The history of business in Latin America

Writing in 2009 on the Latin American ‘variety of capitalism’, which he termed ‘hierarchical market capitalism’, Ben Ross Schneider identied four dening features of business structures in the early twenty rst century: diversied business groups; multinational corporations (MNCs); atomistic labour relations; and low skills. The relative lack of research on business history, he observed, meant that we knew much more about the political activities of domestic business and its relations with multinational corporations than the ways in which ‘local capitalists built and organised their rms’ (Schneider, 2009, p. 555).