The limits of public intervention. Civil engineers and railways in Spain (1840-1877)

Between 1840' and 1870' decades, Spanish Liberal governments approved a set of legislative initiatives aimed at building and improving the transport infrastructure. Given the lack of financial assets, they often had to call to foreign private capital through several systems of state licenses and public aid. From the professional focus of civil and railway engineers, some of those solutions conflicted with their ideological positions, or with the reality of projects that demanded large investments and promised scant returns. This paper examines the underlying assumptions of these engineers to face the problems, the answers they gave, their acceptance by the public authorities, and the evolution of their viewpoints in the central decades of the 19th century.