This text analyses the interpretation of the historian Vitorino Magalhães Godinho about the relationship between the Portuguese America and the process of organization of the economy of the European world since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The principal ideas announced in this study, according to the history of the fleet and the circulation of the spices related by Godinho, are the following: the conception of the global space discovered since the ‘opening of the world’; the contemporaneous crisis of the human science; the history of Brazil and Potugal in a ‘unique writing’; and, finally, the concept of Maritime Empire.
