"All Ways Open to all Men": Anthony Trollope and Mary Seacole in The Central American Transit Zones

Abstract

This article focuses on two writers whose work on Panama and Nicaragua confronts Britain's supersession by the United States as the hegemonic power in Central America. Reading the nurse and memoirist Mary Seacole and the novelist and civil servant Anthony Trollope, I argue that these British subjects both understood the fate of the Empire as tied to that of the Central American transit zones, particularly the transoceanic route across Panama. They differed, however, on whom waning British influence in Central America would benefit. While Trollope saw commercial and cultural continuity in an uninterrupted Anglo-American dominance of the hemisphere, Seacole, a Black Jamaican for whom the Empire functioned as a guarantor of political status within a larger colonial framework, worried that the United States would subject the region to its regime of strict racial separation. Taken together, these accounts suggest a surprising inversion of imperial identifications: Trollope evinces an informal imperialist's disdain for official entanglements, while Seacole emphasizes that her status as a British subject entails a duty on the part of the Empire to protect the region and its people from American rapaciousness.