Year: 2016
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Entrepreneurism, the processes of initiating and enterprising one’s own business or organization, emerges all around us, and mostly proliferates in potential business settings that reflect untapped or high-demand markets that can accommodate new investments and start-up companies. The Amazon Basin is no exception to this global phenomenon. In fact, entrepreneurial businesses have long been operating in its midst, particularly since the seventeenth century, via strong colonial trade networks in animal skins, timber, vanilla, cacao, and later, quinine, rubber, and other commodities that propelled personal business pursuits (Cleary, 2001; Alexiades, 2009). A general pattern of exporting natural resources was well established by the nineteenth century and has markedly shaped the economic and political realties of Latin America today (Bulmer-Thomas, 2003). Many of these entrepreneurial businesses benefitted from colonial discourses of primitivism and wildness that still pervade popular views about Amazonia (Taussig, 1987). Indeed, it was often traders who perpetuated myths of danger so as to keep other entrepreneurial competition away (Taussig, 1987).3
Source: Routledge eBooks
Author: DANIELA M. PELUSO
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: Wenner-Gren Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W2531786949