O CAPITAL COMO SUJEITO E O "SENTIDO DA COLONIZAÇÃO"

The objective of this paper is to discuss the main lines of the Brazilian historiography about colonial period that had emerged after the Caio Prado Júnior' s model and, starting from its metodological fundaments, evaluate the explicative power and adequacy of the considered models. In this historiography, the majority of the authors analyzes the Brazilian colonial period with the concepts developed by Marx, in the Historical Materialism approach. However, although apparently belong to a same theoretical conception, such authors find very different results. Such differences are due to the different interpretations of marxian theory, and they can be understood by a comparison of the methodological aspects of them.