FLANAGAN, Terence.

£875 · Offered by Peter Harrington

Railways in Portugal. First edition. Flanagan warns British investors and contractors of foreign railway schemes, after the Portuguese government-backed plan to build Portugal's first railway, a line from Lisbon to Santarem, failed. Flanagan worked as an engineer on the line for two years, and presents an account of the project, which he presents as riddled with corruption and ineptitude on the part of the Portuguese, with the honest English investors and contractors defrauded after the government terminated their contract. The author is now very hostile to Portugal, of which he says "no country in Europe is more backward, not only in internal communications, but in all those improvements which during the last half-century have almost changed the face of Europe" (p. 6).

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