Michael Monteón

Business history in Latin America : the experience of seven countries

Preface Notes on Contributors Glossary 1. Business History in Latin America: an introduction - RORY MILLER 2. Business History in Argentina - RAUL GARCIA HERAS 3. Business History in Brazil from the mid-nineteenth century to 1945 - COLIN M. LEWIS 4. Business History in Chile - LUIS ORTEGA 5. Business History in Colombia - CARLOS DAVILA 6. Regional Studies and Business History in Mexico since 1975 - MARIO CERUTTI 7. Business History in Peru - RORY MILLER 8. Economic and Business History in Venezuela - RUTH CAPRILES AND MARISOL DE GONZALO 9. Bibliography Index

The British in the Atacama Desert: The Cultural Bases of Economic Imperialism

In the nineteenth century, the British were popular throughout the west coast of South America as the cultural and economic allies of the ruling elites. The criollos of Peru and Chile, who had inherited the colonial social order, looked to France in matters of art and fashion but viewed the British as the providers of commerce and economic progress. They welcomed Irish, Welsh, and English immigrants as merchants, artisans, and prospective grooms. In Peru, the British played a key role in developing the market for guano (the fertilizer composed of bird excrement and the precursor of the nitrate, salitre, trade), and British ships took Chiles copper and wheat to England from the 1840s through the early 1870s. By 1870, the development of the Pacific Steam Navigation Company and the London Bank of Mexico and South America assured the British dominance of the commerce along the west coast.

The child is father of the man: Personality and politics in revolutionary Mexico

Abstract On 21 August 1926, Mexicos President Calles received two bishops—Leopoldo Ruiz of Michoacán and Pascual Díaz of Tabasco—for a discussion of the Ley Calles, which had gone into effect on 2 July. Whereas implementation of the anti-clerical provisions of articles 3, 5, 27 and 130 of the 1917 Constitution had formerly been left to local authorities and governors, the Calles administration had imposed a national code. Under the Ley Calles, the number of priests per capita was to be regulated in such a way as to reduce their numbers substantially, foreigners could no longer be priests and foreign priests were to be expelled from the country. Religious instruction could not be included in any schooling, public or private. All monasteries and convents were to be banned. The government was to become the owner of all Church properties. Convents and schools would be turned into public offices or given to labour unions and peasant leagues, and the church was to be banned from all political organising or commenting. 1 In the meeting, the bishops insisted on the rule of conscience, Calles on that of law:

Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917–1945: Dávila, Jerry: Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press 292 pp., Publication Date: April 2003

England in Uncus: First offthe Mohegans. Oberg rescues the historical Uncas, Mohegan sachem. from thc fictive “Mohican” of lames Fenirnore Cooper’s novel. Uncas was, simultaneously, an ambitious leader with clear political aspirations, a dangerous enemy to rival natives, and a firm friend to English wltlers and colonial governments. Oberg shows that these three depictions are mutually dependent. To expand his power and to subdue Indian adversaries, Uncas played a delicate diplomatic game. Uncas seemed to understand better than other sachems that surviv;il and success depended on close relations with English newcomers. Although Pequots challenged English efforts to control local trade and Narragansetts complained about t’nglish heavy-handedness, the Mohegan leader drew the English nearer. Uncas proved himself indispensable a s a partner in frontier nianageinent and warfare. Playing the political and diplomatic game with more skill than othcrs. Uncas secured Mohegan land rights and avoided genocidal wars with the English. Hc was hardly the last of his “tribe.” Neither was he the only Mohegan. Oherg explains that Northeast Indian sachems could not lead without the consent of lower chiefs ;ind allicd villages. But the deliberations of Mohegan councils and the complexity of Mohegan trihal politics are missing from Oherg’s analysis. Scant sources may be to hlame. Oberg recounts vividly the machinations ot’ English governments, rival Indian nations, and native warriors from English rccords. But within Mohegan ranks, with the exception of one instance, it seems that Uncas led unilaterally and without much debate. Uncas: First of‘ the Mohegans is the only available biography of this significant figure. 11 is ideally suited for an undergraduate audicncc and is a good read for scholars despite sulf’ering from the thin analysis typical of biographies. Surprisingly, James D. Drake’s Khig Philip’s Wlw: C‘ivil War in New Englund, 1675-1676 and Daniel K. Richter’s Fncing i < u / ,from Indian Countq: A Native History of’ Etrr1y Amr,riru do not appear in Oberg’s notes. Both strengthen Oberg’s conclusions that Indian-English relations were more interrlcpendent than inany assume. Nevertheless, Oherg reveals the complexity and variety of Indian-English relations in the colonial Northeast with descriptive style.

Crime and Punishment in Latin America: Law and Society since Late Colonial Times

U.S. historiography on Latin America, for the last ten yearb o r so, is embarked, to use a popular and ironic Latin American saying, in a true “dialopo de sordos” (a dialogue of deaf people). Among the U.S. historians who study Latin America, there are the cultural postmodernists, who focus on “hegemonic and counter-hegemonic projects,” the “genderization of culture,” and the “social and cultural construction of the space,” amid other varieties of unusual and controversial topics. At the other side of the spectrum, there are the practitioners of “science history” or “social science history,” as The Mexican Economy pretends to be. The scientific part of the book, however. is a matter of dispute. Compared with some recent cultural postmodernist books, the book is rigorous and extremely methodical, although very ideological as well. It is divided into three parts or topics, which eight authors address, ( I ) the Mexican tinancial-sy

The Many and the Few: Political Participation in Republican Buenos Aires: Sabato, Hilda: Stanford: Stanford University Press, 210 pp., Publication Date: September 2001

tem reforms during the Porfiriato (the rule of general Portirio Diaz in Mexico, roughly between 1876-1910); (2) foreign trade reforms during the Porfiriato; and (3) labor relations reforms during the Porfiriato. Papers by Noel Maurer, Noel Maurer and Stephen Haber, Carlos Marichal, and Paolo Riguzzi address the first topic. Sandra Kuntz Ficker and Edward Beatty wrote the two essays that discuss institutional change, foreign tradc. commercial policy, and the structure of protection of the Porfiriato in the second part of the book. The third theme is dealt with by Jeftrey L. Bortz and Aurora GomezGalvarriato. Bortz and Haber wrote the introduction, which is also a discussion of historiographical issues. Most of the essays are examples of hardcore quantitative history, although of a particular kind, highly influenced by neoclassic econd what Bortz and Haber, and some authors, call “new” institutional economic history. Economist Douglas North started to develop this theory, and to some extent, the book is an c-ffort to use North’s theories in the analysis of‘ 1,atin American history. Almost all the essays are full of tables, figures. regresions, and regression analysis. However, the whole book sometimes reads as a neoliberal indictment of the Diaz regime for not developing enough markets and capitalism. Nevertheless. the reading of each of the essays shows a much more nuanced picture. It also shows that each author has his or her own view of the economic and social problems at stake. There is a clear contrast, for example, between Bortz’s essay on “the legal and contractual limits to private property rights in Mexican industry during the Revolution” and Gomez-Galvarriato’s essay on the role of unions in social and economic change in the textile industry. Whereas the former is a theoretical and legal analysis of labor laws and contracts before and after the Mexican Revolution, very much immersed in North’s theories, Gomez-Galvarriato’s piece is an economic analysis of company records to prove that workers needed union organization, bargaining power, and direct action to achieve economic benefits, while forcing the modernization of the textile industry. Haber concludes the book with a highly ideological and to some extent biased essay on the “commitment problem” in Mexican history. One reads in that essay that because there was no commitment to the defense of property rights in nineteenth-century Mexico, “there was neither political stability nor economic growth” (324). “Mexico is a canonical case of a ‘coup-trap’: a self-replicating cycle of violence, predation, and zero growth” (324-5). The panacea to economic development in the Latin American countries, therefore, was (and he is implying is) a commitment to the defense of property rights. If not, violence, predation, and zero growth will ensue. To defend these assertions, Haber uses the, by now, rather old and awkward GNP per capita statistics of John Coatsworth, elaborated for a 1978 study largely criticized since for their inaccuracy and tendency to compare “apples with pears,” as economic historians Richard and Linda Salvucci once put it. After all the programmatic goals for a new scientific, or rather, “social science history,” still ideological stereotypes hang at the book’s end.

Las Derechas: The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, 1890–1939: Deutsch, Sandra McGee: Stanford: Stanford University Press, 491 pp., Publication Date: August 1999

This is one ofthe most original books about Getlilio Vargas’s government to appear in many years. Scholars have long known that his centralizing administration laid the groundwork for modern Brazil’s political economy, labor law, political practice (populism), and social welfare policies. Daryle Williams, an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, adds new dimensions to our understanding of that period by examining the regime’s complex cultural politics as it greatly increased federal government power in cultural management, engaging a broad spectrum of artists and intellectuals, from conservatives to modernists, in a project to renew Brazilian culture and to definc hrasilidude (Brazilianness). The core of Culture Wars in Brazil consists of three chapters that focus on the registry (tomhamento) of historical sites and artifacts, fcdcral museums, and the portrayal of Brazil at two international expositions (the 1939 Ncw York World’s Fair and the 1940 Exposition ofthe Portuguese World in Lisbon). Registry of historical sites considerably broadened the scope of what was considered worthy of historical preservation to include entire colonial towns like Ouro Preto, leading inevitably to conflicts with some property owners but offering others an opportunity to link themselves to the state. Museums, notably the lmperial Museum (in the old palace in Petr6polis), came to present a “pristine national past’’ (136), free from conflict and uncomfortable realities such as slavery. Indeed, the 1940 exhibition of Jean-Baptiste Debret’s early-nineteenth-century watercolors, with their graphic portrayals of slavery, fell tlat, according to Williams, because the images were too harsh. Brazil’s contributions to the fairs offered contrasting portrayals of thc country: New Yorkers saw a society that embraced modernism, notably in the pavilion designed by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer; visitors to the Lisbon fair saw a Brazil that revcled in its Portuguese origins. Although Williams effectively analyzes the complex high politics of government and cultural elites, it is less clear how ordinary Brazilians viewed the resulting portrayals of their country. Only a handful of people visited the federal museums discussed in the book; several of them were difficult to reach I’rom major population centers, and dress codes kept out the poor and the working class.