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The central goal of this thesis was to understand how the resource dependent condition shaped a divergent pattern of state capacity in Chile, Peru and Bolivia. The analysis focused on the re-creation and reproduction of state infrastructural capacities during the period from the 18405 to the1920s, and in particular of those capacities that were critical for the development of the railways, as a crucial aspect of needed state capacities at this period. The main claim is that <revenue-centre1d' approaches to the study of the political resource curse provide only partial explanations of this divergence. These approaches typically focus on the effects of windfall rents on the state, providing much insight for the negative cases, but riot for the relatively successful ones, or for the comparison between both. In addition, recent lessons from studies on state formation and its effectiveness show that states vary in their capacities based on their ties to society. Therefore, the thesis observes that each of these approaches emphasized different and important elements of the divergent development of state capacities in mining dependent countries, and that precisely for that reason each of them should be integrated into a more satisfying approach. From the first body of literature, this thesis borrowed the idea that windfall rents enlarge the prospects of the state for high autonomy. Yet, in line with the literature about 'embeddedness', this thesis recognized that the impact of extreme mining dependence on the socioeconomic determinants of elite politics shaped a particular path of state expansion of infrastructural capacities and its resilience over time. In fact, one of the main …