The emerging work on the internationalization of the family businesses suggests that family businesses in general tend have low levels of internationalization when compared to their nonfamily counterparts. Here, we use the varieties of capitalism perspective and Parson’s structural functionalism perspective to formulate a GILA framework for analyzing the development of the overseas family businesses (OFBs). The framework emphasizes the role of four functions – goal attainment, integration, latency, and adaptation, and shows how these functions are played by business system, family system, ethnic group system, and gender system in the context of the OFBs. We illustrate the framework using the empirical context of the internationalization history of Lebanese Diaspora businesses in West Africa since the late 19th century. Implications for further research are discussed.