The disintegration of the tobacco trade in the Upper Plata of the 1800s provides a striking example of economic progress hindered by political conflict—a common occurrence in Latin American history. The exportation of tobacco from this interior region created a focus for a coherent and relatively successful commercial infrastructure during the late colonial era. The post-independence regimes could not, however, create the stability necessary for the growth and maintenance of the tobacco trade. In this article, Dr. Whigham analyzes the balance between economic interests and political constraints in the Upper Plata between 1780 and 1865, and demonstrates how these factors interacted to disrupt the potential for a sizable commerce in tobacco.

In this article Mr. Secada analyzes the origins of W. R. Grace and Company and its rise as a dominant actor in Peruvian economic history. He attributes this ascendancy primarily to the arms trade in which Grace engaged on behalf of the Peruvian government during the War of the Pacific (1879–84). Grace's early status as an intimate of the dominant Peruvian elite, its deft manipulation of its ambiguous position as an American shipping house, its imaginative construction of a nascent intercontinental trading network utilizing both sea and rail transport, and its willingness to invest its own capital in the development of potential product lines—all served to catapult the firm within a period of thirty years into a powerful trading house and foreign investor in Latin America.

While it lost some five million dollars operating in Mexico between 1824 and 1849, the British Real del Monte Company conducted its business without major interruption from the political turbulence that characterized the new nation. In this article, Professor Randall shows how the company finessed most of the political risk that it potentially faced by keeping administrative distance between itself and the ever-changing central governments and by conducting political relations at the local level as community relations. Despite business rivalries with mine owners, labor-management conflict, and incidents of individual and institutional friction, the English firm and the Mexican town of Real del Monte generally maintained positive community relations. Accommodation as much as conflict accompanied foreign penetration into newly independent Mexico.

Enrique C. Creel was Mexico's leading banker, an innovative industralist, venture capitlist, and representative of the nation's largest land and cattle owner; he was also the political boss of the state of Chihuahua and the key conciliator of the conflicting intersts of the north and the national regime of dictator Porfirio Díaz. In this essay, Professor Wasserman describes Creel's activities, showing how he and his family built the greatest business empire in Mexico before 1910, survived the decade-long destruction of the revolution (1910–20), and rebuilt their empire in the 1920s. Better than any of his contemporaries, Creel combined managerial talent and vision with a mastery of the interplay of politics, regional interests, and foreign capital that comprised his economic entrepreneurship and the special nature of economic entrepreneurship and the intimate relationship between business and politics in pre-and post-revolutionary Mexico.

Since the Business History Review's special issue on Latin America twenty years ago, many articles and monographs have been published utilizing archival sources. An examination of many of these studies and experience in archives suggest that the historian of Latin American business must use a variety of sources to study individual firms and the relationships between business and the national societies in which they operate. In this essay Professor Reber discusses eight types of archives found in the United States, Latin America, Great Britain, France, and Spain which hold manuscripts of interest to those studying both the economic and business history of Latin America. She also offers advice about bibliographic aids, guides, and, briefly, printed primary source materials useful in supplementing the often hard-to-find archival data.