Teaching entrepreneurial families and family business history in Latin America, 1870s-2017

This paper aims to be an instrument for teaching family business history in Latin America in business schools. The focus is the story of the many failures and the few successful histories of Latin American family businesses, from the 1870s until our days. The choice of the dates responds to the willingness of the authors to focus the attention of students in a key historical period in the history of Latin America, with consolidated independent governments, and fast inclusion in the global economy. Those were years in which the region transformed its global position from being a destination of foreign products, labour, and capital, to becoming increasingly the cradle of innovative multinationals, some of which are today key players in global Foreign Direct Investment (Casanova 2016). The paper indicates the major trends in the external environment and the national politics, and the impact of such context in the creation, expansion, disappearance, or transformation, of family businesses, though the focus is in the large diversified family controlled business groups, for which the empirical evidence is more abundant to establish comparisons across borders, despite the diversity.