Big Business and Dictatorships in Latin America: A Transnational History of Profits and Repression

Business Power and Dictatorship in Latin America

Big Business and Dictatorships in Latin America: A Transnational History of Profits and Repression is a substantial edited collection on one of the most difficult and revealing chapters in modern Latin American history. Rather than treating dictatorship only as a matter of state violence, the volume asks what happened when large corporations, business groups, and authoritarian governments became entangled in shared projects of profit, control, and survival.

The book ranges across the region, with chapters on Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Colombia, and Central America. That broad scope gives the collection real force: readers see both the specific national contexts and the larger patterns that connect them. The result is not a single-country study dressed up as comparison, but a genuinely transnational look at how repression and economic power often moved together.

Three Layers of Analysis

The structure of the volume helps it move from the general to the specific. It opens with broader historical and conceptual framing, then turns to national and regional case studies, and finally shifts to focused investigations of major firms and business networks. That architecture makes the book useful for readers who want both the big picture and the documentary detail.

What the Collection Emphasizes

• the links between big business and military or civil-military regimes
• the political economy of repression and profit
• comparative perspectives across Latin America
• the role of corporations, banks, and industrial groups under dictatorship
• the relationship between economic power, labor conflict, and human rights violations

Why It Stands Out

Because the chapters are written by different scholars, the book brings together a range of methods and perspectives without losing sight of its central question: how did business interests interact with authoritarian rule, and what did that mean for workers, institutions, and democratic life? The collection’s transnational framing gives it a wider reach than a standard area-study title, while the case studies keep it grounded in concrete historical evidence.

Good Fit For

This ebook will be especially relevant to readers interested in Latin American history, business history, Cold War studies, political economy, labor history, and human rights. It is also a strong choice for university libraries, advanced students, and researchers looking for a serious scholarly account of corporate power under dictatorship.

A Scholarly Resource With Regional Depth

For readers exploring the modern history of Latin America, this volume offers a carefully assembled set of arguments and examples that illuminate how profits and repression could become mutually reinforcing. It is rigorous, wide-ranging, and historically attentive—exactly the sort of collection that rewards close reading.