This article examines the trust-producing mechanisms investors and financiers used in São Paulo, Brazil, to determine where to invest their money in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The coffee boom that began in the 1880s spurred bursts of new domestic business development that transformed São Paulo into Brazil's industrial leader. Using shareholder and director data from an array of business sectors, this article demonstrates that early development (1856–1905) of the institutions that provided business finance was accompanied by highly personal relationships between financier and entrepreneur. By the early twentieth century (1906–1920), rapid economic growth and business diversification rendered these personal connections inadequate and hence less important to business finance. Investors and directors concentrated their energies and their money, abandoning the practice of forming broad connections in general—and connections to a bank in particular—and turned to the stock market instead. By providing an alternative to personal forms of trust production, the rise of impersonal intermediation promoted the significantly broadened market for corporate business formation that underwrote São Paulo's economic transformation.

The Brazilian economy before the First World War has been generally characterized as an economy specializing in the production of primary goods for the international market—chiefly coffee for export. The emergence of the first industrial factories has been seen as closely connected to the performance of the export sector. The first cotton mills established in one province of Brazil, Minas Gerais, were not connected to the export sector, however. Minas Gerais was different in key respects from other regions. This article describes the peculiarities of the Mineiro economy during the 1870s and investigates the establishment of the first cotton mills there. It considers the location, size, and financing of the mills, as well as the structure of ownership and relations between partners. The results show that the emergence of the textile industry in Minas Gerais was independent from the performance of the foreign sector of the Brazilian economy.

This article looks at the corporate history of J. Walter Thompson to examine the nature of U.S.-Mexican relations in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II. It contends that local conditions, along with a cadre of “progressive” Good Neighbor Policy diplomats, forced American companies to adopt the role of “commercial diplomats,” altering the nature of what, up to 1940, had been a tense and bitter binational relationship. The article shows how Thompson's role as a commercial diplomat changed its previous “capitalist missionary” approach and how it complemented American diplomacy, including national security measures to displace German commercial influence in Mexico during Word War II.

The Mexican Revolution (1910) brought important changes to the social, political and economic spheres of Mexico. New legislation was passed to protect workers and redistribute land. The state acquired rights to petroleum, water, and subsoil minerals. For entrepreneurs this was an abrupt change from the previous regime. They had to adapt to the new policies and administrative state structure. Business lawyers aided companies in a country where the government had circumscribed the private sector's participation in the economy. Lawyers offered their clients important services, such as lobbying and aid in corporate restructuring. This article explores how in the midst of these new revolutionary regimes an important investment group used the services of business lawyer Manuel Gómez Morin to create Mexico's first holding company and to issue the first mortgage bonds in the country.