British Romanticism and Latin America, 2: Atlantic Revolution and British Intervention

Abstract

The second part of ‘British Romanticism and Latin America’ explores the repercussions of Robertson’s hemispheric heterotopia of the New World in the larger narratives of Atlantic revolution and British intervention that shaped the relationship between Britain and Latin America from the 1790s to the 1820s. The poems and essays that represented insurrection in Latin America drew on the shared histories of Africans and Amerindians in the American hemisphere to negotiate revolutionary sympathies in light of the rebellion of Tupac Amaru in 1781, which, after the Carib War of the 1770s, became the largest movement of indigenous resistance against European power until Toussaint Louverture. The figure of Tupac Amaru haunts the poetry of William Blake and Helen Maria Williams to suggest a returning insurgency and continued struggle for indigenous self-determination, while Ottobah Cugoano’s reinterpretation of the history of Amerindians in Robertson’s America expands the denunciation of European imperialism to include crimes against Africans. Other authors such as Robert Southey, John Thelwall, and George Colman develop the idea of Britain as the ‘noble deliverer’ or liberator of Latin America, an idea that Creole authors such as Francisco Miranda and José Blanco White also promulgated. The narrative of Britain as liberating power facilitated the penetration of British capital and political influence in the region, and resulted in the dissonant portraits of South American independence that informed the work of Maria Graham and British representations of the region in the 1820s.