Cyrus Veeser

Concessions as a Modernizing Strategy in the Dominican Republic

In the late 1800s, Latin American modernizers faced major obstacles to economic growth. In the Dominican Republic, elites embraced concessions as a policy to attract foreign capital to infrastructure, industry, and cash-crop agriculture. In contrast to Mexico, where concessions were public and impersonal but failed to create viable firms, Dominican concessions were public, yet corrupt, formally opposed to monopoly, yet prone to convey exclusive privileges. Dominican modernizers recognized that concessions created “monopolies that are always a hateful tyranny,” yet found no better way to attract investment. Only after the United States took control of Dominican finances in 1905 were the “burdensome” contracts canceled as an “impediment to future progress.”

A Forgotten Instrument of Global Capitalism?International Concessions, 1870–1930

From the mid-1800s through the 1930s, concessions were an institutional foundation of modern capitalism about which we have little systematic, comparative knowledge. Concessions - contracts given by governments in less-developed states to foreign investors - supplied elements that were lacking in the host country, including a congenial legal order and an attractive investment environment. Cash-poor governments eager to modernise often added special privileges and monopoly rights to concessions in order to attract capital. In Africa and Asia, all the colonial powers granted concessions to promote the building of infrastructure and development of commercial agriculture without burdening the Treasury. After providing a global survey of concessions with special attention to Russia, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and French West Africa, the author concludes that concessions, by their nature, entailed contradictions that made them a ‘third best’ option for political elites eager to incorporate peripheral regions into the world economy.