Our paper provides a comparative perspective on the development of public primary education in four of the largest developing economies circa 1910, BRIC - Brazil, Russia, India and China. These four countries encompassed almost 50 percent of the world's population in 1910, but remarkably few of their citizens attended any school in the early 20th century. We present new, comparable data on school inputs and outputs for BRIC that are drawn from a variety of archival and published sources. Similar to recent studies that emphasize the importance of income, political decentralization, and the level of political voice to the spread of primary education in developed economies, we also find these factors to be important in the context of BRIC. We also outline other factors such as local ethnic and religious heterogeneity, the institutional legacies of colonialism and serfdom, and, especially, the characteristics of the political and economic elite that help explain the low achievement levels of these countries and the incredible amount of heterogeneity within each BRIC.