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It was the duty of the Comissão to politically guide the commemorations at a time when Portugal's colonising engagement was being questioned internationally. As if unrelated to these issues, crucial works such as those of Jaime Cortesão (História dos Descobrimentos), Duarte Leite (História dos Descobrimentos), Luís de Albuquerque (Introdução à história dos descobrimentos [Introduction to the History of the Discoveries]) and Damião Peres (História dos Descobrimentos) appeared on the market. However, all of them lacked the official seal of approval, while Salazar's followers denied Vitorino Magalhães Godinho the publication of A Economia dos Descobrimentos Henriquinos [The Economy of Prince Henry the Navigator’s Discoveries ]. Nevertheless, that year devoted to Prince Henry marked the definitive autonomy of studies on the History of the Discoveries and Portuguese Expansion - much less on colonisation, which continued to be an understudied subject - for obvious reasons.
Following this remarkable eruption in 1960 - regardless of its reason or motivation - academic works continued and came to prominence in the ensuing decades. However, the studies of Luiz Filipe Reis Thomaz soon gained recognition for their originality and methodological innovation.
