Joaquim Pedro de Oliveira Martins (30 April 1845 – 24 August 1894) was a Portuguese politician and social scientist.

In 1874 Martins returned to Portugal to coordinate the construction of the railway between Porto, Póvoa do Varzim and Vila Nova de Famalicão.

In 1880 he was elected president of the Sociedade de Geografia Comercial of Porto and, four years later, manager of the Museum of Industry of Commerce in the same city.

Oliveira Martins worked for the major literary, scientific, political and socialist Portuguese journals.

[2] According to historian Sérgio Campos Matos, in Oliveira Martins' historiographical works "the single event is always related with the totality, with a principle of unity".

[4] Martins's thesis proved to be controversial in the context of the second half of the nineteenth century, a time when fields like archeology, ethnology, philology and geography shared great development and when there was tendency to view History as a discipline based on natural laws.