Industrial Investment in an 'Export' Economy: the Brazilian Experience before 1914

Under what conditions does an economy specialised in primary product exports become industrialised? More specifically, what induces capital to move into activities geared to the internal market, rather than the traditional export sector, and where does this capital come from? The Brazilian experience since the late nineteenth century is clearly relevant in connection with those questions: it represents - distortions and inequalities apart - an accomplished transformation of a typical export-based economy into one with a relatively high level of diversification. This paper brings some new evidence on the first steps of that process, in the period before the First World War. This evidence, it will be argued, brings into question some accepted notions on the early development of manufacturing production in Brazil, especially as concerns the role of tariff protection, and the relations between the new sector and the old export-oriented activities.