Efforts to extract wealth from the subsoil began with the earliest colonization of Brazil by Portugal, but they achieved success only in the middle of the twentieth century, with the massive exploitation of iron ore. As entrepreneurs experimented with a range of approaches, they faced shifting definitions of ‘success’. Finally emerging as a mineral producer required significant transformation in Brazilian economic governance. Leveraging extremely rich iron ore deposits into wider economic benefit had unexpected and fundamentally important impact on the Brazilian economy. Mineral extraction is a relatively neglected area of historiography, despite its centrality in production and in the institutions of political economy. Scholarship by Gavin Wright demonstrates the very tight connection between industrialization and mineral endowment in the US. This book, using different methods, a longer time frame and a focus on political economic institutions, examines this connection as it unfolded in Brazil. The book places iron ore mining at the centre of the story, because iron ore is the mineral that brought success. This chapter offers the relevant historical background. In focusing on the general features of Brazilian political and economic structures that have been relevant to the institutional developments necessary for iron ore mining and metallurgy, the chapter gives short shrift to the broader range of individuals, conflict, contention, nuance and non-linearity of Brazilian history.