Shades of Dependency and the Discourse on “Corruption”: Railway Concessions in Romania in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Colonial Anxieties, Corruption Scandals and Xenophobia in Nineteenth-Century Infrastructure Development in Romania”, guest-edited by Silvia Marton and Andrei Sorescu.

Romania progressed, in a short period of time, from an underdeveloped road network to a large railway infrastructure. Within less than 15 years, starting in the mid-1860s, with a huge financial effort and exclusively with foreign capital, several concessions built the main railway network and junctions with the neighboring Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires. Around 1,400 kilometers were completed or under construction from the mid-1860s to 1879. Romanian political and administrative elites engaged in this far-reaching infrastructural building process that was, in their view, consubstantial with the nation- and state-building of a polity yearning for sovereignty. Yet the absence of domestic capital and expertise generated a strong dependency on the Great Powers, which controlled the whole railway network and its construction from a financial and a technical standpoint. This, in turn, engendered strong colonial anxieties in a region where multiple imperial peripheries overlapped with Western European powers’ formal and informal influence. Amid these anxieties and dependencies, a pervasive discourse on corruption allowed Romanian elites to reclaim their political agency and blame both the local Jewish community and political adversaries. “Corruption” may have frustrated sovereignty but preserved the belief that political agency could be reappropriated and was not definitively absent. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, controversies over concessions opened the way toward nationalizing the growing railway network via state buybacks, as a means of avoiding dependency at a time when political autonomy was jealously guarded.