British Policy Considerations in Central America before 1850

Abstract

R OBERT A. NAYLORP's article entitled The British Role in Central America Prior to the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850,' sets forth a sweeping thesis of commercial determinism which demands careful scrutiny before being accepted. Mr. Naylor declares that British policies in mid-America before 1850 determined not by political considerations but rather by commercial interests, and to a considerable degree were formulated by British inerchants in Central America, Belize, and Great Britain rather than by functionaries in the Foreign Office. '2 It is to be noted that this rather narrow thesis expressly rules out political and strategic factors in British policy formulation. Few historians today would wish to deny the great importance of trade considerations to the British in the first half of the nineteenth century. But to say that commercial interests determined the policies of the London Foreign Office is quite another matter. Such an interpretation, on the one hand, tends to obscure the fundamental inseparability of economic, political, and strategic matters, while on the other it implies that British policy makers were peculiarly insensitive and unresponsive to the major strategic forces that led directly to the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty. It would be strange indeed to learn that functionaries of the Foreign Office failed to give heed to non-commercial factors in Central America during the turbulent years that preceded the negotiation of the controversial treaty of 1850. Is it possible that the shattering defeat of Mexico by the United States, the increasing Yankee interest in Central America, and the serious talk of a trans-isthmian canal route of these years could have been ignored by British officials because they were preoccupied with the returns of trade? If the strategic threat of Manifest Destiny went unnoticed by the British in Central America, then we may conclude that the policy makers of that nation were unaccountably negligent.