The building of an efficient fiscal apparatus is crucial in explaining how states in the twentieth century were able to finance increasingly costly infrastructure projects, public-funded education, and welfare provision. Fiscal capacity is commonly explained as the outcome of war or democratization. But in many episodes of state-building both these factors were absent. In order to study the politics of authoritarian state-building, we examine the case of Chile, arguably the most significant example of fiscal modernization in Latin America, utilizing a unique data set comprising financial and personnel information from the Chilean Ministry of Finance, administrative and fiscal reforms in the Ministries of Finance and Internal Affairs, in addition to details of the backgrounds of government ministers. Our preliminary findings suggest that the capacity of modernizing coalitions to monitor the implementation of reform and negate the veto power of traditional elites is critical to understand state building in a context of a non-democratic political system.