5 - Business History in Colombia

Summary

In Colombia the study of business history is in its early stages. The first works specifically dedicated to this subject, those of the North American historian, Frank Safford, appeared in the middle of the 1960s. However, the last two decades have seen a slow but gradual expansion of this area of research. The literature is somewhat disparate, produced by individual researchers, rather than research teams. They have come from a wide range of social science disciplines, and been located in very different faculties and university departments: management, history, economics, and sociology. Foreign scholars have made a significant contribution. This is not without merit since Colombians have been opening up a field which is quite well developed on an international level, especially in Great Britain and the United States, and which, from the beginning, has been ‘something of a no man's land, on the frontiers between economics, history and sociology’. The literature published since 1965 has resulted in new research themes and stimulated important questions, and it has aroused interest in different units of analysis – regional business elites, companies, entrepreneurs, families of businessmen, economic groups, and business associations – all of which had tended to receive very little attention in Colombia.

The number of important reviews of the historical literature undertaken in the last few years is evidence of the marked advance of research overall in Colombia since the mid-1970s.