British Informal Empire Research Articles

The Tweed venture: the language of freedom and British informal empire on the Mosquito Shore

The Tweed venture: the language of freedom and British informal empire on the Mosquito Shore

Greece, Uruguay and the British Informal Empire: From National Narratives to Global History

This article adopts a comparative global history approach to reflect on the histories of Greece and Uruguay through the prism of British informal imperial rule. It compares and contrasts the role and impact of the British informal empire on Greece and Uruguay’s economic integration into the globalising economy of the late nineteenth century. The aim of this article is twofold: to reflect on each country’s past to gain a better understanding of them, and to integrate the histories of Greece and Uruguay into the history of globalisation. To achieve this, we examine the place of each country in the globalising economy and the reasons why each country “performed” differently; Uruguay experienced some of the highest living standards in the region and the world while Greece was mired in wars and aggressive nationalist policies that lead to significant territorial (and therefore market) expansion at significant cost to state finances – a history that was marked by economic failures such as the default of 1893. Even that crisis, however, produced different outcomes depending on each country’s place in the globalising British informal empire. This article shows two different paths of integration into a globalising economy shaped by the British financial and commercial order – an order often imposed with consent and occasionally through coercion.

Agency and geopolitics: Brazilian formal independence and the problem of Eurocentrism in international historical sociology

The main narratives that explain the development of the modern international order fall short of incorporating the historical peculiarities of processes of state-formation in non-European contexts. To overcome that limitation, this paper argues that class agency must be taken as a core element to understand the social and geopolitical struggles that shape each case of transition towards modern sovereignty in its historical particularity. This is informed by the Brazilian historical experience. In that case, statehood can only be understood as an outcome of the disputes of its ruling landowning class against Portuguese colonialism, mediated by the British informal empire throughout the 19th century. In order to bring all these elements together, I follow the tradition of political Marxism to reconceptualize the very notion of “geopolitics” by grounding it in class-based strategies of reproduction and spatialization. The result is an agency-centred and radically historicist theoretical framework that rejects structuralist transhistorical logics of development. It also argues against the latent Eurocentrism present in theories of state-formation that are grounded on the European experience and simply transposed to other contexts by stressing the agency of non-European subjects in the making of their own history.

Stumbling towards Empire: The Shanghai Local Post Office, the Transnational British Community and Informal Empire in China, 1863–97

ABSTRACTIn the second half of nineteenth century, a small transnational British and foreign community grew up in the treaty ports scattered along China’s coast, a community literally caught between the great inner Asian empire of the Manchu Qing and British-dominated informal empire in Asia. Although scholars often contend that few major developments occurred in the foreign sector of the treaty port world until the very end of the nineteenth century, this article joins recent revisionist scholarship seeking to better understand the growth of this transnational treaty port community through a study of the Shanghai Municipal Council’s local post office in the context of informal empire prior to the rise of muscular Chinese nationalism in the early twentieth century.As an institutional history of the virtually unknown local post office, this article is a study of the decades-long process by which the foreign settler community of Shanghai slowly built up the administrative capacity, trading networks and communications infrastructure of informal empire and semi-colonial order in the nineteenth-century treaty ports. The history of the local post office is largely unknown not because of its insignificance, but because we have not paid enough attention to the institutions that facilitated the emergence of transnational expatriate and settler communities throughout the world of British informal empire and the global and local influences that shaped them.

British Informal Empire during the Great War. Welsh Identity and Loyalty in Argentina

In Latin America, where British imperial expansion had left little administrative trace, Argentina was nonetheless profoundly affected by British investment and imported British technical expertise. Among the more modest examples of British expansionism in Argentina was the arrival, from 1865 onwards, of Welsh immigrants eager to establish a colony in Patagonia isolated from the seemingly unstoppable progress of Anglicisation by an overwhelmingly hegemonic Victorian England. By the time of the First World War, however, the Celtic character of the colony could no longer be taken for granted: Argentine government pressures had already meant that the Welsh-speaking colony was now more firmly integrated into the nation-building process. Friction which then developed between the Welsh community and the Argentine government acted as one of the push factors which sent Welsh Patagonians back to Wales and on to Australia, for example…To this process of integration the Great War added new pressures in the form of the question of loyalty to Britain during the conflict. Those who stayed in Patagonia during the war often expressed views which were pro-British and the Argentine province became a source of recruitment for the British armed services…Using a range of sources, this paper attempts to show that the Welshness of the Patagonian colonists had not destroyed their British patriotism: the latter survived and even came to the fore during the conflict of 1914-18.

British informal empire and the origins of association football in South America

Most historical and sociological studies of association football in South America assume that the game was first played, and became popular, as a result of British informal empire in the region between 1830 and 1914. This article shows that historians of British informal empire in South America, in contrast, have never found evidence of such a link. It demonstrates that the conventional belief in a link between football and informal empire rests on assertion rather than evidence, and on a very narrow source base of English language newspapers and case studies drawn from only two countries, Brazil and Argentina. It reviews some of the recent South American historiography on the origins of football and offers some conclusions for future research directions.

An Information War Waged by Merchants and Missionaries at Canton: The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China, 1834–1839

AbstractThis paper explores the efforts and impact of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China (1834–1839), which existed during the five years before the First Opium War. It contends that the Society represented a third form of British engagement with the Chinese, alongside the diplomatic attempts of 1793 and 1816, and the military conflict of 1839–1842. The Society waged an ‘information war’ to penetrate the information barrier that the Qing had established to contain European trade and missions. The foreigners in Canton believed they were barred from further access to China because the Chinese had no information on the true character of the Europeans. Thus, they prepared ‘intellectual artillery’ in the form of Chinese language publications, especially on world geography, to distribute among the Chinese, in the hope that this effort would familiarize the Chinese with the science and art of Westerners and thereby cultivate respect and a welcoming atmosphere. The war metaphor was conceived, and the information war was waged, in the periphery of the British informal empire in Canton, but it contributed to the conceptualization of war against China, both in Canton and in Britain, in the years before actual military action. Behind the rhetoric of war and knowledge diffusion in Canton, lay a convergence of interests between merchants and missionaries, which drove both to employ information and military power to further their shared aim of opening China up for trade and proselytizing.

KONSESI BRITISH DI TIANJIN SEBELUM 1925: SATU BENTUK IMPERIALISME DI CHINA

British concession in Tianjin was part of the British informal empire. The existence of this concession was because of the demand of British businessmen for their own settlement. The British government asked the Chinese government to grant them land in Tianjin to create their own settlement, which was autonomous and could not be challenged by the Chinese authority. This concession steadliy grew and created a mini European-style city. The British who lived in the concession created a British cultural environment that included several English clubs, bars and race course. To the Chinese, the development of this concession had brought about a negative perception towards the foreign imperialist who did not respect Chinese sovereignty. Therefore, this and other foreign concessions became the thorn in the Chinese people against foreign imperialism.

Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture, Commerce and Capital

Preface. Acknowledgements. About the Cover Images. Contributor Biographies. Introduction (Matthew Brown, University of Bristol). 1. Rethinking British Informal Empire in Latin America (Especially Argentina) (Alan Knight, St. Antony's College, Oxford). 2. The British in Argentina: From Informal Empire to Postcolonialism (David Rock, University of California). 3. Commercial Christianity: The British and Foreign Bible Society's Interest in Spanish America, 1805-1830 (Karen Racine, University of Guelph). 4. Britain, the Argentine and Informal Empire: Rethinking the Role of Railway Companies (Colin M. Lewis, London School of Economics and Political Science). 5. Finance, Ambition and Romanticism in the River Plate, 1880-1892 (Charles Jones, University of Cambridge). 6. Appropriating the 'Unattainable': The British Travel Experience in Patagonia (Fernanda Penaloza, University of Manchester). 7. 'Weapons of the Weak?' Colombia and Foreign Powers in the Nineteenth Century (Malcolm Deas, St. Antony's College, Oxford). 8. 'Literature Can Be Our Teacher': Reading Informal Empire in El ingles de los guesos (Jennifer L. French, Williams College, USA). 9. The Artful Seductions of Informal Empire (Louise Guenther, Universidade Federale de Minas Gerais, Brazil). 10. Afterword: Informal Empire: Past, Present and Future (Andrew Thompson, University of Leeds). References. Index.

<sc>robert a. naylor</sc>. <italic>Penny Ante Imperialism: The Mosquito Shore and the Bay of Honduras, 1600–1914; A Case Study in British Informal Empire</italic>. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press or Associated University Presses, Cranbury, N.J. 1989. Pp. 315. $42.50

Journal Article robert a. naylor. Penny Ante Imperialism: The Mosquito Shore and the Bay of Honduras, 1600–1914; A Case Study in British Informal Empire. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press or Associated University Presses, Cranbury, N.J. 1989. Pp. 315. $42.50 Get access Naylor Robert A.. Penny Ante Imperialism: The Mosquito Shore and the Bay of Honduras, 1600–1914; A Case Study in British Informal Empire. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press or Associated University Presses, Cranbury, N.J. 1989. Pp. 315. $42.50. William A. Green William A. Green Holy Cross College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 95, Issue 4, October 1990, Pages 1326–1327, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/95.4.1326-a Published: 01 October 1990

Penny ante imperialism: the Mosquito Shore and the Bay of Honduras, 1600-1914: a case study in British informal empire

Penny ante imperialism: the Mosquito Shore and the Bay of Honduras, 1600-1914: a case study in British informal empire

British informal empire: The case of China1

(1976). British informal empire: The case of China. The Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 64-81.