The Redemptive Work: Railway and Nation in Ecuador, 1895-1930. A. KIM CLARK: Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1998.

Abstract

The Guayaquil and Quito Railroad is one of the most unusual industrial creations in the history of Latin America. Built relatively late, it connected Ecuador's chief port with its capital city in 1908, some 70 years after the region's first railroad was inaugurated in Cuba. Built by an American company, the G & Q was an incredibly difficult railroad to construct, crossing a multitude of rivers, tropical zones and the constantly shifting Andes. It was an expensive project, both in terms of capital and lives lost in the construction and maintenance of the enterprise. Unlike many of the railroads of the region, the Guayaquil and Quito Railroad was not built primarily for the extraction of exports. It was, as Kim Clark demonstrates, part of a larger 19^th century liberal project of modernization and national integration that also featured centralized state control of education, expanded markets for goods and labor, and "moral reform" through new forms of work.