After graduating from my undergraduate degree in History from Cambridge University in 1970, I was successful in obtaining a 'Parry Award' from the UK Department of Education and Science for PhD research in Latin American Studies. This paid for three years' research, which included fifteen months living and working in Peru and Bolivia. Initially I planned to write a thesis on the Peruvian Corporation, a London-registered company founded in 1890 to take over concessions in Peru, the most important of which were the unfinished railways constructed twenty years previously at the end of the 'Guano Age'. However, the company's archives proved to be more patchy than I had been led to expect, so I ended up broadening my topic to cover the British merchants and their involvement in Peru's commodity trades and the oil industry, as well as the Peruvian Corporation's activities, under the title of 'British Business in Peru, 1883-1930'. Cambridge eventually awarded me a PhD in 1979, but by then I had been lecturing at Liverpool for five years and published several articles arising from my doctoral research.
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In 1973 I was appointed as a Lecturer in Latin American History at the University of Liverpool, dividing my time between undergraduate teaching in the Department of History and postgraduates in the Centre (later Institute) of Latin American Studies. Meanwhile I continued to research and write on Peru, shifting my focus to socio-political history, while at the same time commencing a book surveying British relations with Latin America since Independence at the beginning of the nineteenth century (eventually published in 1993).
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My career trajectory changed at the end of the 1980s for a number of reasons. A research visit to Peru in August 1988 with the intention of continuing some research I had started on the social history of Lima in the nineteenth century turned out to be fruitless, and the prospects for continued work in the country in the following few years did not look good, due to the Sendero Luminoso insurgency and Peru's deepening economic crisis. At the same time I was invited to transfer the History part of my post in Liverpool to the then separate Department of Economic and Social History. And my research trajectory turned towards a focus on business history, probably for two reasons: first, towards the final stage of research for my book on Britain and Latin America I had gained access to Unilever's wonderful corporate archives, which led me to look more closely at UK-Latin American business relations after 1914 and, second, at much the same time Professor Carlos Dávila of the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá invited me to contribute to an international conference on the region's business history, which led a subsequent co-edited book.
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Another set of events at the end of the 1990s changed my trajectory again. The Department of Economic and Social History was absorbed into the School of History, which I had voluntarily left ten years before in search of an environment that was more congenial to an economic and business historian. In the meantime I had been asked to become the Programme Director for a new MBA (Football Industries), now commonly known as FIMBA, which was initially based in Economic and Social History. In 2000-01 I was also temporarily Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at a very difficult time in its history, as well as running both my own ESRC project on UK-Latin American relations and jointly directing a project for Leverhulme Foundation to evaluate the likely usefulness for historians of the archives that Unilever had taken over from its former subsidiary, the United Africa Company. This tangled knot of commitments became unravelled in 2002 when the university management asked me to transfer full-time into the newly established Management School in order to continue running the FIMBA programme and provide an input in international business history to the School's undergraduate degrees.
Between 2002 and 2017, when I retired, I worked in the then very positive and stimulating atmosphere of the Management School as we built it up into what is now an internationally accredited business school. My teaching encompassed international business history, international business and management, Latin American business and political economy, and a 'Football Finance' module on the MBA (Football Industries) degree. However, my administrative commitments, as Director of Undergraduate Studies and then head of a subject group, coupled with larger undergraduate classes than I had ever taught before, were impeding continued research and writing, In summer 2012, as well as commencing new research on the economic and business history of Chile, a country which I had avoided since the military coup of 1973, I decided to change to a part-time role, and I eventually retired fully in 2017, although I continue to research and write, as well as continuing my involvement with the FIMBA graduate network.
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Outside Liverpool, I have taught at the University of Warwick, the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, and summer school at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. In 2008 I was appointed to the Cátedra Corona, a visiting professorship at the latter university, and in 2013 I was appointed an Honorary Professor at the Universidad del Pacífico in Lima. I have co-edited two interdisciplinary journals in Latin American studies at different times, the Bulletin of Latin American Research between 1983 and 1989, and the Journal of Latin American Studies between 2005 and 2014. I served on the committee of the UK Society for Latin American Studies for several years, co-founded the latam-info email list in 1993, and I was also as a trustee of Canning House in London between 2014 and 2020. I continue to be an Associate Fellow of Canning House as well as an Honorary Fellow at the University of Liverpool Management School.