A World Without “Dependant Kings”: Eighteen Hundred and Eleven and the Forms of Informal Empire

Abstract

IT HAS BEEN ROUGHLY TWO HUNDRED YEARS SINCE THE PUBLICATION OF Anna Laetitia Barbauld's explosively controversial poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, and the same span has elapsed since the Latin American wars of independence, an event her poem prophesies, celebrates, and closes with. This dual bicentennial is a reminder that we have yet to do justice to the impact of the Latin American revolutions on Barbauld's poem, or on Romantic literature more generally. Bringing Latin America into our understanding of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world--something transatlantic studies have only sporadically attempted (1)--shows Eighteen Hundred and Eleven to be part of a lively conversation about the networks of imperialism rapidly emerging between Great Britain and the Spanish American colonies in revolt. In fact, the narrative form of Barbauld's poem offers a remarkable resistance to the discourses of what has recently come to be known as informal as they first began to circulate. It is therefore a profitable lens through which Romantic-era questions of revolution, sovereignty, and empire can be freshly complicated to account for a new and troubling configuration of global influence. At the time Barbauld was writing Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, Latin America (2) was beginning to revolt against Spain, creating a flurry of transatlantic activity. Writers and revolutionaries like Francisco de Miranda, Andres Bello, and Simon Bolivar went to London to seek financial partnership, while British officials and Romantic poets began to think seriously about how such newly opened Atlantic relations might create an opportunity for Great Britain to seize control over American markets and resources. Critics have identified this as the birth of what we now call modern neocolonialism or empire. (3) In Barbauld's day these terms did not exist, but it was no secret that if the Spanish American colonies were to win independence, the British might re-subject them to financial control. As early as 1809 James Mill had written in the Edinburgh Review: fate of Spain is sealed.... The only question remaining for Britain is whether it will take Spanish America for itself ... whether Spanish America will become free under the auspices of British protection. (4) Throughout the nineteenth century Great Britain would enact this very fantasy; Latin America emerged politically sovereign into waiting structures of financial subjugation. These mechanisms of financial dependence had been employed sporadically before, within and without Great Britain's formal empire, but the nineteenth century would witness an unprecedentedly vast institutionalization of empire as a primary means of exerting influence in the new world. In other words, Latin American revolution reorganized the Atlantic network in two crucial ways: it shifted control of the Americas from Spain to Britain, and it made way for empire to step out of the shadow of territorial colonialism as a unique and perhaps even more effective means of overseas dominance. British-Latin American relations offer dynamic ways to revive the well-worn questions of imperial power. Robert Aguirre's 2006 Informal Empire and Rebecca Cole Heinowitz's 2010 Spanish America and British Romanticism both remind nineteenth-century scholars that Great Britain had powerful imaginative and material ties to the southern Americas. Alongside several other key voices in the field, (5) they have noted that while British empire in Latin America had forceful impacts that merit a sustained inquiry such as the formal empire has received, empire also operated under strange and distinct logics. Unlike traditional colonial targets, Latin America entered the Romantic imagination as a powerful symbol of liberty from oppression. Those who wished to return the region to a state of dependency under British imperial power, therefore, faced a unique rhetorical and logical problem, one that began to spark subtle reconfigurations of what sovereignty might mean and how it might be undermined in new ways. …