Immaterial Empires: France and Spain in the Americas, 1860s and 1920s

Abstract

Imperial expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been largely studied as a military and economic phenomenon. According to the widely accepted narrative, European empires expanded their power across the world following different ‘formal’ (direct) and ‘informal’ (indirect) strategies. This article argues that, beyond material forms of conquest and effective domination, empires also implemented their rule through the use of immateriality. We explore this phenomenon through a transnational and diachronic comparison of the cases of France in the 1860s and Spain in the 1920s. Both examples suggest that such notions as ‘civilization’, ‘race’, ‘spirit’, and ‘greatness’ not only underpinned the imaginary and the conceptualization of empire, but also actively produced powerful ‘immaterial’ means of domination, expansion, and influence. This work’s methodological approach relies on the conviction that concepts and significations are an integral part of politics. France and Spain did not have empires in Latin America in the periods under study, but they were imagined as being imperial powers in the Americas. This crafted an imperial mind-set that complemented the formal and informal imperial practices that France in the 1860s and Spain in the 1920s were undertaking in other parts of the world. We focus on intellectual and political projects and on practices of cultural diplomacy as two manifestations of these immaterial empires. By virtue of these projects and policies, French and Spanish leaders managed to create an image of France and Spain as deserving their ‘natural’ important place in the global scene. Immateriality served as an instrument to counterbalance the growth of competing powers, namely the United States, which, in the 1860s as well as the 1920s, was seen as a dangerous competitor in the so-called Western hemisphere. In this way, notions of Latinity and Hispanity competed with each other and, at the same time, targeted the ‘Anglo-Saxon’, ‘racial’, and ‘spiritual’ competitor.