Enormous changes have taken place in the business environment in Latin America during the last quarter of the twentieth century, making the production of a volume of historiographical essays on the state of business history in seven major countries of the region a particularly timely event.¹ The process of transformation began in the mid-1970s following the installation of the Pinochet regime in Chile and the introduction of economic policies there which were designed to reduce the role of the state and ameliorate the conditions both for Chilean private business and for foreign direct investment. Elsewhere in Latin America at the...

The aim of this chapter is to review the literature on the history of business in Argentina. It will include texts which may rightly be considered as ‘business history’, and others which have made significant contributions to this field of knowledge, even though they do not fit into this category exactly. The studies reviewed in this chapter fall into four sections: foreign companies; state enterprises; local private firms; and interest groups and professional associations. In order to understand why certain subjects have received more attention than others in the work undertaken thus far, each section will identify the ideological and...

The bibliography on Brazilian business history is limited but growing rapidly.¹ In part this is due to the novelty of the subject, which is only now emerging as a distinct discipline or, more accurately, being consolidated as a clearly identifiable branch of economic history in the country. This process is not peculiar to the literature on Brazil. The same phenomenon can be observed elsewhere in the Latin American historiography and in writing about Asia, regions of Africa, and central and southern Europe. As in the case of Colombia, Chile and, possibly, Mexico, the study of Brazilian business history has been...

Business history is one of many areas in which Chilean historiography provides evidence of its limited development. In general terms, this situation is explained by two factors. First, this is a relatively new field of research within the discipline. It has evolved in conditions of great difficulty, and is therefore weak in institutional terms. The second factor goes beyond the sphere of historiography, and has more to do with the dominant trends in the economic and social development of the country. From 1927 until 1974 the state was the principal actor in the economic arena. It is only in the...

In Colombia the study of business history is in its early stages. The first works specifically dedicated to this subject, those of the North American historian, Frank Safford, appeared in the middle of the 1960s.¹ However, the last two decades have seen a slow but gradual expansion of this area of research. The literature is somewhat disparate, produced by individual researchers, rather than research teams. They have come from a wide range of social science disciplines, and been located in very different faculties and university departments: management, history, economics, and sociology. Foreign scholars have made a significant contribution. This is...

Research on the origins, development and activities of business groups in Mexico accelerated relatively quickly after the middle of the 1970s.¹ During the following decade it attained an obvious importance. An analysis of a large proportion of the published work allows one to pick out three significant features. First, developments in this particular field of historical research coincided with the growth of regional studies in Mexico. Second, from the very beginning these studies of businessmen were directly linked to the broader analysis of economic and social history. Third, if one adopts these two characteristics as the major points of reference,...

There are certain parallels between the task faced by a British business historian working on Latin America in the late twentieth century and the British businessman of the mid-nineteenth century who tried to apply the business techniques with which he was familiar in his home economy to a quite different environment. Both run the danger of overestimating the value of their own approach and imposing an alien agenda on a society and economy they only partially understand. It is worth stating at the outset, therefore, that there are many problems with the practice of business history in the United Kingdom....

In this chapter we take the risk of carrying out, perhaps for the very first time, an overall evaluation of the state of business history in Venezuela.¹ It is only recently that this theme has been considered by those working on it as an area of academic research which is both specific and distinctive. Business historians in Venezuela used to lack awareness of its dimensions and hardly realised the significance of the tasks in which they were engaged. They were simply researchers approaching an area of common interest from rather different directions. Nobody, including the authors of this paper, could...