This book is about attempts in Brazil to use its endowment of minerals as a tool for creating wealth and the evolution of the economic role of the Brazilian state. These topics are surprisingly intertwined. The focus is on political economy, rather than the extraction of minerals from the ground, because political economy impeded extraction. Substantive change in the political-economic institutions related to mineral extraction initiated Brazil's emergence as an industrial economy and as a global powerhouse in supplying iron ore in the second half of the twentieth century. These outcomes occurred nearly four and a half centuries after the first attempts of Europeans to realize wealth from the land's minerals. As one result of this process, the Brazilian state became the nation's largest industrial producer and commercial agent, as well as one of the world's prime examples of state-capitalism.

The questions framing this study are: How did political-economic institutions shape efforts to exploit mineral resources within Brazil, and reciprocally, how did these efforts shape political-economic institutions? The interactions between the rules and practices governing property, business enterprise, capital markets and the state reveal themselves to be as important to mineral development as the structure of the individual institutions and as important as the presence of minerals.