This volume of essays has its roots in an invitation from Carlos Dávila to various colleagues elsewhere to participate in a panel at the annual conference of CLADEA (Consejo Latinoamericano de Escuelas de Administración) in Bogotá in November 1992. The idea was simply to bring together specialists working on business history in different countries of the region in order to compare the state of the subject and trends in research. In fact a lively panel resulted, with much discussion both within the formal sessions and in numerous conversations once the formal proceedings were over. The extent of common ground amongst the contributors and the seriousness with which they had undertaken the task of reviewing and explaining the literature on individual countries was sufficient for us to decide that it would be worth publishing revised versions of the papers in order to provide others with a sense of how the subject was developing in Latin America. To this end two more chapters, on Argentina and Chile, were commissioned, and the original essays were published in Spanish in 1996 as Empresa e historia en América Latina: un balance historiográfico (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo/Colciencias).