Acknowledgments

One of the fundamental starting points that encouraged the author to undertake this work has been the participation over many years with numerous colleagues in seminars and colloquia on Latin American banking and financial history, but equally important has been the stimulus of the work of many researchers published in academic journals, as well as individual and collective books in this growing field of research. For this reason, I wish to thank colleagues with whom I have collaborated over the last thirty-odd years. To begin with I should mention the seminar on the history of credit and banking in Mexico City that we organized in the 1980s with Leonor Ludlow, Guy Pierre and Abdiel Oñate, among other colleagues, at which we had the pleasure of participating in the brilliant lectures by guest professors Gabriel Tortella and Jean Bouvier. In different formats this seminar, which we coordinated for many years with Leonor Ludlow, continued for many years and also helped to form the Mexican Association of Economic History in 1999, greatly expanding the universe of colleagues from whom I was able to learn about relevant aspects that made me reflect more deeply on the topics that linked financial history with other fields of study. Also important was participation in the journal América Latina en la Historia Económica, founded by Luis Jáuregui and Guillermina del Valle, which has become a key vehicle for discussion among colleagues from many countries.

Discussions with colleagues in Europe, the United States and a variety of Latin American countries have proved enriching to deepen my interest in comparative financial history. Particularly stimulating have been numerous exchanges with Michael Bordo, Gail Triner and Eugene White of Rutgers University. Equally important were the seminars held in Mexico and California with Gustavo del Ángel, Stephen Haber, Noel Maurer, William Summerhill, Sandra Kuntz Graciela Márquez, Aurora Gómez Galvarriato, Luis Anaya, Ricardo Solís, Paolo Riguzzi and Aldo Musacchio, among others. From the early 1990s, my collaboration with Pedro Tedde at the Bank of Spain was very important to me as we jointly organized an excellent colloquium on comparative financial history in Madrid, which brought together some two-dozen historians from both sides of the Atlantic, and stimulated collective publications. I must also highlight the close collaboration with my colleague Albert Broder from Paris, between 2000 and 2003, on a project on the history of French banking in Latin America, which allowed a dozen Latin American economic historians to delve deeper into this topic. Similarly stimulating was the participation in several colloquia organized by the European Association of Banking History, where I was able to collaborate on essays with Daniel Díaz Fuentes and Gail Triner, as well as on collective books organized by the financial historian Youssef Cassis. An opening to the world of the history of regional banking in Mexico came from Mario Cerutti, who convened a collective seminar on the subject. More recently, I would like to thank Andrés Hoyo, Daniel Díaz and Javier Martínez and the University of Cantabria for collaborating in an excellent colloquium in 2015 in Santander on comparative banking history in Spain and Latin America, a collective effort that led to the publication of two edited works and to the construction of the HBancaria website, which is intended to be a resource for students and researchers interested in this field.

At the original genesis of my first essay on the themes of comparative Latin American banking history, I must acknowledge the encouragement given to me by Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz. I am especially grateful for the support provided by the Guggenheim Foundation in the early 1990s, which gave me opportunity to begin my research and writing on Latin American banking history, as well as by the Banco Exterior de España, V Centenario Scholarship. Later, the support granted to me by Conahcyt and by El Colegio de México proved essential. Finally, I would like to give my most sincere thanks to several young colleagues who have collaborated in various aspects of the preparation of the manuscript. In the first place, I am most grateful to Guillermo Barragán, who helped greatly with historical statistics and with the design of key illustrations, as well as being coauthor of a first draft of Chapter 5 of this book. Thanks also to Fernando Arteaga, who contributed fundamentally to an early draft of Chapter 4, as well as to Manuel Bautista, for his always stimulating suggestions. Finally, in the last stages of preparing the manuscript, Julio Quinones helped me review the entire manuscript and bibliography as well as charts and graphs in the format required by Cambridge University Press.

As always with all my books, I must thank the excellent service provided by the library of El Colegio de México and in particular to my good friends Víctor Cid and Micaela Chávez for obtaining an essential bibliography for this field of study. I would like to thank El Colegio de México for the support and time granted to carry out this work over many years. But the greatest debt remains, as always, with Soledad González Montes and to our daughters, Andrea and Ana, for their tireless solidarity and affection.