¹ Sardica, José Miguel, A Regeneração sob o Signo do Consenso (Lisbon, 2001)Google Scholar.

² Followers of the French philosopher and political economist Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, who believed, among other things, in promoting technological progress as a way to achieve social betterment. Cowen, Michael and Shenton, Robert, “The Invention of Development,” in Power of Development, ed. Crush, Jonathan (London, 1995)Google Scholar; and Eckalbar, John C., “The Saint-Simonians in Industry and Economic Development,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 38 (1979): 83–96Google Scholar.

³ Roth, Ralf and Dinhobl, Günter, eds., Across the Borders: Financing the World's Railways in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Aldershot, 2008)Google Scholar.

⁴ Eichengreen, Barry, “Financing Infrastructure in Developing Countries: Lessons from the Railway Age,” in Infrastructure Delivery: Private Initiative and the Public Good, ed. Mody, Ashoka (Washington, D.C., 1996)Google Scholar.

⁵ Wilkins, Mira, “Multinational Enterprise to 1930,” in Leviathans: Multinational Corporations and the New Global History, ed. Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. and Mazlish, Bruce (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 53–56Google Scholar.

⁶ Jensen, Michael C., Foundations of Organizational Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1998)Google Scholar.

⁷ Wilkins, Mira complained about the lack of research on railways: “The Free-Standing Company Revisited,” in The Free-Standing Company in the World Economy, 1830–1996, ed. Wilkins, Mira and Schröter, Harm (Oxford, 1998), 56Google Scholar, and “Multinational Enterprise to 1930,” 57. Rory Miller, “British Free-Standing Companies on the West Coast of South America,” in The Free-Standing Company, ed. Wilkins and Schröter, 218–52, dedicates some attention to freestanding companies in South American railways. For a recent study see Boughey, David, “British Overseas Railways as Free-Standing Companies, 1900–1915,” Business History 51 (2009): 484–500CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Wilkins, Mira, “The Free-Standing Company, 1870–1914: An Important Type of British Foreign Direct Investment,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 41 (1988): 259–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Wilkins, Mira, “The Significance of the Concept and a Future Agenda,” in The Free-Standing Company in the World Economy, ed. Wilkins, and Schröter, , 421–39Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Mark Casson, “An Economic Theory of the Free-Standing Company,” in The Free-Standing Company in the World Economy, ed. Wilkins and Schröter.

¹¹ Fino, Gaspar, Legislação e disposições regulamentares sobre caminhos de ferro (Lisbon, 1883), 25–37Google Scholar, 62–63; António Lopes Vieira, “The Role of Britain and France in the Finance of Portuguese Railways, 1850–1890: A Comparative Study in Speculation, Corruption and Inefficiency,” PhD diss., University of Leicester, 1983, 181.

¹² Vieira, “The Role of Britain and France,” 204.

¹³ Ibid., 242.

¹⁴ de Matos, Ana Cardoso and Silva, Álvaro Ferreira da, “Foreign Capital and Problems of Agency: The Companhias Reunidas de Gás e Electricidade in Lisbon (1890–1920),” in TST—Transportes, Servicios e Telecomunicaciones 14 (2008): 143–61Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Fino, Legislação e disposições regulamentares.

¹⁶ Carreras, Albert, “Los ferrocarriles en Europa: Algunas perspectivas históricas,” in Siglo y medio del ferrocarril en España, 1848–1998: Economia, industria y sociedad, ed. Rubio, Miguel Muñoz et al. (Madrid, 1999), 39Google Scholar.

¹⁷ However, the international traffic through the Beira Alta railway line only started after 1886, when the railway junction between Salamanca in Spain and the Portuguese frontier was built.

¹⁸ Wilkins, “The Free-Standing Company Revisited,” 13–14; Jones, Geoffrey, “Globalization,” in The Oxford Handbook of Business History, ed. Jones, Geoffrey and Zeitlin, Jonathan (Oxford, 2009), 153Google Scholar; Winder, Gordon M., “Webs of Enterprise, 1850–1914: Applying a Broad Definition of FDI,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96 (2006): 788–806Google Scholar. Spanish railways also attracted French capital through clusters of foreign investors: Olivares, Javier Vidal, “Las compañias ferroviárias y la difusion de las modernas formas de gestion empresarial en España, 1850–1914,” in La empresa en la história de España, ed. Comín, Francisco and Aceña, Pablo Martin (Madrid, 1996), 285–301Google Scholar; Comín, Francisco et al. , 150 años de historia de los ferrocarriles españoles (Madrid, 1998)Google Scholar. For the role of French capital in railroad construction in Mediterranean Europe, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, see Cameron, Rondo, France and the Economic Development of Europe, 1860–1914 (Princeton N.J., 1961)Google Scholar and Cassis, Youssef, Capitals of Capital: A History of International Financial Centres, 1780–2005 (Cambridge, U.K., 2006), 58Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Duke of Saldanha (politician and military chief), Baron of Paiva (Portuguese ambassador in France, broker between foreign financiers and the Portuguese political milieu), and Fortunato Chamiço (banker).

²⁰ Vieira, “The Role of Britain and France,” 271, and Pinheiro, Magda, Chemins de fer: Structure financière de l'état et dépendance extérieure au Portugal (1850–1890), 3 vols. (Lille, 1987), 3: 80Google Scholar.

²¹ Pinheiro, Chemins de fer, 3: 420.

²² Cameron, France and the Economic Development of Europe, 197–98.

²³ Pinheiro, Chemins de fer, 3: 281, and Magda Pinheiro, “The French Investors in Portuguese Railways from 1855 to 1884: Three Cases,” in Across the Borders, ed. Roth and Dinhobl, 142; Şeni, Nora and Tarnec, Sophie Le, Les Camondo, ou l'éclipse d'une fortune (Paris, 1997)Google Scholar; Comín, 150 años de historia, 192; de Lorca, Pedro Tedde, “La compañia de los ferrocarriles andaluces (1868–1920): Una empresa de transporte en la España de la Restauración,” Revista de Investigaciones Económicas 12 (1994): 27–76Google Scholar.

²⁴ García, Raquel Sánchez, “El Marqués de Salamanca y la amortización de los ferrocarriles,” Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea 25 (2003): 199–215Google Scholar.

²⁵ Joaquim de la Gandara was active in railways, particularly MZA and Andaluces, as well as in Portuguese banking (Sociedade Geral de Crédito Agrícola e Financeiro). Luis de La Cuadra, Marquês de Guadalmina, was associated with Joaquim de la Gandara in several businesses: the Sociedade Geral de Crédito Agrícola e Financeiro, the MZA, Andaluces, and a large agricultural enterprise, the Colónia Agrícola de San Pedro Alcántara, in Andalucia. He also had interests in mining and housing. See Francisco de los Cobos Arteaga and Tomás Martínez Vara, “Spanish Society of Secondary Networks: The Failure of a Major International Project to Create an Additional Railway Network in Spain,” in Across the Borders, ed. Roth and Dinhobl, 87.

²⁶ Minutes from the meetings of the Paris Committee, 22 Oct. 1882, Subfundo do Comité de Paris, 1860–1930 (hereafter CP), Archive of Fundação Museu Nacional Ferroviário (FMNF), Lisbon, Portugal. Hereafter this documentation will be identified by the date of the meeting.

²⁷ I am particularly indebted to two referees' comments in the clarification of these differences.

²⁸ Wilkins, “The Free-Standing Company Revisited,” 12–13.

²⁹ Ibid., 41.

³⁰ Comín et al., 150 años de historia; Villar, Domingo Cuéllar, “El ferrocarril en España, siglos XIX y XX: Una vision en el largo plazo,” in 150 Años de Ferrocarril en Albacete (1855–2005), ed. Muriel, Francisco Polo (Albacete, 2007), 11–63Google Scholar; Rubio, Miguel Muñoz et al. , eds., Siglo y medio del ferrocarril en España, 1848–1998: Economia, industria y sociedad (Madrid, 1999)Google Scholar.

³¹ In 1879, the boards of the Compañia de los Ferrocarriles del Norte de Espanha (Norte) and MZA had, respectively, forty and twenty-five directors; see Olivares, Javier Vidal and Ortúñez, Pedro Pablo, “The Internationalisation of Ownership of the Spanish Railway Companies, 1858–1936,” Business History 44 (2002): 29–54Google Scholar. Merger, Michèle and Giuntini, Andrea, “L'organisation des chemins de fer italiens: Un ou des modèles (1839–1939)?” in Railway Management and Its Organizational Structure: Its Impact on and Diffusion into the General Economy, ed. Armstrong, John et al. (Seville, 1998), 153–67Google Scholar.

³² Estatutos da Companhia Real dos Caminhos de Ferro Portugueses (Lisbon, 1860)Google Scholar, articles 12 and 13.

³³ Estatutos, article 26.

³⁴ “Cadre du Personnel”; minutes from the meetings of the Paris Committee; correspondence between the Paris Committee and Lisbon; all in CP FMNF.

³⁵ Meetings of the board, Lisbon, 12 Apr. 1876, 18 Jan. 1881, 6 Nov. 1883, 14 June 1884, for instance, CP FMNF.

³⁶ Boughey, “British Overseas Railways,” 495.

³⁷ Also in other railway companies, where Camondo and CRCFP's Spanish shareholders had interests: Sociedade de Caminhos de Ferro Madrid-Cáceres-Portugal (MCP) and Andaluces.

³⁸ Memorandum written to the government by the board in Lisbon, in 1885: “The accounts are made in Paris by the bankers of the company, the Société Générale de Crédit Industriel et Commerciale.” Fino, Legislação e disposições regulamentares, 271; author's translation.

³⁹ Meetings of the Committee, 4 and 18 Sept. 1883, when the accounting reorganization was discussed, CP FMNF.

⁴⁰ Boughey, “British Overseas Railways”; T. A. B. Corley, “The Free-Standing Company, in Theory and Practice,” in The Free-Standing Company in the World Economy, ed. Wilkins and Schröter, 129–47. Nicholas, Stephen, “British Multinational Investment before 1939,” Journal of European Economic History 11 (1982): 606Google Scholar; Wilkins, “The Free-Standing Company,” 264.

⁴¹ López-Morell, Miguel A., La Casa Rothschild en España (Madrid, 2005), 164Google Scholar.

⁴² Article 28 from the Statutes and “Ordem de Serviços n° 2,” 17 Aug. 1872, Fundo da Companhia dos Caminhos de Ferro Portugueses, FMNF.

⁴³ da Silva, Álvaro Ferreira, “Engineers and Organizational Behaviour: The Companhia Real dos Caminhos de Ferro Portugueses (1870–1885),” in The Quest for a Professional Identity: Engineers between Training and Action, ed. Diogo, Paula et al. (Lisbon, 2009), 329–42Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ The strategy was discussed in the meeting of September 13, 1876 and a decision was taken on September 19, 1876. The earlier connection with Madrid was made via the Elvas–Badajoz frontier, increasing the distance between the two Iberian capitals by more than 200 kilometers.

⁴⁵ Meeting of the board, Lisbon, 28 Sept. 1876, CP FMNF.

⁴⁶ Meeting of the Committee, 12 Dec. 1876, which tackles this theme for the first time. The meetings of the Committee on February 14 and March 7, 1877 analyzed the different components of this strategy; CP FMNF.

⁴⁷ Meeting of the board, Lisbon, 12 Apr. 1877, CP FMNF.

⁴⁸ Meetings of the Committee, 23 Nov. 1881 and 21 June 1882, CP FMNF.

⁴⁹ Companhia Real dos Caminhos de Ferro Portugueses (CRCFP), Réponse à la Note Addressée aux Actionnaires de la Compagnie par le Conseil d'Administration Nommé par l'Assemblée Irrégulière et Illégale du 13 Septembre 1884 (Paris, 1884), 12Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ As an example, meeting of the Committee, 14 Oct. 1880, CP FMNF. Examples of loans to other firms: the Companhia del Tajo, as well as Companhia Malpartida-Cáceres (meeting of the Committee, 18 Jan. 1881); see Committee of Paris, Contracts (1876–1883), PT/FMNF/CCFP-PT/A/3/016 and 022 and PT/FMNF/CCFP-PT/A/3/02 to 07, FMNF.

⁵¹ Meeting of the Committee, 2 Mar. 1881, CP FMNF.

⁵² Meeting of the Committee, 7 Dec. 1883, CP FMNF.

⁵³ Jones, Geoffrey, Merchants to Multinationals: British Trading Companies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ A similar role was analyzed in the case of British banks and trading companies operating overseas, where head offices provided not only capital, but also managerial expertise and recruitment services. See Jones, Geoffrey, British Multinational Banking, 1830–1990 (Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar and “British Overseas Banks as Free-Standing Companies, 1830–1994,” in The Free-Standing Company in the World Economy, ed. Wilkins and Schröter; Lees, Lynn Hollen, “International Management in a Free-Standing Company: The Penang Sugar Estates, Ltd., and the Malayan Sugar Industry, 1851–1914,” Business History Review 81 (2007): 27–57Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ Turner, Victor, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y., 1974)Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ See also Pinheiro, Chemins de fer, and Salgueiro, Ângela, A Companhia Real dos Caminhos de Ferro Portugueses: 1859–1891 (Lisbon, 2009)Google Scholar for an account of these events.

⁵⁷ Meeting of the board, Lisbon, 10 Sept. 1884, CP FMNF.

⁵⁸ Meeting, 13 Sept. 1884, CP FMNF. Table 1 only includes data for the ordinary annual meeting on June 3, 1884. The minutes of the September 13 meeting do not provide information on the shareholders present.

⁵⁹ Letter 30 Jan. 1877 from Espregueira to the executive director in Paris, Gandara, PT/FMNF/CCFP-PT/A/2/22, FMNF.

⁶⁰ Meeting of the board, Lisbon, 10 Nov. 1883.

⁶¹ Gandara (39.5 percent), Camondo (20 percent), Cuadra (12.5 percent), Delahante (10 percent), de la Bouillerie (7 percent), Blount (7 percent), the engineer of the Paris Committee, Sosthène Le François (4 percent). Only two members of the Paris Committee were not shareholders of the Spanish railway company: E. Joubert (but on the Board of the Sociedade dos Fosfatos de Cáceres) and the Marquis of Scépeaux. Relations with the Companhia del Tajo became very close after the decision of the Paris Committee to proceed with a loan to the Spanish company (8 Oct. 1878). For the evolution of the Spanish company see: Comín et al., 150 años de historia, 171; Juan José Cendal Búrdalo, “Compañia de explotación de los ferrocarriles de Madrid a Cáceres y Portugal y del Oeste de España,” in Siglo y medio del ferrocarril en España, ed. Muñoz Rubio et al., 563–83; and Wais, Francisco, Historia de los ferrocarriles españoles (Madrid, 1974), 37Google Scholar.

⁶² Meetings of the Committee, 27 Feb. and 8 Apr. 1879, CP FMNF.

⁶³ See Keefer, Philip, “Protection against a Capricious State: French Investment and Spanish Railroads, 1845–1875,” Journal of Economic History 56 (1996): 170–92Google Scholar; and de Lorca, Pedro Tedde, “Las compañías ferroviarias en España, 1855–1935,” in Los ferrocarriles en España, 1844–1943, vol. 2, ed. Artola, Miguel (Madrid, 1978), 118Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ Pimentel, Frederico, Apontamentos para a história dos caminhos de ferro portugueses (Lisbon, 1892), 43Google Scholar, reviewing the guidelines followed by the Portuguese state for promoting railroad construction.

⁶⁵ Eichengreen, “Financing Infrastructure in Developing Countries,” 120.

⁶⁶ See the conclusions of the report presented to the board, when the Paris office was seized by the new administration, after the resignation of the French directors (meeting of the board, Lisbon, 27 Nov. 1884, CP FMNF).

⁶⁷ It happened on several occasions, even before the crisis. Between 1871 and 1881 these operations accounted to 1.8 billion réis. Salgueiro, A Companhia Real, 52. But after 1885 these loans became more frequent and large (see meeting of the board, Lisbon, 10 Sept. 1885 and 16 June 1886, CP FMNF).

⁶⁸ Meeting of the board, Lisbon, 23 June 1887, CP FMNF.

⁶⁹ Meeting of the board, Lisbon, 3 Aug. 1887, CP FMNF.

⁷⁰ The Progressive Party was one of the two main Portuguese parties in the period 1876–1910, considered more liberal and leftist than the Partido Regenerador.

⁷¹ Fernandes, Paulo Jorge, O poder oculto, Mariano Cirilo de Carvalho: O poder oculto do liberalismo progressista (1876–1892) (Lisbon, 2010)Google Scholar.

⁷² Barjot, Dominique, “Les entrepreneurs français de travaux publiques et l'équipement du Portugal: Une contribution multiforme (milieu du XIX siècle–milieu des années 1970),” Ler História 26 (1994): 93–116Google Scholar; Escudier, Jean-Louis, “Itinéraire d'un Entrepreneur de travaux publics éclectique: Edmond Bartissol (1841–1916),” Histoire, économie et société 14 (1995): 229–51Google Scholar.

⁷³ Pinheiro, Chemins de fer, 480.

⁷⁴ Meetings of the board (Lisbon) from Sept. 1890 to June 1891, CP FMNF. The burden of debt comes from Pinheiro, Chemins de fer, 495.

⁷⁵ Fernandes, O poder oculto.

⁷⁶ Esteves, “Finanças Públicas.”

⁷⁷ In Paris, the Économiste français (25 Nov. 1893) urged naval blockade of the ports of Lisbon and Porto in order to force the Portuguese government to pay CRCFP and state bondholders.

⁷⁸ Wilkins, “The Free-Standing Company Revisited,” 8.

⁷⁹ Ibid., 13.

⁸⁰ The French Commission des Values Mobilières, created in 1872 to tax foreign securities, considered CRCFP as a Portuguese company. The author thanks Rui Pedro Esteves for this information.

⁸¹ Definition of FDI provided by the International Monetary Fund, Balance of Payments and International Investment Position Manual, 6^th ed. (New York, 2012), 100–106Google Scholar.

⁸² Casson, “An Economic Theory of the Free-Standing Company,” 100.

⁸³ Eichengreen, “Financing Infrastructure in Developing Countries,” and Casson, Mark, “Institutional Diversity in Overseas Enterprise: Explaining the Free-Standing Company,” Business History 36 (1994): 95–108Google Scholar.

⁸⁴ Casson, “An Economic Theory of the Free-Standing Company,” 123–24.

⁸⁵ Cameron, France and the Economic Development of Europe. See also Armstrong, John et al. , eds., Railway Management and Its Organizational Structure: Its Impact on and Diffusion into the General Economy (Seville, 1998)Google Scholar; Barth, B., trans. by Whitehouse, J. C., “The Financial History of the Anatolian and Baghdad Railways, 1889–1914,” Financial History Review 5 (1998): 115–37Google Scholar; Cottrell, Philip L., “A Survey of European Investment in Turkey, 1854–1914: Banks and the Finance of the State and Railway Construction,” in East Meets West: Banking, Commerce and Investment in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Cottrell, Peter L., coedited by Fraser, Monika Pohle and Fraser, Iain L. (Aldershot, 2008), 59–95Google Scholar; Roth and Dinhobl, eds., Across the Borders; Schram, Albert, Railways and the Formation of the Italian State in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, U.K., 1997)Google Scholar.

⁸⁶ Comín et al., 150 años de historia; Cuéllar Villar, “El ferrocarril en España”; López-Morell, La Casa Rothschild; López-Morell, Miguel A. and O'Kean, José M., “A Stable Network as a Source of Entrepreneurial Opportunities: The Rothschilds in Spain, 1835–1931,” Business History 50 (2008): 163–84Google Scholar; Muñoz Rubio et al., eds., Siglo y medio; Olivares and Ortúñez, “The Internationalisation of Ownership.”

⁸⁷ Comín et al., 150 años de historia, 179; López-Morell and O'Kean, “A Stable Network,” 177.

⁸⁸ Olivares, Javier Vidal, “La estructura de la propiedad, de la organización y la gestión de una gran empresa ferroviária: La Companía de los Caminos de Hierro del Norte de Espana, 1858–1936,” Revista de Historia Económica 3 (1999): 638Google Scholar, 647. However, López-Morell and O'Kean, “A Stable Network as a Source of Entrepreneurial Opportunities,” 177, suggest that in its early years MZA's strategic decisions were taken in Paris. For information on conflicts, see Francisco de los Cobos Arteaga and Tomás Martínez Vara, “Spanish Society of Secondary Networks: The Failure of a Major International Project to Create an Additional Railway Network in Spain,” in Across the Borders, ed. Roth and Dinhobl, 84; Keefer, “Protection against a Capricious State,” 180.

⁸⁹ Wilkins, “The Free-Standing Company,” 261.

⁹⁰ Wilkins, “The Free-Standing Company Revisited,” 23, and Casson, “An Economic Theory of the Free-Standing Company,” 104, mention that different stages in the development of local operations might lead to the elimination of foreign headquarters. When, in 1887, the Paris Committee disappeared, one of the Portuguese directors justified its end in the following way: “In these circumstances the situation of the Paris delegation had necessarily become fragile and untenable, because the causes which led to its creation gradually disappeared.” (Marquis of Foz, meeting of the Board, Lisbon, 3 Aug. 1887, CP FMNF; author's translation).

⁹¹ Vidal Olivares, “Las compañias ferroviárias” and “La estructura de la propiedad”; Olivares and Ortúñez, “The Internationalisation of Ownership.” Wilkins, “Multinational Enterprise to 1930,” 78.

⁹² Hausman, William J., Hertner, Peter, and Wilkins, Mira, Global Electrification (Cambridge, U.K., 2008), 258Google Scholar.

⁹³ The same argument was advanced in the case of the freestanding company. For this reason Geoffrey Jones calls it a misnomer in “British Overseas Banks,” 345.

⁹⁴ Casson, Mark and Cox, Howard, “International Business Networks: Theory and History,” Business and Economic History 1 (1993): 459Google Scholar.

⁹⁵ Jones, Geoffrey and Khanna, Tarun, “Bringing History (Back) into International Business,” Journal of International Business Studies 37 (2006): 453–68Google Scholar.