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Abstract: Abstract: A large literature suggests that government owned banks produce inferior outcomes to privately owned banks. These findings are based, however, on data from the 1990s onwards. We do not know whether government owned, or mixed government-private ownership, banks were less efficient than privately owned banks during earlier stages of economic development. We therefore build a unique bank-level data set for Brazil from 1870 to 1929. The data allow us to estimate rates of return on equity on a semi-annual basis, as well as compute market shares, and to decompose banks by ownership class. Our preliminary findings indicate that, at least during the early stages of economic growth, public ownership was not associated with an efficiency loss.