Strom Thacker’s aim in his Big Business, The State, and Free Trade, is to examine the political coalitions that underlay Mexico’s turn to free trade in the late 1980s to the early 1990s. His argument is that beginning in the early 1980s, the business sector in Mexico began to gain strength as a political actor and as a free trade coalition partner, and at the same time the Mexican state became more responsive to the demands of the business elites. By paying equally close attention to both the business and political sides, he argues his case with admirable elegance.First, what meets the eye: Thacker’s writing style is accessible if somewhat dry. His prose is by no means exciting, but it’s not marred by rambling, convoluted sentences that so many academics can’t seem to resist writing. And he defines and clarifies whatever social scientific jargon he uses in the early parts of the book.The first two chapters may be somewhat of a bore to non-specialists. In chapter 1, the introduction, the author discusses the merits and inadequacies of the extant literature on political coalitions and policy-making in recently liberalizing countries. For those readers wishing to pursue further the study of this field, this serves as a good reference. The second chapter lays out the general argument of the book in a semi-theoretical way.The bulk of the book is devoted to examining the rise in the relative strength of the business sector in the political arena and how the Mexican policy makers came to depend on the increasingly vocal business elite. On the business side, Thacker considers several different factors that made business elites strong free trade coalition partners: the international economic context, the size and geographic location of firms, the division between import-competing and exporting firms and their consequent preference for open trade or state protection. On the state side, he explores factors that made the state more vulnerable to business pressure: the development international and domestic financial markets, the mounting electoral challenge that the PRI faced, economic crisis of the 1980s, the fall in international oil prices, and the rise of the free market-oriented technocrats into policy-making positions.Thacker cogently argues that the NAFTA negotiations in 1991-92 was a culmination of these trends, and indeed by that time, business had become an established free trade coalition partners with the state.The last chapter demonstrated the explanatory power of his argument by briefly comparing the liberalization program in Argentina, Brazil and Chile.This is an invaluable study for anyone interested in why Mexico liberalized its commercial relations with the United States so enthusiastically, or how the relationship between the Mexican government and that country’s various social forces functions, or anyone simply curious to see how social science is done properly.