Joaquim Pedro de Oliveira Martins

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Joaquim Pedro de Oliveira Martins (1845 – 24 August 1894) was a Portuguese writer.

He was born in Lisbon and educated at the Lyceo Nacional and the Academia das Bellas Artes. At the age of 14 he became a clerk at a commercial house; by 1870 he was manager of the mine of St Eufemia near Córdoba, in Spain.

1 Career
2 Influences
3 Works
4 References

[edit] Career

While in Spain he wrote Teoria do Socialismo, and developed a sympathy for the industrial classes which marked his entire life. Returning to Portugal in 1874, he became administrator of the railway from Oporto to Povoa, residing in Oporto. He had married when only nineteen, and for many years devoted his leisure hours to the study of economics, geography and history. In 1878 his memoir A Circulação Fiduciária brought him the gold medal and membership of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Lisbon. Two years later he was elected president of the Society of Commercial Geography of Oporto, and in 1884 he became director of the Industrial and Commercial Museum in that city. In 1885 he entered public life, and in the following year represented Viana do Castelo in parliament, and in 1887 Oporto. He moved back to Lisbon in 1888, continuing the journalistic work which be had commenced when living in the north, by editing the Reporter, and in 1889 he was named administrator of the Tobacco Rgie. He represented Portugal at international conferences in Berlin and Madrid in 1890, and was chosen to speak at the celebration of the fourth centenary of Columbus held in Madrid in 1891, which gained him membership of the Spanish Royal Academy of History. He became minister of finance on 17 January 1892, and in a matter of months managed to save his country from announced bankruptcy. Later he became vice-president of the Junta do Credito Publico. His health, however, began to break down as a result of a life spent in unremitting toil, and he died in August 1894.

[edit] Influences

Martins was impressed and influenced by the works of French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, defending mutualistic anarchism and later, socialism, as the best path for human progress. He also was impregnated with modern German philosophy, and his perception of the low moral standard prevailing in public life made him a pessimist who despaired of his country's future, even founding a movement which he called Os Vencidos da Vida, including Eça de Queirós and Ramalho Ortigão but his sense of proportion, and the necessity which impelled him to work, saved him from the fate which befell his friend Antero de Quental, who shot himself out of despair.

[edit] Works

Martins' Bibliotheca das Sciencias Sociaes, a veritable encyclopaedia, comprises literary criticism, socialism, economics, anthropology, histories of the Iberian civilization, of the Roman Republic, Portugal and Brazil. Towards the end of his life he specialized in the 15th century and produced two notable volumes, Os filhos de D. João I. and A vida de NunAlvares, leaving unfinished 0 principe perfeito, a study on King John II, which was edited by his friend Henrique de Barros Gomes.

As the literary leader of a national revival, Oliveira Martins occupied a special position in Portugal during the last third of the 19th century. If he judged and condemned the parliamentary regime and destroyed many illusions in his sensational Portugal Contemporâneo ("Contemporary Portugal"), and if in his philosophic History of Portugal he showed, in a series of impressionist pictures, the slow decline of his country commencing in the golden age of the discoveries and conquests, he at the same time directed the gaze of his countrymen to the days of their real greatness under the House of Aviz, and incited them to work for a better future by describing the faith and patriotism which had animated the foremost men of the "race" in the middle ages.

The works of Oliveira Martins include Elementos de Anthropologia, As Racas Humanas e a Civilização Primitiva, Systema dos mythos religiosos, Quadro das instituições primitivas, 0 Regime das riquezas, Política e economia nacional, Taboas de chronologia e geographia histórica, 0 Helenismo e a civilização christã, Historia da Republica Romana, Historia da civilização ibérica, Historia de Portugual, O Brazil e as colonias portuguezas, Portugal nos Mares, Portugal em Africa, Portugal contemporaneo, Camões, os Lusiadas e o renascimento em Portugal, a brilliant commentary on the physiognomy of the poet and his poem, Os Filhos de D. João I., the preface to which gives his views on the writing of history; A Vida de Nun'Álvares; and A Inglaterra de Hoje, the result of a visit to England.