This article examines some of the institutional conditions that facilitated the development of equity markets in Brazil. A critical factor was the addition to corporate bylaws of protections for investors, which enabled relatively large corporations in Brazil to attract investors in large numbers. By availing themselves of this strategy, the firms generated a relatively low concentration of ownership before 1910. Archival evidence, such as company statutes and shareholder lists, reveals that the addition of voting rights to their bylaws, particularly maximum-vote provisions and graduated voting scales (which stipulated that less-than-proportional votes increase in parallel with shareholdings), allowed many Brazilian corporations to balance the relative voting power of their small and large investors. In companies that made such arrangements, the concentration of ownership and control was sharply lower than in the average company. Judging by the Brazilian companies examined for this article, it also appears that the concentration of control was significantly lower before 1910 than it is today.

In Mexico, as in other parts of the world, the introduction of modern transportation and communications brought about major changes in the production and distribution of goods and in firms' management and structure. Between 1880 and 1910, the Mexican textile sector was modernized through the efforts of entrepreneurial French immigrants from Barcelonnette, whose closely knit network enabled them to succeed in overcoming limitations in the Mexican institutional framework.

This article analyzes the performance of foreign electric-utility companies and the evolution of the electric-power industry in Argentina from 1890 until the end of the 1950s, when the electric utilities were nationalized. It focuses on the decisions and strategies of the subsidiaries controlled by two holding companies: the Société Financière de Transports et d'Entreprises Industrielles (SOFINA) and the American & Foreign Power Company. The study suggests that the divergence in the performance of these two companies was determined both by their investment patterns and by their financial styles and management decisions. The impact of private decisions and public regulation on the Argentinean electric-power system is also explored.

Before World War I, most foreign investment in Latin America came from Britain. By World War II, however, the United States had become the main and unchallenged foreign investor in the region. This analysis of the negotiations that took place between the British firm (Pearson and Son) and the Colombian government over oil contracts reveals the reasons for the shift in influence. The company's lack of awareness that Britain had been overtaken by the United States as the hegemonic power in the hemisphere eventually caused the negotiations to collapse. While talks were proceeding, the company failed to consider how much influence the United States had on Colombian internal politics, and it overlooked the history of U.S.–Colombia relations. As a result, Pearson never received oil concessions in Colombia; instead, they were granted to American companies, consolidating U.S. power in the region.

In this survey of the trajectory of Latin American business history, the focus is on its development over the course of the past twenty years, when the discipline began to be recognized as a field of specialization within historical studies. The first section is a consideration of the origins of business history in Latin America, from the 1960s to 1985. The second section, covering 1985 to the present, is an analysis of the institutionalization of Latin American business history as research expanded and practitioners in the field began to adopt a more professional approach to their work. In the third section, the focus is on the topics that have attracted the most attention during the previous two decades, identifying research trends that have transcended national differences as well as some notable traits of Latin American business. The last section, a consideration of how Latin America can contribute both to business history and to comparative studies, concludes with proposals for a new research agenda.

In recent years, business history has become a rich and varied terrain for research in Latin America. In this essay, I will present an overview of key aspects of banking history in the region, with an emphasis on the sources that are available in Argentina and Mexico. The extensive archives that have been built up in both countries offer historians the opportunity to study an array of topics: histories of individual banks; the evolution of banking systems; the relation between banking firms and industrial and agricultural development; the role of banks in government finance; the unique historical trajectories of central banks; the rise and relative decline of state-development banks; and the complex history of foreign banks in Latin America from the nineteenth century to the present.