and 1940s in Brazil, under the impact of the 1930 revolution and the Estado Novo dictatorship (1937-1945), both under the leadership of Getúlio Vargas.

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