Business History in Latin America: The Experience of Seven Countries

Abstract

The field of Latin American business history remains at an incipient stage of development, but this collection of essays offers an important assessment of its accomplish ments thus far, as well as suggestions for future research agendas. The authors offer some fairly coherent observations about business history in the seven countries that they examine. They agree that the level of development of business history varies dramatically from country to country, with Brazil and Mexico leading the list while Chile and Venezuela appear near the bottom. The essays also stress certain common limitations in the business historiography of the region. While there is general agreement that social and economic histories have contributed to a better understanding of business, the authors are critical of the focus on dependency and imperialism, which typified these works in the 1960s and 1970s. That focus on externalities, most of the authors believe, stereotyped Latin American business elites as weak and prone to domination by foreign capitalists, and discouraged more thorough research on local corporations. They are also critical of the fact that even as more researchers turn to the firm as the focal point of their interests, most have failed to apply the methodologies developed by such noted business historians as Alfred Chandler. While recognizing these shortcomings, the essayists do an impressive job of leading the reader through the literature on the subject.Most of the essays, especially those by Raúl García Heras (Argentina), Rory Miller (Peru), Colin Lewis (Brazil), Luis Ortega (Chile), and Carlos Dávila (Colombia) provide effective surveys of the literature that include not only the narrow base of works strictly concerned with business, but the broader range of works in economic and social history as well as those from other disciplines that have contributed to our understanding of corporate history. The articles also provide some limited observations and suggestions about archival materials although the emphasis is on secondary literature. While it would be difficult to summarize the research agendas for seven countries, there seems to be a consensus on the need to focus on individual firms and their institutional development, the history of business associations, and the legal and economic environment in which corporations developed in each country.The one significant disappointment in this collection is the essay by Mario Cerutti on Mexico. Cerutti notes that in the last three decades Mexico developed an impressive business historiography; he supports this assertion with a sixteen-page bibliography, but the essay itself is only ten pages long. Because of its brevity the article offers few specifics to guide the reader through this rich array of materials. As a group the essays provide limited treatment of the literature from labor historians, despite the fact that labor has been a central formative factor in the evolution of Latin American business enterprises. Finally, while the criticism of works on developmentalism and imperialism is warranted, it is also true that the concern with the economic, social, and political effects of private enterprise, typical of research concerned with Latin America, has given business history an immediacy and import that contrasts positively with studies that concern themselves exclusively with the internal working of corporations, as if they operated in splendid isolation from the world around them. But these are essentially quibbles with what is a valuable addition to business historiography that will guide scholars and students through the existing literature and encourage and direct future research.