Britain in Latin America

Abstract

In the 19th century, foreigners had unprecedented access to Spanish America, as the newly independent nations welcomed travelers as readily as they accepted foreign loans and investment capital. Britons were able to freely travel into the South American interior, and commercial ties between Britain and Latin America grew quickly. Cultural and economic exchanges proceeded in two major waves: the first occurred during and in the immediate aftermath of the Wars of Independence, and then, after a cooling-off period, during the second half of the century, when infrastructural and technological advances opened up the Latin American hinterlands to capitalist expansion. International trade grew after 1850, along with Britain’s role in Latin American culture. Britain remained the hegemonic foreign power in Latin America until the First World War. These relationships left their mark on both British and Latin American literatures. In addition to a vast number of travel books about Latin American countries by adventurers, explorers, and tourists, British poets, novelists, philosophers, and historians also drew inspiration from this still relatively unknown territory. Toward the end of the 20th century, Victorian studies began to focus more insistently on British and Latin American exchanges, often making use of historical analyses that interpreted the British-Latin American relationship in terms of dependency theory and world-systems theory. These analyses have generally characterized Britain’s enormous economic, cultural, and political influence in terms of informal imperialism, a strategy for establishing domination over a territory without ruling it directly; however, the nature of British imperialism in Latin America, and its implications for cultural analysis, remain much debated. Currently, literary studies of Britain’s role in Latin America, and Latin America’s role within the British literary imaginary, constitute a large and growing body of scholarship. This bibliographic introduction offers an overview of important texts produced in the 19th century, as well as major currents of scholarship in literary studies and related humanities disciplines.