In the last 40 years, European agribusiness corporations have been at the forefront of the transnational process of turning land into capital in Latin America. Their leadership is intertwined with the legacy of European companies that arrived in the region since the end of the 19th century, at the dawn of the independent life of the emerging nations after the fall of the Spanish-Portuguese empire. The main question of the research asks about the continuities, ruptures, and novelties in the territorial control strategies of these corporations to produce and extract wealth in different Latin American countries. Our hypothesis suggests that since the end of the 19th century and much of the 20th century, direct control techniques characterized by dispossession and physical expulsion of communities from their territories prevailed. To study the changes in their territorial control strategies, case studies will be carried out using different approaches (micro-history of globalization, economic history, and corporate history) to build the genealogy of two world leading European agro-industrial corporations: KWS Saat and Nestlé; and to determine their importance in the transnational processes of turning land into capital entangled with other actors and symbolic and ecological implications.
