Order against progress : government, foreign investment, and railroads in Brazil, 1854-1913
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Order against progress : government, foreign investment, and railroads in Brazil, 1854-1913
(Social science history)
Stanford University Press, 2003
- : cloth
Available at 7 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Bibliography: p. 269-286
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
How did foreign investment in infrastructure affect a relatively backward Latin American economy? The author engages this long-standing issue in Latin American history by applying the methods of the "new economic history" to the study of Brazilian railway development.
Railroads have long been viewed as having intensified Brazil's dependence on foreign product and capital markets in the second half of the nineteenth century. Because steam locomotion in Brazil relied heavily on British finance in an age of export-led economic growth, many scholars have viewed railroads as magnifying economic dependency in ways that benefited foreign investors and export agriculture at the expense of the Brazilian economy as a whole.
This study combines extensive archival research in Brazil and Britain with cliometric methods to present a new and provocative picture of the impact of railroads on the Brazilian economy. The book's findings reveal that the savings on transport costs provided by the railroad accounted for a large share of the Brazilian economy's gains before 1914. Indeed, thanks largely to the savings generated by railroad investments, in the early twentieth century Brazil emerged from decades of stagnation to become one of the Western world's fastest growing economies. Moreover, foreign investors in Brazilian railroads failed to reap profits commensurate with the benefits their investments produced within Brazil: government policies on subsidy and regulation enabled Brazil to capture and retain most of the gains resulting from transport improvements.
Combined with other significant changes of the era, railroad development favored immigration, the expansion of agriculture, and the growth of manufacturing in an economy that had long been laggard. In addition to drawing substantive conclusions about the Brazilian case, this book demonstrates that the techniques of the new economic history provide Latin American specialists with a rich array of tools to identify and assess the various consequences of technological and institutional change in historical perspective.
by "Nielsen BookData"