Conventional etymology attributes the emergence of geopolitics to the end of the nineteenth century, under the authorship of the Swedish scholar Rudolf Kjellén, who coined the term. In Brazil, the study of geopolitics arose somewhat later, beginning with a few military and civilian scholars in the 1930s and 1940s. However, it only gained broader acceptance in the 1950s, notably with the work of the Army intellectual Golbery do Couto e Silva, author of Geopolítica do Brasil (most important works, 1952–1959, published in 1967). Less known in its early, almost virtual trajectory, is the work of a predecessor, Francisco Varnhagen, a brilliant young historian (33 years old). Varnhagen authored a Memorial Orgânico (1849), sent anonymously to the General Assembly, as a contribution to the reorganisation of the Brazilian Empire, at the onset of the Second Reign under Pedro II, himself a young monarch. The short pamphlet went virtually unnoticed at the time. It was “rediscovered” in the twentieth century by another historian, Arno Wehling, who worked extensively on the vast historiographical production of his nineteenth-century colleague, already known as the “father of Brazilian historiography.” After a brief introduction, the present chapter will examine Varnhagen’s proposals for a complete overhaul of Brazil’s economic, political, and educational institutions, as well as its infrastructure, defence, foreign policy, and ethnic composition, with the goal of transforming it into a more powerful Empire, perhaps akin to certain European models of the time. In the following sections, there will be an assessment of the relevance of Varnhagen’s ideas in modern times, particularly in relation to contemporary Brazil. One of the aims of this chapter is to pay homage to the true father of Brazilian geopolitics, despite having been largely ignored by twentieth-century Brazilian “professional” geopoliticians, who overlooked his work. The projection of the reforms proposed by the then young historian—already appointed secretary of the first national academic institution, the Brazilian Historic and Geographical Institute (1838)—offers a valuable opportunity to reflect on how the work of the few Brazilian geopoliticians of the twentieth century might have been “instructed” by this earlier set of proposals, made in the style, if not the formal structure, of a geopolitical thinking avant la lettre.