Latin American business history from the perspective of the twenty-first century

This chapter contextualizes the essays in the collective volume Latin American Business History by surveying the intellectual efforts of scholars publishing before the 1990s. The chapter shows how since the 1960s, the role of firms in the economic development of Latin America was addressed from different perspectives ranging from Dependency Theory, structuralism, and neo-institutionalism. The dominance of each of these perspectives, we maintain, was consistent with wider debates on which policy was most suited to achieving economic development. Even though before the 1990s, few scholars conducting this research referred to themselves as business historians, their research provides a wealth of information relevant to business history. By the mid-2000s, business history had established itself as an independent field in Latin American scholarship that dialogued with the global business history community. The volume this chapter introduces is the first English-language initiative to provide a general overview of Latin American business history. Based on our reading of the scholarly production in the field of Latin American business history, we also offer some potential avenues for research worth exploring.