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Foreign Predominance Among Overseas Traders in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Eugene W. Ridings
Eugene W. Ridings*
Affiliation:
Winona State University
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Writing of nineteenth-century Peru, historian Jorge Basadre observed, “To discuss the commercial life of the country is to discuss the role of the foreigner.” Historian Francisco Calderón similarly stated that during the late nineteenth century, “it may be affirmed that various foreign houses with great capital generally dominated Mexican overseas commerce.” A visitor to nineteenth-century Brazil remarked of Rio de Janeiro's foreign trading houses, “these large firms are the main prop of Brazilian commerce; almost every shopkeeper in the country is, more or less directly, dependent on them.” Nor were Peru, Mexico, and Brazil atypical. In almost every Latin American nation, foreigners dominated international trade during the nineteenth century. As the above authorities imply, this domination was not only economic but numerical: the majority of overseas traders in most Latin American nations were aliens (only Colombia constituted a clear-cut exception). Foreign numerical domination among overseas traders may have had a profound effect on Latin American development.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , 1985 , pp. 3 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

∗

The author would like to thank Donald Barnhart, Neill Macaulay, Thomas Skidmore, Joseph Sweigart, and John Hoyt Williams for their helpful comments. Research was greatly aided by grants from the American Philosophical Society and the Organization of American States.

References

Notes

1. “La riqueza territorial y las actividades comerciales e industriales en los primeros años de la República,” Mercurio Peruano (Lima) 17 (Jan. 1928):24.

2. La república restaurada: la vida económica, vol. 2 of Historia moderna de México, edited by Daniel Cosío Villegas (Mexico: Hermes, 1955), 200.

3. Herbert Huntington Smith, Brazil, the Amazons, and the Coast (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1879), 484.

4. Monographs that focus on nineteenth-century Latin American overseas traders are few. Two valuable studies that appeared recently are Vera Blinn Reber, British Mercantile Houses in Buenos Aires, 1810–1880 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); and Susan Migden Socolow, The Merchants of Buenos Aires, 1778–1810: Family and Commerce (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978). A useful older work is Roland T. Ely, Comerciantes cubanos del siglo XIX, 3rd ed. (Bogotá: Aedita, 1961). Much material on overseas merchants is also found in Arnold J. Bauer, Chilean Rural Society from the Spanish Conquest to 1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); David A. Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Gilberto Freyre, The Mansions and the Shanties (Sobrados e Mucambos): The Making of Modern Brazil, translated and edited by Harriet de Onís (New York: Knopf, 1966); John E. Kicza, Colonial Entrepreneurs: Families and Business in Bourbon Mexico City (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983); Catherine Lugar, “The Merchant Community of Salvador, Bahia, 1780–1830,” Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1980; D. C. M. Platt, Latin America and British Trade, 1806–1914 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1972); Business Imperialism, 1840–1930: An Inquiry Based on British Experience in Latin America, edited by D. C. M. Platt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977); Eugene W. Ridings, “The Bahian Commercial Association, 1840–1889: A Pressure Group in an Underdeveloped Area,” Ph.D. diss., University of Florida, 1970; Frank R. Safford, “Commerce and Enterprise in Central Colombia, 1821–1870,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1965; Jerônimo de Viveiros, História do Comércio do Maranhão, 1612–1895 (São Luís: Associação Comercial do Maranhão, 1954); Barbara Weinstein, The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850–1920 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983); and Ralph Lee Woodward, Class Privilege and Economic Development: The Consulado de Comercio of Guatemala, 1793–1871 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966). Useful histories of European merchant houses trading with Latin America are B. W. Clapp, John Owens, Manchester Merchant (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1965); Edward Johnston & Co., Rio de Janeiro, Um Século de Café (Rio de Janeiro: Edward Johnston & Co., 1942); and Wallis Hunt, Heirs of Great Adventure: The History of Balfour, Williamson and Company Limited (Norwich: Balfour, Williamson, 1951).

5. For example, Francisco López Cámara, La estructura económica e social del México en la época de la reforma (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1967), 81; Katia M. de Queirós Mattoso, Bahia: A Cidade do Salvador e Seu Mercado no Século XIX (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1978), 161; J. P. and W. P. Robertson, Letters on Paraguay: Comprising an Account of a Four Year's Residence in That Republic, under the Government of the Dictator Francia, 2nd ed. (New York: AMS Press, 1970) 1:291; Stanley J. Stein and Barbara Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 154, 175. For the standing of overseas merchants vis-à-vis other businessmen, see Sebastião Ferreira Soares, Elementos de Estatística (Rio de Janeiro: J. Villeneuve, 1865), 1:264; and Susan Migden Socolow, “Economic Activities of the Porteño Merchants: The Viceregal Period,” Hispanic American Historical Review 55 (Feb. 1975):3.

6. For example, Jorge Basadre, Historia de la Cámara de Comercio de Lima (Lima: Cámara de Comercio de Lima, 1963), 13–62; Eugene W. Ridings, “Interest Groups and Development: The Case of Brazil in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Latin American Studies 9 (Nov. 1977):228–31; José Raimundo Sojo, El comercio en la historia de Colombia (Bogotá: Cámara de Comercio de Bogotá, 1970), 65–67, 70.

7. Robert Greenhill, “Merchants and the Latin American Trades: An Introduction,” in Business Imperialism, 1840–1930, edited by Platt, 180–82; Eugene W. Ridings, “The Foreign Connection: A Look at the Business Elite of Rio de Janeiro in the Nineteenth Century,” New Scholar 7, nos. 1–2 (1979): 173–77. On the varied activities of one merchant house, see Hunt, Heirs of Great Adventure, 81, 90–91, 129.

8. Warren Dean, The Industrialization of São Paulo, 1880–1945 (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1969), 19–33; Henry W. Kirsch, Industrial Development in a Traditional Society: The Conflict of Entrepreneurship and Modernization in Chile (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1977), 77–81; López Cámara, La estructura económica e social del México, 81; William Paul McGreevey, An Economic History of Colombia, 1845–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 164, 200.

9. Henry Stanley Ferns, Britain and Argentina in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 76; Charles Blachford Mansfield, Paraguay, Brazil, and the River Plate: Letters Written in 1852–1853 (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1856), 225; Richard Henry Dana, To Cuba and Back, edited by C. Harvey Gardner (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966), 112.

10. W. Arthur Lewis, The Evolution of the International Economic Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 22.

11. Eugene W. Ridings, “Business, Nationality, and Dependency in Late-Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” journal of Latin American Studies 14 (May 1982):95; Vera Blinn Reber, “British Mercantile Houses in Buenos Aires, 1810–1880,” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1972, 198, 205–6. In Peru foreigners controlled the Lima Consulado by mid-nineteenth century, as well as the Cámara de Comercio de Lima from 1888. Paul Gootenberg, “The Social Origins of Protectionism and Free Trade in Nineteenth-Century Lima,” Journal of Latin American Studies 14 (Nov. 1982):337; Basadre, Cámara de Comercio, 16.

12. Foreigners predominated in the committees drawing up the commercial codes of Brazil and Peru. See Jornal do Comércio (Rio de Janeiro), 16 August 1834, 4; Heraclio Bonilla, Gran Bretaña y el Perú: los mecanismos de un control económico (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1977), 5:77. Brazil's commercial associations were routinely called on by the government to help formulate or comment upon proposed tariffs. Ridings, “Interest Groups and Development,” 243. They served as the “sole aggregators” of the interests of commerce and industry until well into the twentieth century. Phillippe C. Schmitter, Interest Conflict and Political Change in Brazil (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971), 142.

13. López Cámara, La estructura económica y social del México, 212–13; Valentín Solórzano Fernández, Historia de la evolución económica de Guatemala (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1947), 291.

14. For a sampling, see Edwin F. Atkins, Sixty Years in Cuba (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1926), 54; Maturin M. Ballou, Equatorial America (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1892), 224; Alexander Caldcleugh, Travels in South America (London: John Murray, 1825), 1:359; William E. Curtis, The Capitals of Spanish America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1888), 304, 636, 675; Francisco A. Encina, Nuestra inferioridad económica: sus causas, sus consequencias, new ed. (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1955), 81, 129; James C. Fletcher and D. P. Kidder, Brazil and the Brazilians, 8th ed., rev. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1868), 180; Mackenzie to Foreign Office, Xalapa, Mexico, 24 July 1824, PRO/FO 50/7, in British Consular Reports on the Trade and Politics of Latin America, 1824–1826, edited by R. A. Humphreys (London: Royal Historical Society, 1940), 302–3; Michael G. Mulhall, Rio Grande do Sul and its German Colonies (London: Longmans, Green, 1873), 43; Henry George Ward, Mexico in 1827 (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), 1:429.

15. For example, David A. Brading, “Government and Elite in Late Colonial Mexico,” Hispanic American Historical Review 53 (Aug. 1973):414; Calderón, La república restaurada, 200–1; Ely, Comerciantes cubanos, 17–20; Richard Graham, Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 26; Greenhill, “Merchants and Latin American Trades,” 161, 168; Robert Greenhill, “The Brazilian Coffee Trade,” in Business Imperialism, 207–8; Thomas H. Holloway, The Brazilian Coffee Valorization of 1906: Regional Politics and Economic Dependence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 39; Jay Kinsbruner, Chile: A Historical Interpretation (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 71; López Cámara, La estructura económica y social del México, 94; Luís Nicolau D'Olwer, “Las inversiones extranjeras,” in El Porfiriato, vol. 7 of Historia moderna de México, edited by Daniel Cosío Villegas (Mexico: Hermes, 1965), 1122.

16. Ridings, “Business, Nationality, and Dependency,” 55–96.

17. Amaro Quintas, O Sentido Social da Revolução Praiera (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1967), 24.

18. Associação Comercial de Santos, Relatório da Associação Comercial de Santos, Apresentado em Sessão Ordinária da Assembléia Geral em 7 de Março de 1887 e Parecer da Comissão de Contas (Santos: União Typográfica, 1887), Annexo no. 13, unnumbered; Associação Comercial de Santos, Relatório de 1900, “Lista dos Exportadores durante a Safra de 1899–1900,” unnumbered. A non-Portuguese surname was, of course, no guarantee of being foreign, but exceptions were probably few. In any case, foreign numerical preponderance seems certain.

19. Ayers to Department of State, Belém, June 1892, United States Bureau of Foreign Commerce, Reports from the Consuls of the United States on the Commerce, Manufactures, Etc. of Their Consular Districts (hereafter cited as USRC) 39, no. 141:353.

20. Ridings, “Foreign Connection,” 170.

21. Clifton B. Kroeber, The Growth of the Shipping Industry in the Río de la Plata Region, 1794–1860 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), 62.

22. Jonathan C. Brown, “Dynamics and Autonomy of a Traditional Marketing System: Buenos Aires, 1810–1860,” Hispanic American Historical Review 56 (Nov. 1976):624. Although the author assumes that all merchants with Spanish surnames were Argentines, it is likely that many were Spaniards.

23. William E. Curtis, Trade and Transportation between the United States and Spanish America (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1889), 78–79. Figures are given for Argentine, British, German, Italian, Spanish, and French establishments only, with Argentine houses comprising 10 percent of that total.

24. Bauer, Chilean Rural Society, 38; John Mayo, “Before the Nitrate Era: British Commission Houses and the Chilean Economy, 1851–80,” Journal of Latin American Studies 11 (Nov. 1979):297.

25. Ernesto Yepes del Castillo, Perú, 1820–1920: un siglo de desarrollo capitalista (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1972), 132–33. Totals are obtained by combining three separate lists of firms.

26. Basadre, Cámara de Comercio, 16.

27. Nicolau D'Olwer, “Inversiones extranjeras,” 1125.

28. Frank R. Safford, “Foreign and National Enterprise in Nineteenth-Century Colombia,” Business History Review 39 (Winter 1965):503–26. For colonial Antioquia, see Ann Twinam, Miners, Merchants, and Farmers in Colonial Colombia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982).

29. Safford, “Foreign and National Enterprise,” 503–4, 515.

30. Ibid., 505, 511; Safford, “Commerce and Enterprise,” 39, 44.

31. Safford, “Commerce and Enterprise,” 50; Twinam, Miners, Merchants, and Farmers, passim.

32. Twinam, Miners, Merchants, and Farmers, 145–50.

33. Peter Marzahl, “Creoles and Government: The Cabildo of Popayán,” Hispanic American Historical Review 54 (Nov. 1974): 640–48.

34. Natives and Spaniards controlled trade during the 1820s. O'Reilly to Foreign Office, Guatemala City, 22 February 1826, PRO/FO 15/5, in Humphreys, British Consular Reports, 295. British emissary George Alexander Thompson found that twenty-one of the thirty-five “chief families” of Guatemala City lived wholly or partially from trade. Narrative of an Official Visit to Guatemala from Mexico (London: John Murray, 1829), 521. For the political and economic activities of Guatemala's merchant elite, see Woodward, Class Privilege.

35. British traveler Robert Glasgow Dunlop counted seventeen foreign houses but mentioned no native ones in his Travels in Central America (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847), 317. Foreign predominance in overseas trade apparently continued through the century. See Guatemala (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of the American Republics, 1892), 74.

36. Foreign traders entered Paraguay in force after the death of Francia in 1840, but they apparently did not constitute a majority except among shipowners and captains. John Hoyt Williams, “Foreign Técnicos and the Modernization of Paraguay, 1840–1870,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 19 (May 1977):235–38, 251.

37. On the colonial predominance of European-born merchants, see Brading, Miners and Merchants, 104–5; Federico Brito Figueroa, La estructura económica de Venezuela colonial (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1963), 276; Louisa Schell Hoberman, “Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Mexico City: A Preliminary Report,” Hispanic American Historical Review 57 (Aug. 1977):494–95; Robertson and Robertson, Letters on Paraguay 3:211; David Grant Smith and Rae Flory, “Bahian Merchants and Planters in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” Hispanic American Historical Review 54 (Nov. 1978):575; Ward, Mexico in 1827 1:103; Woodward, Class Privilege, 121.

38. David A. Brading, “Los españoles en México hacia 1792,” Historia Mexicana (Mexico City) 23 (July-Sept. 1973):129; Mario Góngora, Studies in the Colonial History of Spanish America, translated by Richard Southern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 163; Socolow, Merchants of Buenos Aires, 18–19, 186.

39. Brito Figueroa, La estructura económica de Venezuela, 278.

40. Góngora, Colonial History of Spanish America, 163. On the origins of early merchants in Peru, see James Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 1532–1560: A Colonial Society (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 78–79.

41. Smith and Flory, “Bahian Merchants and Planters,” 575.

42. Abiel Abbot, Letters Written in the Interior of Cuba (Boston: Bowles and Dearborn, 1829), 98; Verediano Carvalho, A Praça do Rio, 1890–1891: Série de Artigos do Jornal Fluminense O Tempo com o Pseudônymo Zeferino (Rio de Janeiro: Laemmert, 1892), 28; Ely, Comerciantes cubanos, 19–22.

43. Wilson to Foreign Office, Lima, 15 January 1834, PRO/FO 61/26, in Gran Bretaña y el Perú, 1826–1919: informes de los cónsules británicos, edited by Heraclio Bonilla (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1975), 1:89; Brown, “Dynamics and Autonomy,” 626–28; C. F. Van Delden Laerne, Brazil and Java: Report on Coffee Culture in America, Asia, and Africa (London: W. H. Allen, 1885), 189; John Miers, Travels in Chile and La Plata, new ed. (New York: AMS Press, 1970), 2:239.

44. For example, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Geraldo Mueller, Amazônia: Expansão de Capitalismo (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1977), 12–13; W. P. Robertson and J. P. Robertson, Letters on South America (London: John Murray, 1843), 1:174.

45. For example, Associação Comercial de São Paulo, Relatório da Associação Comercial de São Paulo, Ano de 1895 (São Paulo: Industrial, 1896), 54–55; Mackenzie to Foreign Office, Xalapa, Mexico, 24 July 1824, PRO/FO 50/7, in Humphreys, British Consular Reports, 302–3.

46. But overseas commerce firms sometimes practiced retailing as a sideline, as in Central America, where trade was small in volume. Dunlop, Travels in Central America, 82, 315.

47. Ricketts to Foreign Office, Lima, 27 December 1826, PRO/FO 61/8, in Humphreys, British Consular Reports, 155; Domingo Amunátegui Solar, “Origin del comercio inglés en Chile,” Revista Chilena de Historia y Geografía (Santiago de Chile), no. 103 (July-Dec. 1943): 94; John MacGregor, Commercial Statistics of America: Resources, Commercial Legislation, Customs, Tariffs, Shipping, Imports and Exports, Monies, Weights, and Measures (London: Whittaker, 1847), 1354. It is uncertain how strictly such prohibitions were enforced. Their effect was probably more to discourage than to bar completely foreign retailers.

48. Caldcleugh, Travels in South America, 155.

49. See the nationality totals in the charts on “Estatística das indústrias e profissões…” in the Brazilian Ministério da Fazenda's Relatório do Ministro da Fazenda, 1873–1898 (Rio de Janeiro: Typographia Nacional, 1873–98). Proportions are compared in Ridings, “Business, Nationality, and Dependency.”

50. Tulio Halperin Donghi, The Aftermath of Revolution in Latin America, translated by Josephine de Bunson (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 46–47; Socolow, Merchants of Buenos Aires, 177; Ward, Mexico in 1827 1:429.

51. See Barron to Foreign Office, Tepic, Mexico, 1 January 1825, PRO/FO 50/17, p. 338; and Ricketts to Foreign Office, Lima, 27 December 1826, PRO/FO 61/8, p. 117, both in Humphreys, British Consular Reports. See also John Mawe, Travels in the Interior of Brazil (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1812), 102; and Halperin Donghi, Aftermath of Revolution, 47.

52. George Thomas Love, A Five Years' Residence in Buenos Aires during the Years 1820 to 1825 (London: G. Hebert, 1825), 93.

53. M. N. Vargas, Historia del Perú independiente (Lima: Escuela de Ingenieros, 1903), 265–67; Tupper to Foreign Office, La Guayra, Venezuela, 21 February 1824, PRO/FO 18/9, in Humphreys, British Consular Reports, 275, 275n. On the effects of the Mexican expulsion, see Romeo Flores Caballero, Counterrevolution: The Role of the Spaniards in the Independence of Mexico, 1804–38, translated by Jaime E. Rodriguez O. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974), 103, 108–10, 129.

54. Samuel Haigh, Sketches of Buenos Aires, Chile, and Peru (London: Effingham Wilson, 1831), 183–84; Rubén Vargas Ugarte, Emancipación, vol. 6 of Historia general del Perú (Lima: Carlos Milla Batres, 1966), 185; Robertson and Robertson, Letters on Paraguay 3:340–49.

55. Calderón, La república restaurada, 195; Curtis, Trade and Transportation, 79.

56. Ely, Comerciantes cubanos, 19. Portuguese merchants comprised roughly half of the overseas traders in Rio de Janeiro between 1872 and 1898 and were probably equally numerous in other major commercial centers. Ridings, “Business, Nationality, and Democracy,” 64–76.

57. Platt, Latin America and British Trade, 98.

58. Michael G. Mulhall, The English in South America (Buenos Aires: “Standard” Office, 1878), 561; Warren Schiff, “The Germans in Mexican Trade and Industry during the Díaz Period,” The Americas 23 (Jan. 1967):280; Reber, British Mercantile Houses, 57–58.

59. Herbert Heaton, “A Merchant Adventurer in Brazil,” Journal of Economic History 6 (May 1946):6.

60. Centro Industrial do Brasil, Brazil: Its Natural Riches and Industries (Foreign Edition), Vol. 1: Preface—Productive Industry (Paris: Librarie Aillaud, 1910), 170–71.

61. For example, eleven of thirty-three principal Santos coffee exporters from 1895 to 1899 and five of nine major Salvador sugar exporters in 1891 were British. Associação Comercial de Santos, Relatório de 1900, Annexo no. 57, unnumbered; Bureau of the American Republics, Brazil (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of the American Republics, 1891), 163.

62. Quantitative evidence matching nationalities of overseas merchants with fields of trade over time is very sparse. For Rio de Janeiro during 1871–98, see Ridings, “Business, Nationality, and Dependency,” 60–70.

63. For example, Pôrto Alegre and Buenos Aires. Oskar Canstatt, Brasil: A Terra e a Gente (1871), translated by Eduardo de Lima Castro (Rio de Janeiro: Irmãos Pongetti, 1954), 367; Curtis, Trade and Transportation, 78–79.

64. Ely, Comerciantes cubanos, 17–18. In 1899 North American-owned export-import, wholesale, and large-scale retail houses in Mexico City numbered only thirty-two out of a foreign total of 172. Nicolau D'Olwer, “Inversiones extranjeras,” 1122, 1125.

65. Nicolau D'Olwer, “Inversiones extranjeras,” 1125; Bureau of the American Republics, Guatemala, 82; Mulhall, The English in South America, 560–61. No British merchants were found in Honduras's important port of Amapala in the last two decades of the century. Kenneth V. Finney, “Merchants, Miners, and Monetary Structure: The Revival of the Honduran Import Trade, 1880–1900,” SECOLAS Annals: Journal of the Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies 12 (Mar. 1981):35–36.

66. Reber, British Mercantile Houses, 56; Ridings, “Business, Nationality, and Dependency,” 69–70; Yepes del Castillo, Perú, 1820–1920, 160.

67. Platt, Latin American and British Trade, 147–48.

68. Antônio Paulino Limpo de Abreu, Memória acerca da Jurisdição do Juiz Conservador dos Inglêses no Brasil, 11 October 1844, Arquivo Histórico de Itamaraty, Rio de Janeiro (hereafter cited as AHI), vol. 257/1/1.

69. Woodbine Parish, Buenos Aires and the Provinces of the Río de la Plata, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1852), 404; Wilson to Foreign Office, Lima, 15 January 1834, PRO/FO 61/26, in Gran Bretaña y el Perú, 1826–1919, edited by Heraclio Bonilla, 1:107–8; Halperin Donghi, Aftermath of Revolution, 46.

70. In Central America at mid-nineteenth century, only in Costa Rica (where government made no exactions) was native large-scale business enterprise significant. Dunlop, Travels in Central America, 137.

71. The proportion of native overseas traders increased slightly in Brazil between 1873 and 1898, while apparently decreasing significantly in both Argentina and Chile. Ridings, “Business, Nationality, and Dependency,” 70, 86; Carl Solberg, Immigration and Nationalism: Argentina and Chile, 1890–1914 (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1970), 51; Encina, Nuestra inferioridad económica 5:94–95.

72. Brading, “Government and Elite,” 393–94; John Norman Kennedy, “Bahian Elites, 1750–1822,” Hispanic American Historical Review 53 (Aug. 1973):424; Socolow, Merchants of Buenos Aires, 20–21. Susan Midgen Socolow distinguishes between “clerks” and “apprentices,” the latter being trained specifically to manage a merchant house. Ibid., 21–22.

73. Socolow, Merchants of Buenos Aires, 20–21; Canstatt, Brasil, 286.

74. Carlos Victorino, Santos: Reminiscências (1875–1898) (São Paulo: privately printed, 1904), 56; Reber, British Mercantile Houses, 65; Safford, “Commerce and Enterprise,” 327.

75. Brading, Miners and Merchants, 103; Emilio Coello Salazar, “El comercio interior,” in El Porfiriato, vol. 7 of Historia moderna de México, edited by Daniel Cosío Villegas (Mexico: Hermes, 1965), 785; Socolow, Merchants of Buenos Aires, 38.

76. Hunt, Heirs of Great Adventure, 201.

77. Safford, “Commerce and Enterprise,” 328; Salazar, “El comercio interior,” 787.

78. Atkins, Sixty Years in Cuba, 65; Brading, Miners and Merchants, 110; Freyre, Mansions and Shanties, 177–80; Socolow, Merchants of Buenos Aires, 175. There were exceptions, of course. Viscount Mauá and Luís Tarqüínio, notable Brazilian entrepreneurs, began their careers with British firms. Nevertheless, the Brazilian Empire and its provinces of Bahia and Pernambuco thought it necessary to pass legislation forcing mercantile firms to hire Brazilian clerks, laws that apparently were ineffective. British Charge d'Affaires W. G. Ousely to Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations, Rio de Janeiro, 20 December 1838, AHI, vol. 284/3/9; Bahia, Leis e Resoluções da Assembléia Legislativa de Província da Bahia, Sancionades e Publicadas no Ano de 1858 sob Números 704 a 730 (Salvador: Antônio Olavo da França Guerra, 1859), 11; Pernambuco, Presidente da Província, Relatório Apresentado a Assembléia Legislativa Provincial de Pernambuco pelo Exm. Sr. Conde de Baependy, Presidente da Província na Sessão de Instalação em 10 de Abril de 1869 (Recife: M. Figueroa de Faria & Filhos, 1869), 65.

79. See, for example, Pernambuco, Presidente da Província, Relatório de 1869, 65.

80. Safford, “Commerce and Enterprise,” 327–29.

81. Jorge Navarro Viola, El Club de Residentes Extranjeros: breve reseña histórica en homenaje a sus fundadores (Buenos Aires: Coni, 1941), 109–87, presents brief biographical sketches of most of the club's 149 founders, the majority of whom were involved in overseas trade. Forty-three merchants remained in Argentina or other Latin American nations until they died; however, this number includes many who obviously died before their careers in Argentina were complete, often from epidemics. Only twelve are recorded as having left descendants in foreign commerce in Argentina. Of course, certain mercantile dynasties of foreign origin achieved enormous importance through diversification, such as Edwards in Chile and Matarazzo in Brazil. Bauer, Chilean Rural Society, 193–94; José de Souza Martins, Empresário e Emprêsa na Biografia de Conde Matarazzo (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto de Ciências Sociais, 1967).

82. Ferns, Britain and Argentina, 76; Canstatt, Brasil, 287; Yepes del Castillo, Perú, 1820–1920, 159.

83. Clapp, John Owens, 73.

84. Ibid., 74; Hunt, Heirs of Great Adventure, 193.

85. Canstatt, Brasil, 251.

86. For example, Bauer, Chilean Rural Society, 38, 179; Kennedy, “Bahian Elites, 1750–1822,” 431–33; Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, “The Role of the Merchants in the Economic Development of São Paulo, 1765–1850,” Hispanic American Historical Review 60 (Nov. 1980):583. This was not as true, however, in Mexico. Brading, “Government and Elite,” 414.

87. José Wanderley de Araújo Pinho, História de um Engenho do Recôncavo, 1553–1944 (Rio de Janeiro: Zélio Valverde, 1946), 316n.; Brading, Miners and Merchants, 103; Kennedy, “Bahian Elites, 1750–1822,” 424.

88. Mayo, “Before the Nitrate Era,” 296–97; Socolow, Merchants of Buenos Aires, 148.

89. Baker to Department of State, Buenos Aires, 31 October 1883, USRC 13, no. 43:471.

90. Brading, Miners and Merchants, 103; Susan Migden Socolow, “Marriage, Birth, and Inheritance: The Merchants of Eighteenth-Century Buenos Aires,” Hispanic American Historical Review 60 (Aug. 1980): 404–5.

91. Standard biographies of Mauá are Anyda Marchant, Viscount Mauá and the Empire of Brazil: A Biography of Ireneo Evangelista de Sousa (1813–1889) (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965); and Alberto de Faria, Mauá—Ireneo Evangelista de Souza, Barão e Visconde de Mauá, 1813–1889, 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Editôra Nacional, 1933). On Tarqüínio, see Péricles Madureira de Pinho, Luiz Tarqüínio: Pioneiro da Justiça Social no Brasil (Salvador: Vitória, 1944).

92. For example, Mexico and Chile in the first half of the nineteenth century. López Cámara, La estructura económica e social del México, 81–83; Bauer, Chilean Rural Society, 19.

93. Brazil's balance of political power shifted from sugar-growing to coffee-growing regions with the coming of the republic in 1889. On the Northeast's economic decline prior to that date, see Nathaniel H. Leff, “Economic Development and Regional inequality: Origins of the Brazilian Case,” Quarterly journal of Economics 86 (May 1972):243–62. For the problems of coffee factors, see Associação Comercial de São Paulo, Relatório de 1895, 54–55; and Gazeta de Notícias (Rio de janeiro), 28 January 1901, 1.

94. Peru and, to a lesser extent, Ecuador restricted the activities of foreign merchants. Gootenberg, “Social Origins of Protectionism,” 334–35; MacGregor, Commercial Statistics of America, 1331, 1349, 1354; Basil Hall, Extracts from a Journal Written on the Coasts of Chile, Peru, and Mexico in the Years 1820, 1821, 1822 (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1824), 117.

95. For example, British diplomatic representatives often assumed the responsibility of demanding more equitable tax collection or better warehousing facilities for merchants. Charge d'Affaires Arthur Aston to Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations, Rio de Janeiro, 29 January 1830, AHI vol. 284/3/5; Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary Lord Posonby to Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations, Rio de Janeiro, 28 September 1828, AHI vol. 284/3/3. Protection from political violence or confiscation was also afforded natives associated with foreign merchants. Hernán Horna, “Modernization and Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Colombia,” Journal of Latin American Studies 14 (May 1982): 47, 49.

96. William J. Callahan, Honor, Commerce, and Industry in Eighteenth-Century Spain (Boston: Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, 1972), 2–5.

97. Jan Bazant, Alienation of Church Wealth in Mexico: Social and Economic Aspects of the Liberal Revolution, 1856–1875 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 7, 89; Ely, Comerciantes cubanos, 33; Freyre, Mansions and Shanties, 9; Reber, British Mercantile Houses, 135.

98. Safford, “Commerce and Enterprise,” 366–67; Twinam, Miners, Merchants, and Farmers, 92, 105, 146–48.

99. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1930), 73–74; John E. Sawyer, “The Entrepreneur and the Social Order: France and the United States,” in Men in Business: Essays in the History of Entrepreneurship, edited by William Miller (Cambridge, Mass,: Harvard University Press, 1952), 11.

100. Callahan, Honor, Commerce, and Industry, 2–4.

101. Charles R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (New York: Knopf, 1969), 333–34; A. J. R. Russell-Wood, Fidalgos and Philanthropists: The Santa Casa de Misericórdia of Bahia, 1550–1755 (London: Macmillan, 1968), 124.

102. Kenneth R. Maxwell, “Pombal and the Nationalization of the Luso-Brazilian Economy,” Hispanic American Historical Review 48 (Nov. 1968):622–23, 630; Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 332; Callahan, Honor, Commerce, and Industry, 15–34.

103. Callahan, Honor, Commerce, and Industry, 44; Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 332.

104. Wanderley de Araújo Pinho, Um Engenho do Recôncavo, 316n.

105. Gilberto Freyre, Inglêses no Brasil: Aspectos da Influéncia Britânica sôbre a Vida, a Paisagem, e a Cultura do Brazil (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1940), 132–33; Carvalho, A Praça do Rio, 30–31.

106. For a biography of Otoni, see Paulo Pinheiro Chagas, Teófilo Ottoni, Ministro do Povo, 2nd ed., rev. (Rio de Janeiro: São José, 1956).

107. Carvalho, A Praça do Rio, 29–31.

108. H. de Rego Barros, Inspector da Alfândega, to Bahian Commercial Association, Salvador, 9 October 1877, Relatório da Associação Comercial da Bahia de 22 de Janeiro de 1878 (Salvador: J. G. Tourinho, 1878), 38.

109. The list is not meant to be all-inclusive, rather to cite the aristocratic values that are most pertinent to this discussion. See, for example, Tomás Roberto Fillol, Social Factors in Economic Development: The Argentine Case (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1961), 17, 18; Julio Heise González, Historia de Chile: el período parlamentario, 1861–1925 (Santiago, Chile: Andrés Bello, 1974), 162–63; Kirsch, Industrial Development, 57; Wanderley de Araújo Pinho, Um Engenho do Recôncavo, 315.

110. Góngora, Colonial History of Spanish America, 113.

111. Aníbal Pinto Santa Cruz, Chile: un caso de desarrollo frustrado (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1959), 15–18. The expansion of entrepreneurial activities antedated independence, beginning with the reforms in Spain's colonial trade system in the late eighteenth century. Sérgio Villalobos Rivera, El comercio y la crisis colonial: un mito de la independencia (Santiago: Universidad de Chile, 1968), 200.

112. Encina, Nuestra inferioridad económica, 81; Miers, Travels in Chile and La Plata 2:241. At mid-century retail trade in Santiago and Valparaiso together remained more than three-fourths native. Bauer, Chilean Rural Society, 39.

113. Jay Kinsbruner, “The Political Status of the Chilean Merchants at the End of the Colonial Period: The Concepción Example, 1790–1810,” The Americas 24 (July 1972):37; Bauer, Chilean Rural Society, 208; Encina, Nuestra inferioridad económica, 81.

114. Bauer, Chilean Rural Society, 39.

115. Ibid., 213–14; Encina, Nuestra inferioridad económica, 5.

116. Encina, Nuestra inferioridad económica, 92–93.

117. It was aided by the prohibition of retailing by foreigners in 1811 and by the extraordinarily cheap price of British goods due to the flooding of the market. Amunátegui Solar, “Origen del comercio inglés en Chile,” 94; Halperín Donghi, Aftermath of Revolution, 47; Miers, Travels in Chile and La Plata, 2:241.

118. Mulhall, The English in South America, 352. For the activities of naturalized Britons and their descendants in Chile, see Amunátegui Solar, “Origen del comercio inglés en Chile,” 83–90.

119. Chilean agricultural export before 1840 never exceeded 2 percent of its 1871–75 volume. Bauer, Chilean Rural Society, 19.

120. Ibid.

121. Encina, Nuestra inferioridad económica, 85–103, 116–20; Pinto Santa Cruz, Chile: un caso de desarrollo frustrado, 52–56.

122. Bauer, Chilean Rural Society, 62–77.

123. Ibid., 20, 215.

124. Ibid., 210, 217.

125. Safford, “Foreign and National Enterprise.”

126. Safford, “Commerce and Enterprise,” 50–52.

127. For an overview of these interpretations regarding Antioquia, see Twinam, Miners, Merchants, and Farmers, 143–50.

128. Colombia did not become a major coffee exporter until the twentieth century. Much of its production, in contrast to that in Brazil and Central America, came from small farmers. McGreevey, Colombia, 1845–1930, 196, 201–2. In Antioquia the nature and profitability of gold mining was also a major factor. Twinam, Miners, Merchants, and Farmers, 19–46, 147.

129. Twinam, Miners, Merchants, and Farmers, 91–109, 148; Safford, “Commerce and Enterprise,” 366, 386.

130. Safford, “Commerce and Enterprise,” 366, 367.

131. Góngora, Colonial History of Spanish America, 164; Socolow, Merchants of Buenos Aires, 25.

132. Socolow, Merchants of Buenos Aires, 65, 170.

133. Ibid., 25–26.

134. Brown, “Dynamics and Autonomy,” 625–29; Ferns, Britain and Argentina, 82.

135. Reber, British Mercantile Houses, 127.

136. Fillol, Social Factors, 17.

137. Ibid.

138. Solberg, Immigration and Nationalism, 51.

139. Burke to Department of State, Salvador, Brazil, October 1890, USRC 34, no. 121:176; Brading, “Government and Elite,” 394; Ely, Comerciantes cubanos, 25–35.

140. See Warren Dean, “The Planter as Entrepreneur: The Case of São Paulo,” Hispanic American Historical Review 46 (May 1966):138–52.

141. For example, Bauer, Chilean Rural Society, 179; Kennedy, “Bahian Elites,” 433–35; Stein and Stein, Colonial Heritage of Latin America, 176.

142. Reber, British Mercantile Houses, 46; Ridings, “Foreign Connection,” 177–78; Socolow, Merchants of Buenos Aires, 91.

143. Góngora, Colonial History of Spanish America, 164; Kinsbruner, “Political Status,” 47–54; Kuznesof, “Merchants in São Paulo,” 580.

144. For examples of business interest group activities and influence, see Basadre, Cámara de Comercio, 1–62; Ridings, “Interest Groups and Development;” Sojo, Comercio de Colombia, 66–70; and Woodward, Class Privilege.

145. Ferns, Britain and Argentina, 82.

146. Inventário dos Bens de Barão de Cotegipe, 28 de Agôsto de 1890, Arquivo do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, Arquivo Cotegipe, Lata 95, Documento 25, unnumbered.

147. On aid to government, see Jornal do Comércio (Rio de Janeiro), 3 August 1840, 3: Basadre, Cámara de Comercio, 21. Marriage between merchants and members of the traditional elite could be advantageous for both parties. Merchants gained access to local resources through political and family influence. Kuznesof, “Merchants in São Paulo,” 583.

148. Brading, “Government and Elite,” 390.

149. Ibid., 392–93; Brading, Miners and Merchants, 103.

150. Basadre, “Riqueza territorial,” 24.

151. To Cuba and Back, 112.