This study presents a new and provocative picture of the impact of railroads on the Brazilian economy. 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.
Nineteenth-century Brazil's constitutional monarchy credibly committed to repay sovereign debt, borrowing repeatedly in international and domestic capital markets without default. Yet it failed to lay the institutional foundations that private financial markets needed to thrive. This study shows why sovereign creditworthiness did not necessarily translate into financial development. "Using a vast array of archival evidence, Summerhill convincingly shows that political commitment to a secure public debt was neither necessary nor sufficient to insure financial development in nineteenth-century Brazil. A must-read for economic and financial historians and for anyone interested in the politics of financial development." --Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, California Institute of Technology
Intersperses close analysis of the 1726 treaty with discussions of the Marshall case, and shows how the inter-cultural relationships and power dynamics of the past, have shaped both the law and the social climate of the present.
By and large, Brazil's forests were not simply harvested by the Portugese colonists, but rather annihilated, and relatively little was extracted for the benefit of Brazilians, a tragedy perhaps worse than deforestation alone. Fruitless Trees aims to make sense of what at first glance appears to be the senseless destruction of Brazil's incomparable timber as a result of Portuguese colonial policies.
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