The book, ‘Business Power and the State in the Central Andes’, analyses how business elites have influenced state policy making in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru over the past century: during the phase of import substitutive industrialization between the 1930s and 1970s, during the period of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, and in that of post-neoliberalism since around 2000. It seeks to relate business power to the establishment, consolidation and sustainability of more pluralist and open systems of government, identifying ways in which it affects political stability in the region. It provides a sequel to the book written by James Malloy and Catherine Conaghan thirty years ago on ‘unsettled statecraft’ in the Andean region.

John Crabtree is a research associate at the Latin American Centre in the University of Oxford where he has taught for many years. He is also a former senior member of Saint Antony’s College. He has written, lectured and broadcast extensively on the politics of the Andean countries, chiefly Peru and Bolivia. His most recent book (co-authored with Francisco Durand) is Peru: Elite Power and Political Capture (Zed Books, 2017). Other titles include Making Institutions Work in Peru: Development, Democracy and Inequality (Institute for Latin American Studies, University of London, 2006), and (co-authored with Laurence Whitehead) Unresolved Tensions: Bolivia: Past and Present (University of Pittsburgh, 2008). He holds a masters degree from the University of Liverpool and a PhD from Oxford Brookes University.