During the decades immediately following Mexico's emergence as a sovereign nation, and indeed throughout the nineteenth century, one of the country's most important political and economic relationships was with the United Kingdom. British recognition was a key milestone in the consolidation of Mexican independence, British investment shaped the finances and commerce of the early republic, and British power served, for a time, as a potential counterweight in the region to the rising might of an expansionist United States. Considering the extent of British influence in Mexico during this period, it is perhaps unsurprising that nationalist narratives have tended to characterize Great Britain as one of the rapacious, interventionist foreign powers at whose hands the country suffered so greatly over the course of the nineteenth century. Such an interpretation would appear to coincide neatly with a significant literature on the “informal empire” that Britain is said to have maintained over areas in Latin America and elsewhere that were not under direct political control from London but that were nonetheless subordinated to British capital and susceptible to British pressure.In Diplomacia, negocios y política, an impressive collection of essays by Mexican and British scholars calls this view of the nineteenth-century relationship between the two countries into question. Between them, the contributors to this volume explore various dimensions of UK-Mexican relations from the time of independence through the Porfiriato, with attention not just to high policy, the geopolitical concerns of the British government, and the interests of major investors but also to such topics as the contributions of British merchants to regional economic development (discussed by Sergio Alejandro Cañedo Gamboa), the activities of British consuls in provincial Mexico (covered by Flor de María Salazar Mendoza), and the experience of Cornish immigrants in the mining sector (examined by Anne Staples). In addition to broadening our sense of the range of actors involved in the bilateral relationship, these essays generally advance the view that British policy toward Mexico during this period was guided more by pragmatism than by an imperialistic drive to achieve dominance and assert control. For example, Marco Antonio Landavazo argues that while the British government felt compelled by circumstances to recognize the independence of Mexico and other Latin American countries in the early 1820s, and did so with considerable ambivalence, it nonetheless eagerly capitalized on the opportunity that recognition offered to open a vast new field for trade. Pragmatism ruled the day, too, when diplomatic relations were restored in 1884 after a long interruption; as Silvestre Villegas Revueltas shows, though the problem of debts owed to the British holders of Mexican bonds had not been entirely resolved, the Foreign Office was keen to restore normal ties so as to ensure British access to commercial opportunities in Porfirian Mexico. Despite its standing as a global superpower, Britain was not always in a position to impose its will on Mexico, as Josefina Zoraida Vázquez highlights in her discussion of Mexico's rejection of British pressure to recognize Texan independence. And, seen from a more balanced perspective, even the most infamous British capitalists made real contributions to the country's development, as Paul Garner argues in his examination of the career of oil magnate Weetman Pearson. In sum, Will Fowler concludes, while there may be some basis for the view that Britain established an “informal empire” in the Southern Cone, the concept fits the case of UK-Mexican relations much less well. One obvious reason for this is the relatively early rise of the United States as a competitor for influence in the circum-Caribbean region, a development that prevented Britain from being a more significant actor in Mexican affairs, but the point remains that the United Kingdom can be seen as having played a more benign, less exploitative role in nineteenth-century Mexico than some other foreign powers.For contemporary British and Mexican diplomats, it is fortuitous that the recent trends in scholarship on the bilateral relationship reflected here coincide with an uptick in interest in strengthening ties (particularly those of the economic variety) between the two countries. Indeed, it is striking that this excellent volume is itself the product of a 2015 conference held under the banner of a UK-Mexican año dual, proclaimed by both governments and marked by state visits—of Prince Charles to Mexico (where he sampled Cornish-style pastes in Pachuca) and of Enrique Peña Nieto to London. Perhaps it would not be overly cynical to suggest a connection between the designation of 2015 as the Year of Mexico in the UK and the considerable interest shown around that time by British oil companies in the opportunities arising from the liberalization of Mexico's energy sector. With Mexico now seen as an exciting field for trade and investment for a post-Brexit “global Britain,” this reexamination and reassessment of the legacy of the nineteenth century is timely.
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Aug 6, 2020
Stephanie Schroeder + 3
Open Access