Despite the fact that several Chilean companies have experienced great success in recent decades, becoming some of Latin America's largest international enterprises, the field of business history has lagged behind in Chile relative to other Latin American countries. “There is no tradition of business history in Chile,” the editors of these two volumes acknowledge in their introduction (1:13). This gives their publication greater relevance, since it will certainly foster more interest in the field in Chile, which will enable the field of business history to gain more of a hold in Chile in the near future.
The publication of these two volumes is not a minor step—they comprise nineteen chapters that, as a whole, provide a wide and well-balanced overview of Chile's business history from the eighteenth century to the present. Moreover, the chapters in these volumes showcase the different approaches to business history that have been gaining ground in Latin America in the last decades, from narrative accounts of particular entrepreneurs and businesses to studies based on network and quantitative analysis. Finally, taken together, the chapters deal with Latin America's major debates in business history, including the relative absence of local entrepreneurship; the relationship between the government and business; the role played by foreign companies, family firms, and state-owned companies; the participation of women; and the development of business groups and their transformation into multinational companies.
The first volume assembles eleven chapters on business from the last decades of the eighteenth century to the Great Depression, which comprises the first era of globalization and export-led growth based on natural resources. In the first two chapters, Jaime Rosenblitt and Francisco Betancourt show that prior to independence (1818), Chile formed part of an important commercial network that linked the coastal cities of the South Pacific to the rest of the world. They show that the region was less isolated, less dependent on Lima (the capital of the Viceroyalty) or Spain, and more involved in trade and entrepreneurial activities than the historiography has depicted. They also show the importance of family and merchant networks in developing agricultural, manufacturing, and mining enterprises to exchange for the import products and slaves that allowed them to accumulate vast fortunes.
The next two chapters deal with the evolution of business during the first decades after independence, showing that international merchants continued to be the key figures around which businesses developed. The major difference was that English merchants became major players introducing new technologies and new forms of business association. Christian Ducoing and Montserrat Pacull's chapter analyzes the network that mining entrepreneurs formed to reduce risk in the early production of copper, linked by English merchants who provided them credit. Roberto Araya's chapter offers a closer look at one of these English merchants, Josué Waddington, and explores his business strategies of diversification by which he participated not only in the mining sector but also in wheat flour production, railroads, agriculture, and real estate through vertical integration strategies. This chapter, together with Rory Miller's on the development of the South American Bank from 1895 to 1930 and Robert Greenhill's on the evolution of the British nitrate companies in Chile from 1920 to 1930, offers new insights into how and why British companies became dominant during the nineteenth century and then declined. For its part, César Yañez's chapter on the evolution of Chile's electricity sector shows how—even though the first electricity company, the Chilean Tramway and Light Company, established in 1898, was British—during the 1920s North American companies dominated the sector. These chapters would be a worthwhile read for not only those interested in Chile's business history but also those seeking to understand better the evolution of British companies during their era of hegemony and how they began to lose ground relative to North American firms.
Gonzalo Isla's article shows that not all nitrate business was dominated by foreign companies. In fact, Pascual Barburizza's Lautaro Nitrate Company produced around 30 percent of Chile's nitrate before the Great Depression. Barburizza was also a forerunner of what would become a major form of business operations in Latin America—the business group—by establishing companies in several sectors besides nitrate mining, such as agriculture, commerce, tin mining, transport, finance, and hotel services, that he ran together as a group. Another important Chilean family that made a fortune in nitrate mining were the Edwardses, studied in Ricardo Nazer's chapter. With the aim of understanding why Chilean business lost ground relative to foreign companies, Nazer explores the succession problems the family encountered once the founder died. He finds that the family retreated from the more profitable mining sector and invested instead in agriculture and real estate, seeking more secure and less challenging endeavors that would support their luxurious way of life.
The difficulties experienced by Chilean entrepreneurs in the manufacturing sector during this era are explored in Luis Ortega's chapter. Ortega studies the strategies these entrepreneurs followed to lobby for higher protection from foreign imports, such as organizing an industrial association—a scheme that, although not very successful then, would become important in the following century. Finally, Bernardita Escobar's chapter explores patent records between 1877 and 1899 to show that some women, although a small minority, did apply for them. Escobar delves into the story of one of these female inventors, Laurencia de Solminihac, who developed several businesses in manufacturing, real estate, fisheries, and mining.
The second volume includes eight chapters that refer to the years between the Great Depression and 2015. As in the rest of the world, this period includes two distinct epochs: one of deglobalization, when the role of the government in the economy expanded, followed after 1973 by decades of increasing globalization, when liberal promarket policies prevailed. However, in Chile the rupture between these two periods took place more drastically than elsewhere, marked by the coup d’état of Augusto Pinochet in September 1973. These chapters provide revealing snapshots of how business dealt with these changes.
The first two chapters show that from the 1930s to the 1940s, Chile's business elite followed a strategy of accommodation rather than confrontation with state policies. Marcelo Bucheli explains how the government forged links with private enterprises through the creation of the Corporación de Fomento de la Producción (CORFO), which provided financial resources to support companies that substituted imports. He also shows how “revolving door” mechanisms operated during these years by which politicians became businessmen and vice versa. As part of import substitution industrialization (ISI) policies, the government encouraged the creation of a private oil company, the Compañía de Petróleos de Chile (COPEC), and implemented policies to help it survive the war of prices carried out against it by Esso and Shell during its first years. However, in contrast to other governments in Latin America, Chile did not seek to nationalize the sector. After some time, the three oil companies negotiated an oligopolistic arrangement to share the market. A similar evolution took place in the electricity sector, which is explored in César Yañez's chapter. Yañez explains how the government played an increasing role, first through regulation and later by establishing the state company ENDESA in 1944. However, the North American electricity companies continued to operate.
Érica Salvaj, Andrea Lluch, and Constanza Gómez analyze the network formed by board members of Chile's major enterprises, finding that another important strategy undertaken by business was the coordination and collaboration of companies through interlocking directorates. Industrial entrepreneurs associated in the Sociedad de Fomento Fabril (SOFOFA), which until the 1950s had affable relations with the government. Enzo Videla's study of the paper company Compañía Manufacurera de Papeles y Cartones provides an example of the way private business took advantage of the support provided by the government through protectionist policies during these years. The company introduced new technology in both cellulose production and forestry that allowed it to become, by the 1950s, one of the few Latin American companies that had successfully expanded internationally.
Cristián Ducoing and Sergio Garrido study the modernization of the copper industry carried out by the Kennecott Copper Corporation through the twentieth century. They show in their chapter that in spite of nationalistic government policies, North American multinational companies continued to dominate the copper-mining sector, given their technological advantages and the vast infrastructure investments that copper production required. Bernardita Escobar analyzes data on the registry of companies between 1945 and 1958 to show that women owned 9 percent of them—and 11 percent of those located in Santiago, the capital. This suggests a possible reduction of women's participation in business during this period relative to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Luis Ortega Martínez's chapter shows that when government policies radicalized in the 1950s, business's strategy shifted toward greater resistance and confrontation. The SOFOFA reorganized, and its new leaders held a more belligerent position against governments’ populist policies and promoted promarket policies. The business elite also sought alliances with American business associations and American universities to establish a business school, the Instituto Chileno de Administración Racional de Empresas (ICAIRE), and a right-wing think tank, the Fundación Adolfo Ibáñez. It also championed an alliance between the economics departments of the Catholic University of Chile and the University of Chicago. Finally, they supported the Klein Saks Mission, which advised the government on anti-inflationary and liberalization policies. These efforts continued during the next two decades and are key to understanding the coup d’état of 1973 and the policies that were carried out afterward.
Finally, María Inés Barbero's chapter focuses on the development of several successful Chilean multinationals that took advantage of the new era of globalization that began during the 1990s. Similarly to other Latin American multinational companies, they were among business groups that expanded first within the Latin American region, called multilatinas, and then into other regions. While Chile has fewer multinational companies than Brazil or Mexico, it ranks above them in terms of relative GDP.
Although some knowledge of Chile's history is required to place the different chapters in their context, and there are important periods that are not dealt with by any chapter, such as the years of Pinochet's regime, these volumes provide an excellent point of departure to the understanding of Chile's business history over more than two centuries. The chapters in these volumes also offer useful points of comparison for those interested in the specific topics each of them deals with. Finally, scholars interested in changes in business related to the cycles of globalization and deglobalization will find in many of these chapters a better understanding of these processes.
