7 - Business History in Peru

Summary

There are certain parallels between the task faced by a British business historian working on Latin America in the late twentieth century and the British businessman of the mid-nineteenth century who tried to apply the business techniques with which he was familiar in his home economy to a quite different environment. Both run the danger of overestimating the value of their own approach and imposing an alien agenda on a society and economy they only partially understand. It is worth stating at the outset, therefore, that there are many problems with the practice of business history in the United Kingdom. The field was founded on the company history, the classic example of which was Charles Wilson's two-volume history of Unilever. Since 1954, when this was published, there has been a plethora of studies of individual companies in Britain, large and small, central and insignificant. The quality, of course, has been uneven, ranging from superficial and eulogistic narratives produced for a centenary or similar anniversary to sophisticated treatments which locate the company's history within a much broader set of problems and which demonstrate the theoretical and comparative awareness and technical expertise which characterise good historical writing. Nevertheless, the dominance of the company history or case study approach to business history, dictated in part by the constraints of finance and time, has attracted much criticism from leaders in the field in Britain, though it is not without some prominent defenders.