Research on the origins, development and activities of business groups in Mexico accelerated relatively quickly after the middle of the 1970s. During the following decade it attained an obvious importance. An analysis of a large proportion of the published work allows one to pick out three significant features. First, developments in this particular field of historical research coincided with the growth of regional studies in Mexico. Second, from the very beginning these studies of businessmen were directly linked to the broader analysis of economic and social history. Third, if one adopts these two characteristics as the major points of reference, then one should also add that research interest has centred, above all, on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a particular concentration on the period between the 1840s and 1920.

Before commencing the detailed analysis of the literature, one point must be emphasised. In contrast to several of the other chapters in this volume which review books and articles published both in Latin America and those published overseas, this discussion is based almost entirely on studies published in Mexico itself. In part this reflects the substantial volume of research produced in Mexico (in comparison with the work on business history in other countries). However, it also draws attention to the way in which the work undertaken in Mexico since the mid-1970s has changed perceptions of business history. It has resulted in conclusions quite unlike those of the general histories which were published before the 1980s. This emphasis also makes for a reading of Mexican business history which is rather different from that of many foreign scholars, especially in the United States, who often give little credence to the idea that domestic business elites, modern firms, and a style of development based on local capital could have grown up in Mexico or other Latin American societies. It also undermines the Latin American literature of the 1960s and 1970s which was composed more for reasons of ideology than of knowledge.

The nineteenth century and regional research

From the mid-1970s historical research dedicated to specific regional areas began to proliferate in Mexico. Historians started to focus their interest on projects which concentrated on rather smaller geographical areas than that which was eventually encompassed by the modern nation-state.