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...