Agostinho Marques Perdigão Malheiro

Born in Campanha, Minas Gerais, in 1824 and dead in Rio de Janeiro in 1881, he was a Brazilian lawyer, public figure, writer, and historian. He also served as a deputy in the Chamber of Deputies, and his name remains closely linked to legal and political debates in the final decades of the Brazilian Empire.

His best-known book is A escravidão no Brasil: ensaio histórico-jurídico-social, published in 1866. The work examines slavery through law, history, and social analysis, and later scholars have described it as the most substantial legal study of Brazilian slavery produced up to that time.

He is often remembered as an important voice in the long discussion that led toward abolition, though historians also note that his ideas and political path have been debated and interpreted in different ways. That tension makes him an especially interesting author today: not only a critic of slavery, but also a window into how Brazil argued about justice, reform, and freedom in the nineteenth century.