Business History in Latin America

This issue of Enterprise & Society is dedicated to new, innovative business histories focused on Latin America, an area that has been emerging for the discipline of business history only in the last decade or two. Latin American business history is not well entrenched in the teaching and research programs of Latin American economic and social history. Guiding traditions and prevalent theoretical approaches, as well as limited access to sources and resources, marginalized the subject in most of its countries until recently. This introduction sets out to discuss briefly the impediments that Latin American business history has faced so far and then outlines some of the contributions made by the authors of this issue.

A set of old and remarkably persistent historiographical traditions has permeated almost all of the literature on Latin America for centuries. The study of Latin American economies has been shaped by notions of a "New World" with new economic laws that already appeared in Christopher Columbus's first letters to his Spanish sovereigns. The continents were portrayed alternately as glittering "ElDorados" of abundant wealth and innocent aborigines or as benighted and backward regions of jungles, slaves, and hostile Indians. A corollary to this Columbian dichotomy is what has come to be known as the "Black Legend," the Latin American equivalent of what Edward Said termed "orientalism" when discussing the Middle East. Growing out of the Protestant Reformation, the Black Legend blamed "obscurest" Catholicism symbolized by a caricatured nefarious, totalitarian Inquisition and supposedly overweening Iberian monarchs.

The Black Legend blamed excessive state and Church regulation and rents for the failure of capitalism to take root in Latin America. The Iberian elite was seen as an effete aristocracy addicted to routine and repulsed by hard labor; they employed wealth as only a means to status and power, concentrating on consumption and accumulation much more than on production. High birth and politics were much more important than entrepreneurship in achieving success. Family connections outran business acumen on the path to riches. The individual had limited freedom to innovate. The lower classes, in good part racially determined, were predestined to lives of sweat and misery. The argument was not that Latin America was in some sense poor or underdeveloped, however. Parts of Latin America clearly enjoyed wealth on the level of many parts of Europe. Rather, the Black Legend preached that Protestant northern Europe deserved to enjoy the fruits (and silver) of the New World on moral grounds.

This view preceded Max Weber's notion of the Protestant Ethic (and Catholic indolence) by almost three centuries and remained firmly ensconced in views of Latin America, not only by foreigners, but by many Latin Americans as well. Independence was thought to have failed to free the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies from their Iberian heritages.¹ Indeed, economic historians have come to recognize that independence in fact created Latin American underdevelopment, as much of the nineteenth century was rife with coups and banditry while the United States and western Europe enjoyed the fruits of what economic historian Kenneth Pomeranz calls "TheGreat Divergence."² Before 1800 few considered Latin America "underdeveloped." After 1800, the cannibal side of Columbus's contradictory view of Amerindians came to prevail over the innocent Noble Savage account and was transmogrified to describe all Latin Americans. Rather than thick-headed and passive, Latin Americans were increasingly seen as fiery, passionate, emotional, driven by oversexed urges that needed to be satisfied immediately, rather than by calmer, rational drives that demanded strategies for the future. The "caudillo" (warlord) came to supplant the courtier, but neither was fertile material for state and nation building or for the construction of capitalist economies. The supposedly rigid, entrenched colonial mercantilism of the Spanish Empire was replaced by hotheaded warlords and bandits seizing tribute and booty. Markets faded in Latin America's nineteenth-century Dark Ages as cities dwindled and landed estates predominated.³

Just as these perceived cultural and social barriers inhibited the rise of business society in Latin America, so too did structural impediments retard the study of Latin American business. One impediment was the...