A first-rate historical analysis that concludes, inter alia, that British capital outstayed its welcome and came eventually to obstruct Latin American interests. Initially, however, perhaps no real alternative to it existed: inadequacies of communications, capital, markets, labor, fuel and raw materials were "formidable barriers to the native development, which must have made the alternatives to a foreign connection as uninviting to Latin Americans at the time as they seem speculative to the historian today."