Over the past four decades, public works investment has been transformed from a technical backwater for engineers and public managers into a booming financial sector marked by ‘accelerated change in the nature, financing, ownership and management of large economic infrastructure’(O’Neill, 2010, p. 4). Whereas textbook accounts of infrastructure finance often present a toolbox of expert knowledges (such as discounted cashflow analysis) to assess different configurations of capital investment for specific projects, critical scholarship has emphasised how the ‘financialisation’of infrastructure has fundamentally transformed the systems within which public works are planned, executed, and operated (Whiteside, 2019; Furlong, 2020; Halbert, 2024). One key thread in this scholarship examines how financial globalization enables ‘different actors to “lift out” infrastructure from places’(Pryke and Allen, 2019, p. 1343), linking rents derived from the built environment with ‘relational geometries’ of power (Torrance, 2009) centred on equity investors, bond buyers, and asset managers. While these critical approaches have elevated new actors and practices to the fore, this scholarship often reproduces a siloed approach by delinking the acts of financing from the everyday urban contexts and political systems within which infrastructure operates. That is, the infrastructure ‘asset’can be just as abstract within critical scholarship as it is within textbook approaches. As O’Neill (2019, p. 1312) notes, this is a significant lacuna, as the ‘order that infrastructure generates in cities is the essential condition for infrastructure’s financialisation, enabling urban flows to be colonized by financial circuits of capital’. Indeed, a key dimension of the contemporary market for infrastructure investment is how the ‘structuring’and ‘sequencing’of circulation/movement during earlier eras of urban development now facilitate enclosure by new extractive financial practices (Ashton and Christophers, 2020). The challenge is to develop a vocabulary that can illuminate how widening the scope for private financial logics in turn reconfigures infrastructure’s role in ‘binding people and things into complex heterogeneous systems’(Larkin, 2013, p. 335). In this chapter, I take up this challenge by situating historic shifts that have resulted in tighter couplings between flows of people and goods within urban infrastructural systems and the ‘topologies’ of global financial circuits (Pryke and Allen, 2019). The chapter does this in two ways. First, it develops a conceptual framework that positions infrastructure finance as part of an apparatus of capture characteristic of the modern fiscal state, examining how infrastructural capacity is anchored in devices that appropriate and concentrate resources in space and time. While this longue durée account may seem remote from current trends towards privatisation and financialisation, capture provides a lens through which to see the trajectory from state to corporate-financial sovereignty over public works more clearly–specifically,