The recent decline in EU–LAC trade exchange and development co-operation occurred parallel to an increasing weakness of political dialogue forums. The three elements trade, development co-operation and political dialogue between the EU and Latin America followed the EU foreign policy doctrine of inter-regionalism, a group-to-group relationship between two integrated blocs. This “triangle model” came under stress from the backlash of globalisation and regionalism, and the emergence of external actors like China or India to the detriment of traditional partners like the US and the EU. To reactivate relations, the EU and Latin America should reduce political co-operation to those issues that are of real mutual interest and inter-regional convergence like drugs or climate policies. At the same time the “one size fits it all” approach does not work in a deeply divided region in terms of development, size, political ideology and external partners.

This chapter argues that the shift in world politics that commenced in 2016 has created the best momentum to further develop Latin American and European Union relations for political and economic reasons. For political reasons it is intended to reinforce an international arena where multilateralism and respect for international forums and international law continue to exist. For economic reasons it is a way of creating growth and redistributing economic power away from the two largest economies (the US and China) who have clear foreign policy goals regarding the projection of power in both Latin America and the European Union. They are dangerously taking everyone towards a bipolar world. The remainder of this chapter discusses the economic balance of power that has developed over time between the North and the South with a discussion of the BRICS as well as a discussion of the potential outcomes of those struggles, followed by the development of mega-regional agreements until 2016. In Latin America the election of Bolsonaro in 2018 with an individualistic agenda was expected to affect the negotiations with the other countries within Mercosur or with the European Union. Although the EU and Latin America have intended for years to review their links, Trump’s unilateral and conflictive measures against them have actually accelerated their agendas (Santander 2020). Therefore for some of them the counterbalancing exercise took place against Trump, or for others potentially against China or even against both.

In 2012 the EU signed a trade agreement with Peru and Colombia, to which Ecuador subscribed in 2016, having abandoned regional-to-region negotiations with the Andean Community in favour of finalising an agreement with the countries that had already completed agreements with the United States. This chapter explores how the long shadow of the US, so often used to describe the nature of the EU’s relation with Latin America, emerged again in the rationales and negotiations of this modern trade agreement. It traces the impact of the US and its commercial policy on the EU–Peru/Colombia negotiations and on the negotiated outcomes, portraying EU–US competition underlying the EU–Peru/Colombia trade agreement in shaping the context of negotiations as an exercise in geo-economic balancing. The chapter also examines the initial stages of implementation of the agreement, paying particular attention to the controversial Trade and Sustainable Development chapter. The analysis concludes that the trade agreement on its own has not driven major policy changes in the Andean countries but has bolstered broader international commitments to changes in labour laws and policy reforms by creating additional pressure and accountability mechanisms. In so doing the chapter highlights the importance of contextualising trade agreements as one aspect of broader international relations between the EU and Latin American countries.

Accounts related to private medical practices and held by the practitioners themselves are both a part of medical activity and vehicle of information about healers’ practices and outlooks. This chapter is based on the ledgers written by three healers active in the last decades of the eighteenth century in the Geneva region: a country surgeon, a physician established in a small town, and a physician working in Geneva itself. Each practitioner imagined a structure and a code in order to elaborate and keep information about his practice and payments made. In proceeding thus, he surrenders information relevant to the meaning the accounts had for him and the organisation of his practice. The items listed inform both on the services offered, the value given to them, the expediency of clients to pay, and the different medical strategies adopted. Sometimes bills and accounts are clearly related, elsewhere emphasis is on certain types of clientele and, in one case, accounts aimed to estimate the progression of practice and, ultimately, the physician’s success. Comparing accounting practices carries information on the varying nature of medical services from one practitioner to another, on the value of medical counsel, and the social uses of medicine. Town and country practices are complementary, and practitioners from each environment bill different types of services. Contrasting these account systems enables us to understand how practitioners adapted to the demand and reveals something of the nature of the relationship the practitioner established with his patients and the type of medicine he offered.

This volume has shown how inter-regional relations have evolved over time, and how they have been mediated by exogenous factors, mainly US policies, economic crises and, more recently, the perceived crisis in globalisation. President Barack Obama’s approach to trade policy, with his desire to engage in mega-regional agreements in the Pacific and Atlantic spaces in order to set the global trade rules, bypass the WTO and stagnating Doha Round negotiations, and counter Chinese economic power, helped to encourage MERCOSUR states to re-engage in negotiations with the EU (Gomez-Arana 2017). Even more importantly, since the election of President Donald Trump in November 2016, the EU took on the baton of promotion of a liberal trade agenda and redoubled efforts to conclude ongoing trade negotiations with partners across the globe, in symbolic defiance of the US stance. In the 2020s EU–Latin American co-operation for a united front in defence of the liberal order, exemplified in the conclusion of EU–MERCOSUR negotiations and motivated by the need to respond to Donald Trump’s presidency, shows a renewed spirit of co-operation amongst two regions united by common values and goals. However, as in past decades, each side’s complicated domestic political and economic situations, which the Covid-19 outbreak has exacerbated, threatens to once again relegate EU–Latin American relations in the hierarchy of foreign policy priorities.

This chapter investigates the characteristics of a successful voluntary sickness fund in early twentieth-century Sweden. The practices of the Seamstresses Sickness and Burial Fund reveal how a working-class organisation functioned in improving the living conditions of its members. When it was first founded in 1898, it was a small all-female and marginal sickness fund, but by the 1930s it had developed into one of the largest in the city of Gothenburg, with good financial reserves. While successfully attracting new members and retaining its old, the fund also proved to be effective in reducing the costs of long-term sickness cases, one of its greatest concerns. Moreover, the social nature of the fund, its emphasis on mutual aid, and its economic decision-making practices, which went beyond mere capital accumulation, holds much of the explanation for the fund’s success. The fund also took part in initiating discussions on maternity benefits and participated actively in the general women’s rights movement, while also playing a part in the male-dominated sickness fund movement at large. Members’ engagement and willingness to remain members was likely reinforced by how the fund in this way gave a voice for working-class women.

Three processes – pharmaceutical revolution, drug regulation, and new methodologies – radically changed clinical research after the Second World War. The existing historiography highlights the first two. This chapter addresses the shift in research methodology with special emphasis on accounting. Accounting – understood as tools of knowledge – is thus neither restricted to financial transactions nor to any kind of administrative transactions within enterprises, hospitals, and other health organisations.This chapter argues for an extended meaning of accounting as the activity of preparing and comparing lists, used in a second step to define different forms of value and construct markets. An invisible bookkeeper has therefore emerged in the world of clinical research who holds together the fields of knowledge and economy. To explore such accounting, the chapter presents the two forms of accounting involved in the research and marketing of Ciba-Geigy’s antidepressants since the 1970s. The first focuses on the accounting technologies that balanced clinical features with the effects of drugs in order to document efficacy and build a hierarchy of uses and putative prescription motives; the second focuses on the market-based accounting involved in scientific marketing that integrates data on sales, prescriptions, and market-shares in order to build a hierarchy of targets and promotional investments.We therefore propose to understand the blending of clinical research and marketing as the rise of a medico-economic mode of accounting which is bringing together ‘the counter’ and ‘the bedside’ for managing what are massively private, for profit, investments in research and marketing.