Shades of Dependency and the Discourse on "Corruption": Railway Concessions in Romania in the Nineteenth Century.

The article examines nineteenth-century railway infrastructure development in Romania as a central element of nation- and state-building amid financial dependency on foreign capital and expertise. Between the mid-1860s and 1879, Romania rapidly constructed around 1,400 kilometers of railways through foreign concessions, linking it to neighboring empires but generating colonial anxieties and fears of lost sovereignty among Romanian elites. The 1870 Strussberg scandal, involving the bankruptcy of a major Prussian-led concession, intensified nationalist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic discourses that framed corruption as both a symptom of foreign domination and a means for Romanian political actors to assert agency. Ultimately, the nationalization of the railways and conditional Jewish emancipation were key steps toward Romania's international recognition of independence, illustrating how infrastructure, political sovereignty, and identity politics were deeply intertwined in this period.