1 ‘Development’ via coercion. Railway geographies and infrastructural investments in Portuguese Africa, 1880s-1970s 1 Kleoniki Alexopoulou University of Tübingen Work in progress, please do not cite or circulate without permission Abstract Railways were key to the colonization of Africa. Railways facilitated the occupation of hinterland areas, the spread of new settlements, the trade in minerals and cash-crops, tax collection and the effectuation of a violence monopoly. From the 1930s onwards, infrastructural investments in Portuguese Africa were increasingly regarded as part of a colonial ‘development’ scheme. This paper analyses the emergence of railway geographies in Angola and Mozambique from a political economy and comparative perspective, focussing on the financing, chronological order and operation of different lines and the various actors involved, such as private companies and investors, metropolitan and colonial governments. I show that in the early colonial era railways were funded mainly by private capital - especially in Angola - but the colonial state and colonial budgets soon took over. Both colonies - especially Mozambique - raised indigenous taxes and coerced African labour to fund railway expansion. ‘Development’ through coercion thus hardly resulted in tangible welfare gains for the impoverished majority of colonial subjects. 1 Acknowledgement note: I would like to thank Ewout Frankema, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, Nuno Valério, Alexander Keese and Alfonso Herranz Loncan. I also owe deep gratitude to João Damásio for his assistance in data collection; to the participants of The Annual Conference of Economic History Society at Royal Holloway, University of London (April 2017); to the participants of The Fifth ENIUGH Congress on "Ruptures, Empires and Revolutions” at the Central European University and Corvinus University in Budapest (September 2017) for their insightful comments. Last but not least, I am grateful for the financial support provided by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) as part of the VIDI project “Is Poverty Destiny? Exploring Long-Term Changes in African Living Standards in Global Perspective”. The usual disclaimer applies.