Jessie Reeder - The Forms of Informal Empire - Britain, Latin America, and Nineteenth-Century Literature-Johns Hopkins University Press (2020)

The Forms of Informal Empire
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Britain, Latin America,
and Nineteenth-C entury
Lite rat ure
Jessie Reeder
Johns Hopkins University Press

Baltimore
© 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Reeder, Jessie, 1982– author.

Title: The forms of informal empire : Britain, Latin America, and
nineteenth-century literature / Jessie Reeder.
Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019036590 | ISBN 9781421438061 (hardcover) |
ISBN 9781421438078 (paperback) | ISBN 9781421438085 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: English literature—19th century—History and criticism. |
English literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Imperialism in
literature. | Latin America—In literature. | Colonies in literature. |
Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.)—History—19th century.
Classification: LCC PR878.I54 R44 2020 | DDC 820.9/3588—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036590
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C on t e n t s
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Freedom and Empire in the Nineteenth Century 1
part i Prog ress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875:

Sequence, Protagonist, Par adox 35
1 (In)dependence: Simón Bolívar and Revolutionary
Forms of Progress 45
2 “Dependant Kings”: Anna Barbauld and a Paradox Deterred 67
3 Anthony Trollope and the Collapse of Historical Telos 91
part ii Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926:

Origin, Gener ation, Relation, Hybridity 119
4 Vicente Fidel López Re-members the Nation 133
5 H. Rider Haggard and the Antagonism of Valid Fiancées 165
6 Where Progress and Family (Almost) Meet: William Henry Hudson
and the Industrialization of the Pampas 195
Coda 227
Notes 231
Bibliography 257
Index 271
Ac k now l e d g m e n t s
I was on an overnight bus somewhere in Patagonia when I first conceived of

this project. It was March 2009, and my fiancé, Kevin, and I were on a sab-
batical from graduate school. A few months earlier, just before locking our
apartment and stopping the mail, I had submitted a seminar paper on the
Mexican railroad in Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now. As we rum-
bled through the dark Argentine night, my thoughts clearer with some time
and distance from academia, I realized that that essay was just the start of a
bigger project.
That first insight may have come in the m iddle of a quiet wilderness, but
a decade later the finished book bears the imprint of a vibrant community for
which I am forever grateful. For their guidance at the dissertation stage,
I thank Theresa Kelley, Mario Ortiz-Robles, and especially Caroline Levine,
who continues to be a peerless mentor and friend. This book simply would not
exist without her brilliant guidance. I thank Francisco Scarano for reading my
work and Christa Olson for being a trusted mentor. I was so lucky to be sur-
rounded by talented, joyous friends during my graduate school years. Gwen
Blume, Maggie Hagerman, Andy Karr, Katie Lanning, Ana Lincoln, Emily
Madsen, Mary Mullen, Megan Scharmann, Joshua Taft, Renée Turgeon, Eric
Vivier, Marshelle Woodward, and Rachael Zeleny are just some of the p eople
with whom I shared ideas, drafts, and drinks in the formative years of this
project. I especially want to thank Devin Garofalo, who was then and still is
the sharp-eyed, incisive reader I always turn to first.
Both during graduate school and beyond, I have been fortunate to have the
mentorship of two luminous leaders in the study of British informal empire
in Latin America. Robert Aguirre generously served on my dissertation com-
mittee, and I first met Jennifer Hayward at a conference while I was still taking
viii Acknowledgments
coursework. Robert and Jennifer have been terrifically supportive over the
years, even and especially when we disagree, and I am proud to help continue
the work t hey’ve done to bring informal empire into the conversation in lit-
erary studies. More recently, I’m grateful to have gotten to know and work
with Michelle Prain Brice as well, whose collaboration on British–L atin
American research has been a bright light.
In recent years, so many friends, colleagues, and mentors have helped me
develop the thinking in this book. During my postdoctoral fellowship at Rice
University, I received invaluable feedback from Sunil Agnani, Ian Balfour,
Ericka Beckman, Lindsey Chappell, Leo Costello, Jennifer Hargrave, Jen Hill,
Helena Michie, and Alexander Regier. I thank the Mellon Foundation, the
Rice University Humanities Research Center, and Helena and Alexander for
bringing us all together for an electrifying and impeccably organized year of
research. And I am supremely thankful in particular to have met Helena,
whose friendship and savvy guidance are a gift. At Binghamton University,
numerous faculty and graduate student colleagues have read or listened to my
ideas, including John Havard (a tireless and instinctive reader of drafts), Doug
Jones, Dael Norwood, and the members of the fall 2016 Institute for Advanced
Studies in the Humanities. I’ve shared intellectual and social community at
Binghamton with so many o thers to whom I am grateful as well, including
Riya Das, James Fitz Gerald, Praseeda Gopinath, John Kuhn, and Michelle
Paul, in particular. I thank Susan Strehle for her mentorship and Joe Keith for
his inexhaustible support, both institutional and personal. Among the many
essential members of the Binghamton English Department, I also want to
recognize Colleen Burke, without whom nothing would ever get done.
I have presented drafts and versions of this work at annual meetings of the
American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, British W omen Writers,
Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies, the North American Society
for the Study of Romanticism, and the North American Victorian Studies As-
sociation. I am thankful for those opportunities, and for the feedback I re-
ceived. Danny Wright was kind enough to invite me to present my work on
Simón Bolívar to the University of Toronto’s Work in Nineteenth-Century
Studies group, and I benefited enormously from discussing my chapter draft
with the large group of graduate students and faculty in attendance. Partic
ular thanks go to Thom Dancer, Chris Koenig-Woodyard, and Cannon
Schmitt. In collaborating on other projects, Sukanya Banerjee, Ryan Fong,
Ross Forman, Lauren Goodlad, Parama Roy, and Lynn Voskuil have all
Acknowl
edgments ix
inspired new thinking, the traces of which are in this book as well. I am
thankful for the two anonymous manuscript reviewers, who gave thorough
and generative feedback at both an early and a late stage. And in the late
phases of this project I was immensely fortunate to get to know Nathan
Hensley, whose mentorship, feedback, and own brilliant research helped me
figure out when this book was actually finished.
If this book is well organized and clear, as I hope it is, tremendous credit
goes not only to my many interlocutors but also and especially to the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin–Madison Writing Center, where I worked for several years
in graduate school. The rigorous training, the opportunity to talk about writ-
ing with scholars across the university, and the mentorship of the inimitable
Brad Hughes all taught me nearly everything I know about academic writing.
I also want to thank my editor at Johns Hopkins University Press, Catherine
Goldstead; my copyeditor, David Goehring; my indexer, Josh Rutner; and
my translation copyeditor, Emily Iekel, for helping me get this book into its
final form. Any errors that remain are entirely my own.
At various moments this work has been supported by fellowships from the
Mellon Foundation, the Humanities Research Center at Rice University, the
University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison
English Department; travel funding from the Research Society for Victorian
Periodicals and the Binghamton University English Department’s Frances
Newman Endowment for Support of Research; and course releases from the
Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and the Harpur College
Dean’s Office, both at Binghamton University. Essential travel and writing
time were made possible by all of this support. I am also grateful to the librar-
ians, archivists, and staff at many institutions—particularly the library sys-
tem of the University of Wisconsin, the Binghamton University Libraries, the
Biblioteca Nacional de Argentina, the Biblioteca Max von Buch at the Uni-
versidad de San Andrés, and the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile—whose daily
dedication to the preservation and democratization of archives makes schol-
arly work possible.
A version of chapter 2 was previously published as “A World without ‘De-
pendant Kings’: Eighteen Hundred and Eleven and the Forms of Informal Em-
pire” in Studies in Romanticism 53, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 561–590. Grateful
acknowledgment is made to the Trustees of Boston University for permission
to reprint this material. A version of chapter 6 previously appeared as “Wil-
liam Henry Hudson, Hybridity, and Storytelling in the Pampas” in Studies
x Acknowledgments
in English Literature 1500–1900 56, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 561–581. I am grate-

ful for permission to reprint this material.
But scholarship is not merely institutional; it lives in spaces and borrows
resources that we also share with our families. Two exceptional friends and
fellow new m others, Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Amanda Licht, have been
the community of academic parents I d idn’t know I desperately needed. And
Katie Stebbins has provided loving childcare that has helped me balance work
with family and without which I could never have finished this book. To my
parents, Elizabeth Reeder and Eirik Blom, who taught me to love words and
gave me unconditional support, I owe everyt hing. To my husband, Kevin
Boettcher, thank you not only for your brilliance and support, but also for
building a beautiful life of adventure with me, from midnight bus rides to
midnight diaper changes. For sixteen years and counting, y ou’ve been my
home. And to our son, Felix, who has taught me a new kind of love: I’m fin-
ished with the book; let’s go to the playground.
I n t roduc t ion
Freedom and Empire in the

Nineteenth Century
The Latin American wars of independence changed the world.1 Between 1810
and 1824 they decimated Europe’s largest empire, as most of a hemisphere
blazed a path to self-rule.2 And for Great Britain in particular, the collapse of
Spanish imperial power in the early nineteenth c entury opened the Atlantic
world in radically new ways.3 A curtain was abruptly lifted between the Brit-
ish and the southern New World, enabling new material connections and
seemingly endless possibilities for fantasy. More than any other nationality,
it was Britons of all classes—“mining engineers, technicians, metallurgists,
secretaries, army and naval officers, naturalists, sea captains, diplomats, cler-
gymen, colonizers, as well as t hose few who traveled solely for the sake of
traveling”4 —who flooded into Central and South America a fter the outbreak
of revolution. Although the British government could not officially sanction
Latin American revolution, thousands of British soldiers nonetheless donned
Venezuelan uniforms and enlisted with Bolívar’s armies.5 Adventurers slept
under the stars in the pampas and braved the Patagonian winds. W omen ac-
companied their husbands and settled in Valparaíso, Buenos Aires, and Mexico
City. In 1806, four years before the revolutions had even begun, Robert
Southey described E ngland as “mad” for South America.6 But traffic flowed
in the opposite direction, too: Latin American elites traveled to London and
Paris in search of financial and political support for their new nations, mod-
els for republican institutions, and European educations for their sons. And
all this new contact inspired literature, as British and Latin American authors
alike gazed across the ocean and penned stories about lands that were newly
present in their imagination. So intense w ere the nascent cultural and com-
mercial relations between Britain and Latin America that Leslie Bethell has
dubbed the nineteenth c entury in Latin America “the British c entury.”7
2 The Forms of Informal Empire
Amid this outbreak of new transatlantic, transhemispheric, translingual

contact, one can see various possibilities for British–Latin American relations
stretching toward the future. But even in the earliest days, two ideas seemed
to stand above the rest. Freedom was one. Empire was the other.
The push for British imperial control in Latin Americ a was occasionally
quite literal, as when British military officers, seizing on Spain’s weakness dur-
ing the Napoleonic Wars, invaded and occupied Buenos Aires and Montevi-
deo in 1806 and 1807. But even after it became clear that Latin America would
govern itself, the British continued to see it as a place they might dominate,
particularly in industry and trade. And as an 1809 remark by James Mill in
the Edinburgh Review suggests, this was no less imperial. “The fate of Spain . . .
is decided,” he says; the question now for Britain is “whether she s hall secure
to herself an immense advantage . . . whether t hose colonies shall be enabled,
under the protection of Great Britain, to constitute themselves a free and in
dependent nation.”8 Foreign Secretary George Canning issued a similar state-
ment on the other side of the independence wars in 1824: “Spanish America
is free, and if we do not mismanage our affairs sadly, she is English.”9 Such re-
marks about “secur[ing]” the “advantage[s]” of Spanish America and turning
it English through “protection” and “affairs” show not merely that Britain’s
exercise of soft power was imperial, but that they knew it to be so. Latin
Americans—even t hose who courted British influence—understood this, too.
In 1814, hoping to warm his fellow Caraqueños to the idea of British interven-
tion, Simón Bolívar captured the same sentiment with similar concision: “A
[la] sombra [de Inglaterra] la América podrá afirmar su libertad.”10 Over the
course of the nineteenth c entury, a decentralized and ad hoc but nonetheless
effective combined effort by not only British officials, investors, and merchants
but also Latin American elites, brought about this very reality, bringing Latin
Americ a u nder the influence of what we now call British informal empire.
Latin America, in effect, traded formal Spanish rule for informal British rule.
But at the same time that Britain was sharpening its imperial ambitions in
Latin America, the idea most strongly associated with it was freedom. Latin
America exploded into the British imagination at the beginning of the nine-
teenth c entury as a symbol of millenarian unshackling from colonial oppression.
Anna Laetitia Barbauld closed her famous political poem Eighteen Hundred
and Eleven (1812) on the image of the spirit of Enlightenment lifting up the
people of the Andes to take their place as the new center of world culture.
When ambassadors of the revolution—including a young Simón Bolívar—
Introduction 3
came to London in the early 1810s, they found a ready welcome among Brit-
ish liberal intellectuals who cheered their cause. This was “a good time to
arrive in London with a Spanish accent and representing a junta,” a word that
“was entering the English language . . . with a stylish and friendly ring.” 11
Jeremy Bentham even seriously considered relocating to Mexico to help build
its independent government, while Lord Byron very nearly chose to s ettle in
postwar Venezuela. And as Benedict Anderson and Timothy Brennan both
argue, the push for self-rule in the Americas in fact provided Europe and the
rest of the world with the concept of nationalism.12 The celebration of locally
exercised sovereignty, in short, was conceptually foundational to British per-
ceptions of Latin America.
While imperialism and anti-imperialism might seem like difficult ambi-
tions to hold at the same time, informal empire in fact depended on both.
Consider again the remarks by Mill, Canning, and Bolívar. All three express
an interest in Latin America’s freedom and its subjection to British power as
necessarily mutual conditions of possibility. Spanish America, Mill suggests,
can become “free and independent” “under the protection” of Britain. It w ill
be, Canning hopes, “free . . . and English.” Bolívar’s vision is for “freedom”
under “[England’s] shadow.” All three men assert the ideas of freedom and
empire as simultaneous states. That is b ecause, quite simply, informal empire
required Latin American sovereignty. T here could be no domination of f ree
lands without their freedom. This book w ill argue, therefore, that through-
out the nineteenth c entury, British informal empire in Latin America asked
onlookers on both sides to accept a difficult conceptual paradox—that Latin
America might be both a signal example of self-rule and a dependent terri-
tory of the British Empire. That it might be both free and not free at the
same time. The work of this book is to pursue this paradox into its irresolv-
able center, to explain why, although informal empire succeeded for so long,
it also remained conceptually inassimilable to several strains of hegemonic
Enlightenment thought.
In d oing so, the book makes two key interventions in the study of British
literature and imperial thought. One is methodological. The chapters in this
book deploy a formalist analysis, reading literature to uncover the ways that
nineteenth-century Britons and Latin Americans perceived informal empire
to take form. As I will show, many saw its contradictory structure not as a
productive dialectic in which the tension between opposed concepts charac-
terizes a nonetheless unified totality, but rather as an unstable paradox marked
by its irresolvability. That is, liberty and subjugation did not coalesce into a
unified imperial idea but rather constantly produced epistemological incoher-
ence. This paradox appeared most visibly when informal empire collided
against the progress narrative and the nuclear f amily—t wo master forms
that organized nineteenth-century thought, and the subjects of the two halves
of this book. A formalist method, therefore, offers a new way to grasp infor-
mal empire’s structural heterodoxy within dominant imperial discourses. Its
constitutive knot of freedom and unfreedom, subjugation and sovereignty,
complicates conventional accounts of imperial power, and in fact, the opera-
tions of political power more broadly, as totalizing.
The second intervention is archival. British literature scholars have paid
only scant attention to Latin America to begin with, overlooking its impor-
tance to nineteenth-century conceptions of imperial power and economics.
This book, therefore, joins work by Robert Aguirre, Rebecca Cole Heino
witz, and others in arguing for greater attention to British informal empire in
Latin America. But this is also the first book to treat British and Latin Amer-
ican writing on informal empire as a single archive and to read work from both
sides of the Atlantic, in both English and Spanish. I do not do this to imply
or uncover lines of influence. Rather, my expanded archive shows that En-
lightenment narratives of progress and family s haped the difficulty of think-
ing informal empire in corresponding ways around the Atlantic world, in
places whose distinct histories, languages, and literary traditions might lead
us to overestimate difference. I therefore also propose that if we want compre-
hensive answers to our questions about nineteenth-century power and en-
counter, we must seek them in a broader, multilingual archive.13
Some Historical Context

This book is about ideas and the forms t hose ideas take. Its aim is not to trace
the economic history of informal empire in Latin America, already well estab-
lished in a number of disciplines. That alone would be a book-length project.
A fter 1810, the Latin American nations each experienced different intensities
and durations of warfare, consolidated different resources and exports,
achieved different levels of political stability, pursued different relationships
to enslaved and indigenous p eoples, and took up different positions in world
trade. Moreover, British involvement in the region varied from individual
immigration to government loans to mining operations to scientific and
Introduction 5
archaeological exploration. Given the scale and heterogeneity of Latin Amer

ica, the variety of British interests, and the duration of the nineteenth century,
therefore, a comprehensive economic history is simply not possible here. But
more importantly, this book is less interested in economics than in discourses—
how, in other words, the economic relationships that constituted informal
empire were abstracted into stories and tropes.14 Nonetheless, before pursuing
this formal analysis, it may be helpful to trace in a few broad brushstrokes the
scale and impact of British involvement in nineteenth-century Latin America—
to show, that is, a bit of the material reality such stories and tropes attempted
to explain.
In general, the story of Latin American economics after the wars of inde
pendence is the story of those nations’ emergence into an international system
increasingly dominated by British capital and influence. As Ayşe Çelikkol
notes, the rise of free trade ideology in the first half of the nineteenth century
was initially met with British fears that “a world of chaotic circulation” might
threaten sovereignty and national borders. In practice, of course, the reverse
was true: “free trade measures paradoxically went hand in hand with govern-
mental interventions in the global economy and assured Britain’s economic
dominance in the world.”15 The case of Latin America illustrates this princi
ple particularly well.
In the late eighteenth c entury, Spain’s trade monopoly in the Americas be-
gan to be punctured and then deflated by British and French smuggling.
Spain tried to control these new flows to other European centers by sanction-
ing them and acting as intermediary, but this behavior caused “merchants
and especially producers in Latin America . . . to view colonial relations as an
obstacle to be surmounted.”16 Financial ties to other metropoles, therefore, and
to London in particular, began before independence and helped precipitate it.
Sensing Spain’s weakening grip on the American colonies, Britain tacitly sup-
ported Latin American revolution and chose to recognize the sovereignty of
the nations that emerged—with strong backing from London and Liverpool
merchants who saw the potential to dominate vast new markets.17 In the im-
mediate aftermath of independence, it was common for British recognition of
the new states to hinge on advantageous trade deals, but Latin American of-
ficials were eager to establish these relationships, too. When the wars of in
dependence consumed the wealth and destroyed the agriculture of the new
Latin American nations,18 they turned to foreign finance, particularly from
Great Britain, which was at that time “the only country with a surplus of
foreign capital for export.”19 For instance, the Chilean minister Mariano Egaña,
sent to London in 1824 to seek British recognition of Chile’s sovereignty, worked
at that task but also at getting British investment in mining, British settle-
ment in Chile, and British advisement to the Chilean government on the de-
velopment of industry.20 The independence of the Latin American nations
was, therefore, intimately tied to G reat Britain from the very beginning.
Between independence and midcentury, British financial involvement gen-
erally took the form of loans to Latin American governments (or the pur-
chase of Latin American bonds, which amounted to much the same thing),
sudden and expansive free trade, and direct investment in industrial and util-
ity projects such as mining and railroads. During this more turbulent period,
the British also shored up their advantage with occasional minor military
interventions.21 Each of these relationships gave them leverage over the
economically weak and institutionally nascent Latin American nations. In the
case of the loans, when “a combination of fraud, poor management, and un-
productive investment of the proceeds” put most nations in default,22 the
issuers in Europe were able to exert control over trade and state policy. In an
extreme example, the British forgave Peru’s bond defaults in 1890 in exchange
for control over the state-owned railroad industry until 1956.23 And in the case
of trade and industry, the competition from foreign goods tended to weaken
the production of local goods in Latin America and stagnate domestic indus-
try.24 But once again, it is important to note that regional differences refracted
these forces in unique ways. For instance, several decades of political stabil-
ity helped Chile’s economy grow early, while ongoing factional disruption
compounded Mexico’s economic slump.25 Argentina and Chile also fared bet-
ter earlier b ecause they were able to accumulate capital from wool and cop-
per, respectively.26 But the independence wars left mining operations across
Latin America damaged and abandoned—a major blow to economic recovery
in Mexico, Bolivia, and Peru in particular. Peru’s suffering was compounded
by its poor geographic position as a third-choice port of trade sandwiched
between the better-traveled Panama and Valparaíso routes; Peru wouldn’t re-
cover u ntil it established market dominance in guano in the mid-nineteenth
century.27 But while there was diversity, it is fair to say that Latin American
economies generally stagnated during the period 1820–1870, growing much
more slowly than the rest of the world.28
Most scholars agree that the late nineteenth century saw the Latin Ameri-
can nations enter a period of greater stability and prosperity, as internal po
Introduction 7
litical turmoil began to settle, exports steadied, and railroads integrated the
national economies.29 An intensification in British trade and investment aided
this stability, but it also led to the underdevelopment of local industries and
an overreliance on imports and loans. In other words, British informal em-
pire solidified and reached its peak in the final dec ades of the nineteenth
century. In fact, the sheer scale of British interest in Latin America may come
as a surprise to some historians and literary scholars, given the overwhelming
critical attention to the formal empire. According to Gallagher and Robinson,
“between 1815 and 1880, it is estimated, £187,000,000 in credit had accumu-
lated abroad, but no more than one-sixth was placed in the formal empire.”
And “by 1913, in Latin America as a whole, informal imperialism had become
so important for the British economy that £999,000,000, over a quarter of the
total investment abroad, was invested in that region.”30 Only India did more
trade with Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century.31 If this invest-
ment formed a large portion of Britain’s economy, consider its proportional
impact in Latin Americ a. As Bethell notes, during the nineteenth c entury
“Britain was the dominant external actor in the economic and, to a lesser ex-
tent, the political affairs of Latin America,” supplying manufactured goods,
providing loans, investing in infrastructure, and buying raw materials at
greater rates than any other nation.32 In Costa Rica, for instance, “British
investors . . . controlled the ports, mines, electric lighting, major public works,
and foreign commerce as well as the principal domestic marketplaces. In short,
Costa Rica surrendered all its economic independence and mortgaged its
future before 1890 in order to attain the accoutrements of modernization. No
evidence exists that any Costa Ricans except a tiny elite benefited.”33
This last point is important. Foreign involvement in Latin Americ a was
generally a relationship between elites. Informal empire was not a structure
unidirectionally imposed by the British but rather the result of international
elite cooperation,34 and it may not have seemed like imperialism to the wealthy
and landowning classes in Latin America who benefited. On both sides of the
Atlantic in the nineteenth century, the rich got richer, while the internal Latin
American wealth gap grew wider. Burns points out that Latin American elites
often naively believed in a trickle-down effect of their own prosperity, but
what seemed to them like progress only “plunged Latin America into deeper
dependency[,] . . . emptied local treasuries[,] . . . [and] impoverished the ma-
jority of the Latin Americans.”35 This structure in some cases continues today.
In the global division of labor, Latin American economies have struggled to
escape the role of raw materials providers for the more powerful production
economies of Europe and North America.36
Of course, British informal empire was not a phenomenon excusive to Latin
America. Britain exerted informal sway all over the world in the nineteenth
century—especially in China and the M iddle East—by using f ree trade to
nominally “open up” regions of the world to competition that in practice their
economic precedence allowed them to monopolize. In fact, “well before 1815
Britain’s economy had outgrown its Empire, and the subsequent drive for ac-
cess to new regions and for freer trade with all partners was widely seen as
inevitable and necessary.”37 Free trade was celebrated as both a mechanism to
expand British power and a tool for civilizing the world through the indus-
trious morality of capitalism. But its operations varied by location. In China,
for instance, informal empire had a heavy military component. It was estab-
lished on the back of the Opium Wars; what China would come to call the
“unequal treaties” that ended t hese conflicts gave Britain not only serious trade
advantages but also military footholds and formal territory (Hong Kong).
Britain would further use their military presence in the region as gunboat di-
plomacy to maintain their economic advantages, not hesitating to “use force
as political blackmail.”38 Meanwhile, in Egypt, Britain gained massive trade
advantages—“by the 1880s she took 80 per cent of Egypt’s exports and pro-
vided 44 per cent of her imports”—but this “led to inescapable territorial
expansion rather than informal control.”39 And in India, the East India Com
pany’s effective governance of the region—what Edmund Burke famously
referred to as “a state in the disguise of a merchant”40 —took a highly orga
nized form, with the independent territory surrounding British India di-
vided into administrative districts designed to protect British interests.41
Informal empire likewise operated distinctly in Latin America: while the
British used some military intervention, there were no sustained hostilities;
they had less of a monopoly than they did elsewhere;42 British influence did
not lead to territorial control; and they lacked a highly organized system. All
these differences support Andrew Thompson’s argument that informal empire
should be seen not “as a category (analytically distinct from the formal em-
pire)” but rather “as a continuum (along which regions of both formal and
informal rule can then be positioned, according to the nature of their relation-
ship with Britain at any one point in time).”43 These differences are also a key
reason why the arguments I make in this book do not constitute a transhis-
torical or transgeographic al theory of informal empire. Rather, they offer a
Introduction 9
theory of what made informal empire in Latin America specific and unique.
When I use the phrase “informal empire,” therefore, it should be understood
as shorthand for “British informal empire in Latin America.” And I define it
in a straightforward way: Britain’s significant influence over sovereign Latin
American nations by means of economic leverage rather than formal occupa-
tion. But let us now leave economics b ehind.
Informal Empire as an Idea

I have given this brief historical overview in order to demonstrate informal
empire’s importance to both Britain and Latin Americ a in the nineteenth
century—to suggest why it would have been front of mind for people on each
side, gazing across the Atlantic at one another. But this book is not about eco-
nomic or tactical specifics. It is about the idea of informal empire.
And in this sense, there is one feature of British informal empire in Latin
America that matters more than any other having to do with import figures
or military intervention. Informal empire in Latin America is distinguished
both from the formal empire and from informal empire in other regions by
the presence of one single, unusual, disruptive idea. Latin America powerfully,
principally, and uniquely entered the British imagination as a symbol of free-
dom, a standard-bearer of anti-colonial liberation. Unlike China or India, it
never occupied the role of e nemy or combatant in Britain’s narrative of inter-
national relations. This meant that e very story about Britain’s imperial desires
in Latin Americ a, every justification for their economic dominance, had to
work around, or fold in, or make sense of, the perception that Latin America
had deservedly won its liberty from European imperialism. The idea of infor-
mal empire in Latin America differed from ideas about formal and informal
imperialisms elsewhere because it had to grapple directly with the ethics of
freedom.
Here I should note that I am specifically choosing the term “informal
empire.” Since Gallagher and Robinson’s landmark 1953 essay, “The Imperi-
alism of Free Trade,” informal empire has been the primary label for British
influence in Latin America, China, and the Middle East. But historians and
economists do not all agree that influence in a foreign region is tantamount
to empire, nor that “empire” is the right term for processes that were often ad
hoc, decentralized, and bidirectional. Some argue that terms like “sphere of
influence” or “dependency” are more appropriate.44 It also remains a point of
contention among historians whether foreign investment in Latin America in

the nineteenth century was a debilitating force or a necessary evil that helped
modernize helpless economies. It is not my intention to wade into these de-
bates, nor by using the term “informal empire” do I make an ontological claim
about what the nature of the relationship historically was. I use it for the
straightforward reason that it seems to me to best capture how Britons and
Latin Americans themselves perceived their relationship. W hether or not this
relationship was imperial, it is clear that officials like Canning, writers like
Barbauld, and revolutionaries like Bolívar all believed that Britain’s sudden
and intense involvement in Latin America had imperial implications. And if
the term “informal empire” seems paradoxical or ill fitting in a region where the
British exerted no official control, that is precisely the point. It is simulta
neously true that Britain’s approach to Latin America traveled well wide of
the structures of settlement, governance, and military force that brought for-
mal colonies under their sway, and that it nonetheless appeared imperial to
those who looked closely at it.
Onlookers, then, saw Latin America as both a symbol of freedom and a site
of imperialism. As Ericka Beckman puts it, the “political independence of new
nations was accompanied from the start by a condition of non-independence
in the sphere of global market relations.”45 This book is about the difficulty
of resolving those two states—independence and non-independence—into a
coherent idea. T hese are dueling discourses: the clamor to make Latin Amer
ica simultaneously more f ree and less free. Britons and Latin Americans alike
advocated for both. Of course, we are talking about two different kinds of
freedom, one political and the other economic. One might object that t here
is no conflict in simultaneously promoting politic al self-rule and economic
dependence. But the two are not so easily disarticulated, nor w ere they in the
messy web of nineteenth-century British empire. The formal empire spread
through and on behalf of market motives, and control over markets and loans
severely curtailed political sovereignty around the globe. Self-governance and
economic independence cannot be isolated as separate categories, particularly
not in the informal empire, where self-governance is a necessary condition of
the economic exploitation that undermines that very self-governance. Advo-
cating for informal empire, then, meant the promotion of both sovereignty
and subjugation in paradoxical ways.
One reason this paradox was hard to see is that the independence of Latin
America on the one hand, and its subjugation to British power on the other,
Introduction 11
could both be perceived as British moral goods. Certainly the British had no
trouble advocating for revolution in some parts of the world and for colonial-
ism in o thers, and both w ere often part of the same stories they told themselves
about civilization. Freedom and colonialism could both be plot events in the
narrative of progress; they could both be connective links in the f amily of
man. But it was their simultaneity in the case of informal empire that raised
a conceptual paradox. When Mill and Canning refer to South Americ a as
“free” “under the protection” of British power, or “free, and . . . English,”
when Bolívar says that Latin Americ a can be “free” u nder “[England’s]
shadow,” or when Anna Barbauld in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven laments
that British merchants hold sway over “dependant kings,”46 all are remarking
on the simultaneity of sovereignty and subjugation. All position informal em-
pire as a kind of unthinkable paradox that, nevertheless, had to be thought.
Most critics do not dwell on informal empire’s paradoxical nature, likely
because they tend to view it as sharing extensive ideological terrain with the
formal empire. This thinking can be traced to Gallagher and Robinson, who
argued that any “concept of informal empire which fails to bring out the
underlying unity between it and the formal empire is sterile.”47 In literary stud-
ies, Jean Franco and Mary Louise Pratt set similar terms by labeling British
travelers to South America “missionaries of capitalism” and the “capitalist van-
guard,” respectively, and suggesting that they saw the New World through
“imperial eyes.”48 Historians have been somewhat more circumspect. Matthew
Brown argues that Pratt and Franco overextend their conclusions by focusing
only on travelers with commercial interests, failing to notice “the vast major-
ity of British travellers to South America in this period”—the poor, adventur-
ing, radical, expatriate, and so forth—who “were as much missionaries of
capitalism as they w ere missionaries of Protestantism, which is to say, not at
all.”49 Magnus Mörner and June Hahner have argued that British travel ac-
counts of Latin America differ wildly in tone depending on each traveler’s
religion, class, gender, length of stay, and prior travel experience.50 And Wad-
dell and Brown both argue that British soldiers in particular cannot be con-
sidered operatives of informal empire, as they supported the cause of liberty51
and w ere “variously too headstrong, too incompetent, or too inebriated to be
accused of operating on anyone’s instructions, let alone forming part of a co-
herent imperial project directed from London.”52 Some literary scholars have
written about individual Britons like these who seemed to see outside of the
imperial gaze, casting them as exceptions to the general rule.53 In none of t hese
depictions, however, do we see informal empire as internally conflicted; rather

it appears as a fundamentally imperial mode that was present at some times
and not others. This is a binary account of informal empire, in which Brit-
ons e ither viewed Latin America imperially or they did not.
More recent accounts do describe informal empire in Latin America as an
“ambivalent” discourse,54 pointing out that historically it was diffuse and im-
provised, that it “did not originate in a master plan and thus it developed
and was frequently enacted in contradictory ways,”55 and that it consisted of
“competing discourses.”56 Rebecca Cole Heinowitz, for instance, argues that
Romantic texts of informal empire “shift uncomfortably between assertions
of revolutionary solidarity . . . a nd schemes of colonial domination.”57 This
improves upon the binary model by focusing on the internally conflicted na-
ture of writing and thinking about informal empire. But such attention to
ambivalence still rests on an assumption of “unity” between the informal and
the formal empire. T hese accounts tend, e ither explicitly or implicitly, to por-
tray the duality of informal empire as a kind of dialectic in which contradiction
is a productive feature of imperial power’s smooth functioning. Beginning in
the 1960s with definitions of neocolonialism by Jean-Paul Sartre and Kwame
Nkrumah, we typically see a surface/depth explanation for the internal con-
tradictions of economic imperialism. Nkrumah, writing specifically about
Africa but folding postcolonial Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin Amer
ica into his analysis, argued that “the essence of neo-colonialism is that the
State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward
trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus
its political policy is directed from outside.” Neocolonialism “claims,” he
says, “that it is ‘giving’ independence to its former subjects. . . . Under cover
of such phrases, however, it devises innumerable ways to accomplish objectives
formerly achieved by naked colonialism. It . . . attempts to perpetuate colo-
nialism while at the same time talking about ‘freedom.’”58 Sartre put it exactly
the same way: u nder neocolonialism, “the government of the independent na-
tion is completely dependent,” a paradoxical situation intentionally hidden
“behind a political farce.” “Imperialism,” he said, “is lucid.”59 To put this in
structural terms, neocolonialism presents a false “outward trapping” of free-
dom, a “farce,” that masks a true “reality” of dependence underneath. Impe-
rialism is the real drive, and ideas about freedom are less real or entirely unreal
(see Nkrumah’s use of quotation marks), merely serving as ideological “cover”
for the operations of empire.
Introduction 13
Models specific to British informal empire in Latin America imply a simi-

lar dynamic. Heinowitz, for instance, argues that Romantic writers managed
the competing discourses of “solidarity . . . and domination” by “imagin[ing]
a British ascendancy in the Spanish colonies as justified by moral and cultural
kinship with the indigenous population.”60 In other words, these discourses
turn out not to be in competition at all, but rather in complementarity. Brit-
ish solidarity with South American p eople is not sincere or real but merely a
“justification,” a kind of feint or gambit that serves the goals of imperialism.
Far from being troubled by discourses of freedom and solidarity, then, infor-
mal empire relied on them. To the extent that it appeared to be a contradic-
tory discourse, this was only because it was knowingly contradictory (“lucid,”
in Sartre’s terms)—and therefore coherent. It was not troubled; it was simply
dishonest. Once again, we can describe this implied structure in formal terms:
Heinowitz offers a surface/depth arrangement in which surface and depth
stand in dialectical relation, two opposed ideas in tense but stable mutual de-
pendence. Despite attention to the “ambivalence” of informal empire, there-
fore, t here remains a strong tendency to class it as part of a differently operat-
ing but nonetheless kindred system to the formal empire—a system whose
primary motive is imperial power and that operates as an arm of the larger
imperial project. T here have been good reasons for this: Latin Americ a has
received so little attention in nineteenth-century British studies that empha-
sizing the dynamics of imperialism has been a way to highlight its relevance.
It is no surprise, then, that literary scholars have tended to portray ambivalence
and contradiction as a feature, not a bug, of a primarily imperial endeavor,
writing that British travelers deploy “the rhetoric of benign domination,”
that naturalists’ voyages “were built upon, furthered, and expressed the desir-
ability of, British control in the region,” and that “one burning question ran
through all contemporary attention to Spanish America, namely the question
of empire.”61
But assumptions of continuity between territorial and economic imperial-
ism conceal the audacious way that informal empire actually operated: it
could operate only within and around the discourses of liberation and anti-
imperialism. Reading British interest in liberty as a feint, a “cover” for impe-
rial aims, glosses over the material fact and the forceful idea of Latin Ameri
ca’s freedom, which was a logistical precondition of informal empire and a
metonymy for its target. This book shows that the effort to weave both visions
together unleashed the extraordinary idea that liberty could be a condition
and constitutive feature of subjugation. I argue, therefore, that this duality at

the core of informal empire did not produce a smoothly operative version of
the imperial discourse but rather an irresolvable paradox. Nathan K. Hensley
argues that the supposed peace of Victorian liberalism depended on world-
wide violence and that therefore “peacekeeping and warmaking w ere not sepa-
rate ideas, but two aspects of sovereign power as such.” This paradox, he ar-
gues, disrupted and challenged the “core conceptual assumptions” of Victorian
thought.62 While Hensley focuses on the formal empire and its enforcement
through somatic harm, his formulation of epistemologically provoking para-
dox, especially in imperial zones, parallels the way I want to frame freedom
and oppression as mutually interrupting co-constituents of informal empire.
That is not to say that the discourse of “liberty” has never been the hand-
maiden of oppression. F ree trade itself, along with so many related institutions
of the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century liberalism, have functioned that
way. But because of its status in the nineteenth century as a powerful public
talisman for postcolonial liberation, and because informal empire depended
upon that liberation for its operations, Latin America’s freedom could not so
easily be dismissed by or co-opted into imperial aims. It was, as this book shows,
an unassimilable feature of the idea of informal empire, perpetually troubling it,
refusing resolution, and provoking reconsideration of the limits of imperialism.
Progress and Family

Informal empire was such a difficult idea b ecause, as freedom and empire sat
together on the surface of Britain’s interest in Latin America, they prompted
diametrically opposed applications of some of the nineteenth c entury’s most
dominant master narratives. Nineteenth-century western thought was pow-
erfully influenced by two conceptual categories in particu lar: history and
community. This era saw the rise of what I call historical consciousness and
genealogical consciousness, by which I mean that increased attention to the
shape of history and the forms of community influenced nearly e very facet of
western social and politic al life. Overwhelmingly, residents of the Atlantic
world perceived history to have the specific shape of progress, and community
to have the specific form of a nuclear family. Progress and family, then, were
two forms—t wo conceptual structures for the organization of experience—
that in turn gave shape to governance, domesticity, colonialism, commerce,
labor, racism, education, diplomacy, and so on. They were likewise marshaled
Introduction 15
to explain informal empire. And in that process, the opposed notions of free-
dom and empire called on these master narratives in conflicting ways,
thereby making informal empire irresolvable in the very epistemological terms
that s haped modern thought.
Consider progress, which John Stuart Mill called simply “human advance-
ment” and which he tied intrinsically to freedom, saying that “the only un-
failing and permanent source of improvement is liberty.”63 But if progress
marked a trajectory t oward freedom, it also implied that some w ere not yet
ready for it. Mill supported the sovereignty of so-called civilized nations, while
arguing that “barbarians have no rights as a nation” and may justifiably be
subjected to “despotism.”64 Progress, therefore, sanctioned two opposed
ideas—colonialism and self-rule—by distributing them across a hierarchy of
the world’s people. But informal empire could not rely on such geographical
distance to sustain its contradictions, asking onlookers to accept that one
people might occupy two different places on the timeline of progress. Latin
America somehow had to be both a model of postcolonial maturity deserving
of freedom and a dependent child in need of colonial masters. Informal em-
pire, then, emerged as an anachronism in world historical time. It produced
a formal problem in the model of progressive history, not only for its tempo-
ral sequence but also for its protagonist. If Latin America’s freedom suggested
that it was the protagonist of its own historical progress, the British Empire
placed itself in that role. So whose progress narrative was it? Under the con-
ditions of informal empire, the very forms of progress—its linearity, its tele-
ology, its structure of increase—made it difficult if not impossible to imagine
the answer being “both.”
And while progressive historical consciousness saw informal empire man-
ifest as a temporal paradox, genealogical consciousness saw it formalized as a
fractured international family. Nineteenth-century western discourse fre-
quently saw “peer” nations described as b rothers, while colonial targets w ere
often treated as children. Put another way, family describes forms of belong-
ing, and synchronic or lateral ties (to a brother or a spouse) may suggest mu-
tual belonging while diachronic or hierarchical ties (to a father) typically
imply possession. Britain’s dual aims in Latin America once again created con-
flict, as their support (both sentimental and tactical) for the revolutions in-
spired discourses of fraternity and marriage, but t hese butted up against the
paternalistic f amily structure that was foundational to their imperial project.
W hether Latin America “belonged” to G reat Britain as an imperial possession
or w hether they both “belonged” to an enlightened Atlantic community of

peers was a m atter of two different f amily forms that informal empire could
not resolve into a coherent domestic unit.
Literature, of course, is likewise shaped by both historical and genealogi-
cal forms, and it uses its own formal logic to render the narratives of politics.
For that reason, I argue, it is particularly good at revealing the paradoxes of
informal empire. In this book, I examine a wide range of nineteenth-century
writing—novels, poems, travelogues, essays, and letters, British and Latin
American—a ll of which registers the difficulty of aligning an unprecedented
new geopolitical arrangement with conventional stories about progressive his-
tory and familial community. Each half of this book treats informal empire’s
irreconcilability with one of these ideas: part I discusses progress and part II
discusses family. But of course, historical and genealogical consciousnesses
overlap in significant ways, and progress and family are mutually constitut-
ing. So while each half of this book takes shape around one guiding idea, t hose
ideas are far from separate. For example, although Trollope appears in a chap-
ter on the progress narrative, we will see that the English family is critical to
his understanding of progress’s forms. And while I discuss family models in
Vicente López and H. Rider Haggard, each author thinks about international
families as vehicles for and expressions of different kinds of progress.
One implication of my argument, therefore, is that deciphering paradox is
not the privilege only of the twenty-first c entury critic. The conflicted forms
of informal empire were apparent to British and Latin American onlookers as
those forms emerged. Leela Gandhi argues that there were critics of the for-
mal empire within nineteenth-century Britain, often from marginalized
groups themselves, and that they diagnosed the rationalist, binaristic, taxo-
nomical logic of imperial thought.65 Like Gandhi, I reveal that t here w ere
subjects who saw outside of imperial ideology and that they did so specifically
through attention to the formalized structure of that ideology. But my argu-
ment runs in the reverse: the texts I read h ere wielded the very rationalism,
binarism, and taxonomy of western epistemology against itself. Rather than
countering the imperial progress narrative with alternative models of tempo-
ral experience, they offer a way to see progress as a persuasive argument against
empire. Ultimately, therefore, by using formalist analysis to unfold the para-
doxes of informal empire, I show how it disturbed and reshaped standard British
accounts of empire, sparking new perspectives on deeply ingrained nineteenth-
century epistemologies.
Introduction 17
Informal Empire in Literature

Joseph Conrad’s 1904 novel, Nostromo, written nearly a c entury a fter the out-
break of revolution in Latin America, captures the collision between infor-
mal empire and western master narratives exceptionally well. Set in the fic-
tional South American country of Costaguana, the novel is a long, complex,
mostly cynical meditation on the workings of informal empire. The affairs of
Costaguana, and particularly the sleepy port town of Sulaco, are steered not
by the government but by Charles Gould, an Anglo-Costaguanan who runs
the lucrative, US-financed San Tomé silver mine. Gould’s outsize influence
earns him the moniker “King of Sulaco,” and his governance is quite literal—
he “can wind all the hidalgos of the province round his little finger,” such that
“the political Jefé, the chief of the police, the chief of the customs, the gen-
eral, all, all”—are less officials of the state than they are “officials of the mine.”66
Influenced by Gould, his aristocratic circle, and the other foreign residents of
Sulaco, the “President-Dictator” of Costaguana supports projects like the
silver mine and the new foreign-backed railroads as pathways to national
peace and prosperity. This effort goes under the banner of progress: the rail-
road, which is being laid by “the great body of strong-limbed foreigners who
dug the earth, blasted the rocks, [and] drove the engines” is a “progressive and
patriotic undertaking” (77), and the President-Dictator’s party goes by the
“watchwords . . . honesty, peace, and progress” (330). Such ideals, writes Nasser
Mufti, not only “motor Costaguana’s progress, [but] also emplot its future by
laying the tracks, as it were, for [Sulaco’s] journey through history.”67
This progress, of course, is the imperial kind. The novel knows this, de-
scribing the railroad and telegraph lines beginning to mark the country as
symbols of “that progress waiting outside for a moment of peace to enter and
twine itself about the weary heart of the land” (182). And the gate at the en-
trance to Sulaco, on which “the arms of Spain [are] nearly smoothed out as if
in readiness for some new device typical of the impending progress” (188),
seems to suggest that informal empire is just another palimpsestic version of
Spanish rule. The imperial nature of foreign development is manifest to many
Costaguanans, too, who throw their support behind a military revolt against
“the sinister land-grabbing designs of European powers” and the Gould-
backed president’s “[plot] to deliver his country, bound hand and foot, for a
prey to foreign speculators” (165). Chanting “Down with the Oligarchs! Viva
la libertad!” (306), the revolutionaries’ rhetoric casts this uprising against
European capital as an iteration of the wars of independence, a new but cog-

nate fight against compromised freedom.
But in this b attle for the right to govern Costaguana, both sides claim to
fight for its freedom. Once again looking back to the wars of independence,
the novel tells us that the English families in Costaguana have “poured their
blood for the cause of freedom in Americ a” (74); Gould’s grandfather even
“fought in the cause of independence under Bolivar, in that famous English
legion which on the battlefield of Carabobo had been saluted by the great Lib-
erator as Saviours of his country” (87). The English, we are told, have been
“saviours” of this land, and they will be so again, according to the president’s
military commander, b ecause in the fight against turmoil like the military
uprising, “it is money that saves a country” (180).
Informal empire, in other words, wears a double face. It is patently an
infringement upon the nation’s self-rule, but as is the case throughout the
nineteenth c entury, it must deal with what is widely understood to be the
moral good of that very self-rule. John Stuart Mill could use the concept of
progress to defend both imperialism and local sovereignty because he found
each appropriate to different peoples, but Nostromo exposes the illogic behind
informal empire’s necessary reliance on both in the same place. Through the
influence of powerful interests like the San Tomé silver mine, “progress” ap-
pears as a simultaneous trajectory toward both conquest and liberation. It
will both “save a country” and “deliver [it] . . . for a prey to foreign[ers].” Dressed
in the familiar trappings of the wars of independence, always close at hand
in literary renderings of Latin America, informal empire wears the aspect of
both imperial and revolutionary combatants, as a new Spain, and as a new
Bolívar.
This paradox explodes into terrible, ironic reality when the foreign capital
ists decide that the only way to “save” the town of Sulaco from the military
revolt is to declare it an independent country. The English, then, aim to re-
peat their ancestors’ fight for the freedom of Latin America by leading a new
separatist movement. Journalist Martin Decoud explicitly connects the scheme
to the old wars of independence when he writes to his sister in Europe: “Pre-
pare our little circle in Paris for the birth of another South American repub-
lic. One more or less, what does it m atter?” (228). This independence move-
ment, however, is not being fought by South Americans against Europe; it is
fought by Europeans against a free South American nation. And their decla-
ration of independence is written on the letterhead of the San Tomé mine,
Introduction 19
which Gould writes to his American financier “is big enough to take in hand
the making of a new State” (352). Informal empire’s simultaneous desire for
domination and its structural dependence on local sovereignty, therefore, col-
lapse together into the construction of an independent nation governed by
the silver mine. In an effort to have progress both ways, the Europea ns in
Costaguana render informal empire’s narrative paradox farcically literal, lead-
ing a political movement to make a South American country independent—
from itself.
Indeed, the novel suggests that master narratives like progress simply break
down in the face of such dueling interests, a dynamic replicated in the incom-
mensurability of each character’s individual aims. As Edward Said puts it,
“everyone in the novel has an unflagging interest in the fortunes of Costa-
guana, for the most part in the form of a private vision of personal advan-
tage.”68 Even among allies on the same side of the larger political fight, hardly
any two p eople—not husband and wife, not two business partners, not two
men sharing a small boat in the middle of the night—fully understand what
vision of the future the other is fighting for. And while leaders on both sides
claim to fight for “freedom” and “progress,” the novel’s own frustrating, non-
linear plot and strangely shifting perspective seem to corroborate the idea
that universalizing master narratives like t hese shatter against the competing
motives of the modern world, or at least the modern world u nder the sway of
informal empire. The bidirectional demands of progress under global capital-
ism can only appear in Nostromo as what Nathan K. Hensley and Philip
Steer call “cycles of anti-teleological historical motion” caught in a “futureless
stasis.”69 Informal empire does not produce, nor can it be told by, a progres-
sive historical narrative; history in Costaguana instead remains forever
“stalled,” palpably “everywhere but nowhere.”70
Jed Esty argues that at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning
of the twentieth, the traditional linear novel form of the Bildungsroman broke
down as it faced “the form-fraying possibility that capitalism cannot be mor-
alized into the progressive time of the nation.”71 Nostromo shares this sense that
global capitalism—in the particular form of informal empire—is irreconcil-
able with linear, teleological progressive form. But the idea of British informal
empire in Latin America was, by the time of Nostromo’s publication, already
a century old. And as this book shows, it did not take the widely acknowl-
edged breakdown of the progress narrative at the fin de siècle for writers to
perceive a fundamental formal conflict between informal empire and some of
the most powerful ideas of the nineteenth century. That conflict, the one Nos
tromo so deftly captures, had already been apparent for nearly a hundred years.
Conrad’s novel is unique, however, in that it was the first significant Brit-
ish text to treat informal empire in a direct, sustained manner. Influenced by
the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire de Deux Indes (1770) and Jean-François Marmon-
tel’s Les Incas (1777), pre-independence literature in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth c entury offered literary retellings of the Spanish “discovery”
and conquest of the New World.72 It was not u ntil Humboldt’s writing was
translated into English by John Black in 1811—followed soon by a profusion
of travelogues by the Britons who flooded into Latin America—that British
readers began to glimpse the contemporary interior of t hese vast continents.
But even as the British increasingly encountered modern, Enlightened, mul-
ticultural, postcolonial, buzzingly mercantile Latin America in their travels
and affairs, nineteenth-century literature persistently refused to portray it as
such. From the creature in Frankenstein (1818) promising to “quit the neigh-
borhood of man” by removing himself to “the vast wilds of South America,”
to Walter Hartright in The W oman in White (1860) entering Honduras and
thereby leaving both “civilisation” and half the pages of the book, Latin Amer
ica remained offstage in British literature, where it was usually portrayed as
empty or primitive—or, as Cannon Schmitt argues, “a present past, a living
anachronism . . . a lieu de mémoire.”73 It did seem to take nearly a c entury for
informal empire to receive the detailed literary examination that Conrad’s
novel gave it. And yet, I argue, while Nostromo might mark a change in the
content of British literature about Latin America, it is merely a capstone on a
century of like-minded perceptions of informal empire’s strange form. As I
trace in both British and Latin American texts, from 1810 through the turn
of the c entury, writers registered informal empire as having seismic, paradoxi-
cal, “form-fraying” conflicts, not with their own narrative forms but with
the forms of t hose master narratives that shaped the world they knew.
Informal Empire as Form

As I have intimated, this book suggests that formalism offers new and needed
insight to the study of British informal empire. The methods of literary stud-
ies can help us describe the precise forms of what scholars like Aguirre and
Heinowitz have urged us to understand as the messy, complicated admixture
that is informal empire. But something more needs to be said about the specific
Introduction 21
formalism in use here, since it is a heterogeneous field, one that has fallen in
and out of favor and has been undertaken in vastly different ways.
One approach to the study of form is to separate it from author, context,
and politics, to pursue meaning in the text’s internal logic and arrangement.
In various ways, New Criticism, Russian Formalism, and structuralism have
all sought to explain how form produces a textual unity and meaning that is
legible without reference to the author or historical context. My formalism is
particularly indebted to New Criticism’s and Russian Formalism’s close atten-
tion to the specificity of form, to the arrangements of language that are often
called “devices” and that go by names like fabula and syuzhet, anaphora, and
emplotment, and I follow their lead in seeking explanations for how these pat-
terns of language signify. There is also a significant structuralist bent to my
analysis, which reflects my belief that describing formal shapes and architec-
tures is a powerful tool for discovering how they work.
This is a brief and necessarily reductive gloss on a number of formalisms
that are both internally heterogeneous and distinct from one another. I do not
linger here in more detail because this book’s formalism diverges from them
all in one key way: this is not a book about literary form. I aim to describe
neither the internal unity of a text nor its ironies and tensions, and I do not
contribute to taxonomies of possible literary devices or structures. My ultimate
object of study is not the heroic couplet, the realist novel, the political essay,
or the picaresque, though I discuss examples of each. Instead, my aim is to
analyze the specific shapes and structures—that is, forms—nineteenth-
century texts understood social institutions to take.
So, for one thing, this book is much more interested in politics and histori-
cal context than many formalisms have been. Historicist approaches to liter
ature have of course paid attention to politics, and despite their anti-formalist
reputations, frequently invoke literary form. One such approach, often Fou-
cauldian, Marxist, or both, holds literary form accountable for disguising or
normalizing the operations of dominant ideology and teaching its readers to
conform to the norms of a disciplinary society. In these readings, literary form
works to conceal contradictions, inequalities, and minority experiences, and
at best it may fail to do so, revealing something in the process about how
dominant ideologies work. Suvir Kaul, for instance, discussing “hybrid” po-
etic forms of eighteenth-century poetry, declares that “the primary task of a
political criticism is to decode the largely unconscious resolutions supplied by
the narrative search for ideological closure or coherence.”74 The obverse
approach, though methodologically kin, is to suggest that form can be or

bring about ideology critique; discussing the same genre, John Barrell and
Harriet Guest argue that eighteenth-century long poems deliberately “em-
ploy a range of incompatible discourses,” thereby “performing the function of
enabling contradictions to be uttered.”75 Despite the obvious differences in
these two schools of thought, they agree that form does things; it orients lit
erature and its readers into a certain relationship—whether complacent or
combative—with social structures. However, historicist critical models do
not typically take those social structures themselves as available for formalist
analysis; they focus instead on the literary text as a mediation, index, accom-
plice, or antagonist of ideologies that do not themselves come under formal
study.
A word more about Marxism in particular, as my subject matter and meth-
ods brush close to it. My book shares some basic beliefs with Marxist literary
criticism, namely that cultural and literary objects arise out of, and must be
understood in relation to, their sociohistorical—and especially economic—
contexts. I also privilege the role of power in cultural expression, and I agree
that the capitalist mode of production engenders contradictions foundational
to social experience. But I do not analyze the texts here as either concealing
or exposing the material contradictions inherent to a social totality, largely
because the horizon of my analysis is not an ideological or material totality in
the first place. When I read for contradictions, therefore, it is not those that
must be unmasked or unearthed—either by author or by critic—from be-
neath a false ideological surface, nor do I read texts as what Roberto Schwarz
calls an “aesthetic formalization” of the contradictions in social experience.”76
Rather, I start from the assumption that multiple ideas compete to describe
different aspects of existence, some more persuasively than o thers. And most
of the literature I discuss, far from finding fault with dominant ideologies like
empire, capitalism, progress, and racial hierarchy, in fact uses t hese as the
yardstick by which the coherence of any other idea might be assessed. So in-
stead of unpacking the contradictions inherent to problematic ideas like prog
ress and race, I begin by acknowledging that the texts u nder examination
simply find t hose ideas persuasive. What they are about (in their direct con-
tent), however, is the surprising way in which some hegemonic explanations
of social life (like progress) might cause another, also hegemonic explanation
(like informal empire) to appear contradictory or paradoxical—and provide
a means of unthinking it. And so, where critics have seen informal empire as
Introduction 23
belonging to a larger totality of oppressive imperial ideology, my readings re-

veal why it in fact appeared contradictory to the terms of nineteenth-century
master narratives, heterogeneous and unassimilable to certain epistemologi-
cal regimes that w ere widely expected to give shape to the future.
To accomplish what I have proposed—to analyze the specific forms
nineteenth-century texts understood social institutions to take—means under-
standing the social world to be itself composed of describable forms. Here
I draw heavily on a few traditions. Some historical and philosophical work,
for instance, acknowledges the formalized nature of social institutions. Take
Hayden White’s revelation that history is authored narrative with protagonists
and plot turns formed in service of the community telling the story.77 Or the
similar insights of scholars like Homi Bhabha, David Carr, and Ernest Gell-
ner that nationalism is an authored concept, made legible to citizens through
narrative form.78 In fact, as Reinhart Koselleck has argued, the turn t oward
the progress narrative in late eighteenth-century Europe converted the very
notion of “republic” from a structural condition to a narratable event; “repub-
lic” became the telos of historical narrative.79 Marxist and Hegelian ap-
proaches to history likewise see it as available to formal analysis: What is the
dialectic, a fter all, if not a form? The influence of t hese theories w
ill be obvi-
ous throughout this book, as I follow their lead in assuming that history and
politics are rendered to us through the forms and structures of narrative.
Caroline Levine has recently theorized and provided a vocabulary for how
literary studies may do this work in a radically expansive way, by applying its
formalist methods to “patterns of sociopolitical experience.”80 Form, accord-
ing to Levine, is simply that which works to impose order, to organize or con-
strain human experience. A villanelle, a Local Area Network, a railroad, and
the gender binary, therefore, are all forms with recognizable pattern and struc-
ture and that literary analysis may be deployed to make sense of. As various
literary and social forms compete to organize our world, Levine argues, they
collide with one another and produce “surprising and unintentional political
effects.”81 Importing the notion of “affordance” from design theory, she sug-
gests that different forms—such as the couplet or the factory timetable or the
fork—“afford” different outcomes—such as memorization or productivity or
stabbing.82 It requires formalist attention, therefore, to tease apart how a mul-
tiplicity of forms and their affordances interact with one another in the
course of organizing h uman life. This book draws heavily on the insight that
social arrangements have form. My analysis would not be possible without
understanding powerful institutions like the nuclear f amily and capitalist ac-
cumulation to have describable form, and I often use literary terms (such as
“protagonist”) to explain forms that exist outside of the literary text (such as the
progress narrative). But if my object of analysis is not primarily literary texts,
it is also not primarily institutions. Instead, I am interested in how litera
ture contains and deploys its own ideas about the forms of social institu-
tions. Inhabitants of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world had ideas about
the forms of informal empire, and literature (like Nostromo) offers an in-
credibly complex vision of not only what those forms were, but also how
they refracted across other forms, like revolution, capitalism, marriage, his-
torical time, and narrative.
In this sense I side with the idea that “form” is a term with broad concep-
tual applicability. This is a polemical idea, and some maintain that form is
particularly literary and not generalizable outside of specific contexts.83 But
as my readings show, nineteenth-century thinkers themselves saw the world
(not just literature) in formal terms. It is unmistakable that Anna Barbauld’s
poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven understands politics as a function of his-
torical time’s linear progression, and that Vicente Fidel López’s historical
novel La novia del hereje depends upon a vision of f amily as the connective
hinge between domestic and national life. T hese texts assume such forms to
exist and to constrain what politics are possible. Therefore, w hether they
agreed about the forms that shaped their world, Romantic, Victorian, and
Latin American authors w ere already “Levinean” or “New Formalist” in that
they saw their world—not just their texts—as powerfully formal. In partic
ular, they saw through the lenses of two major formal categories: history and
family. Writers on both sides of the Atlantic, I argue, perceived their world to
be forcefully organized by historical and genealogical forms, and t hese forms
circumscribed how they understood themselves to exist in time and commu-
nity, how they understood o thers to exist in time and community, and what
it was possible to be or do in relation to time and community. For instance,
the form of the family afforded the treatment of colonial others as children,
and the form of progress afforded belief in h uman perfectibility and differen-
tial non-coevality. Nineteenth-century writers’ own social formalism, in other
words, shaped their politics. The aim of this book is to show how literature
renders that process visible.
Now let me say a bit more about how this method brings informal empire
in particular into focus. And here it will be helpful to have an overview of the
Introduction 25
book’s general structure. Its two halves each pursue informal empire’s engage-
ment with a master narrative of the nineteenth c entury. The first half is about
perceptions of historical time—what I refer to as historical consciousness—
and in particular, the progress narrative. The second half is about perceptions
of familial relations—what I refer to as genealogical consciousness. Each half
opens with a short introduction that offers a twofold account, one historical
and one formal, of the master narrative in question. The introduction to
part I, therefore, begins by tracking precisely how and why the idea of prog
ress became so important to nineteenth-century thought, before then theo-
rizing the specific forms (diachronicity, linearity, increase, acceleration, and
teleology) that make it a legibly distinct narrative. The introduction to part
II performs the same work of both historicizing familial community and
theorizing the formal categories that govern its shape (origin, generation,
relation, and hybridity).
This is an essentially structuralist social formalism in which, without read-
ing through any literary text, I theorize the form of the progress narrative as
such and the family as such. But t here is a thick relationship between form
and history in t hese introductions: theorizing the forms of progress would be
a sterile exercise without a grounding in how progress shaped nineteenth-
century experiences of being in time, and formal analysis also enriches and
strengthens our understanding of how that shaping of experience occurred.
And so when I say I theorize the forms of “the progress narrative as such,”
I do not mean to suggest that it or any other form—no m atter how influential
or powerful—is transhistorical. The bus schedule constrains my options for
getting to campus, and capitalism constrains my options for retirement. Both
are forms that order my life, and both also change. The bus schedule may
change next semester, while capitalism’s shifts are more epochal, but both look
very different t oday than they did one hundred years ago—and different than
they w ill a c entury hence. We must assess forms in their historical contexts.
So while progress persists as a powerful concept in the twenty-first c entury,
its contours have slowly changed in western thought as we have become less
certain of its inevitability and linearity and more convinced of its incremen-
tality. Therefore, the introductions to each half of this book theorize the forms
of progress and f amily not as transtemporal institutions but as they w ere com-
monly perceived to be formed in a particular historical moment—the nine-
teenth century. In so d oing, they provide a formal vocabulary through which
to understand some of the most influential nineteenth-century thought, a
vocabulary that in turn newly illuminates literary engagements with histori-

cal and genealogical form.
The chapters that follow each introduction, however, do something differ
ent.84 They turn to nineteenth-century literature in order to show how texts
registered the commonly understood forms of progress and family, as well as
how informal empire troubled t hose forms. As writers considered informal
empire, I argue, they could not help but filter it through their understanding
of the forms that powerfully shaped their sense of the bedrock categories of
time and community. Anna Kornbluh argues that “when novels think,” they
express ideas in and as form, showing, for example, that “the problem of child
labor is inseparable from first-person narration and bildungsroman plotting.”85
Forms that we associate with literature, in other words, also have a constitu-
tive relation to social problems, a relation in turn rendered strange or famil-
iar by literary form. For the authors studied here, informal empire could only
be conceived in tensile relation to the formal structures of the progress nar-
rative and the nuclear family. And so their texts produce a complex interac-
tion of both assumption and theory—t hat is, each text assumes the social
world to be formed as I describe in the introductions, and each text theorizes
how informal empire conflicts with t hose specific forms.
Part I has chapters on work by Simón Bolívar, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and
Anthony Trollope, and each author’s texts—including letters, essays, poetry,
travel writing, and fiction—share the common nineteenth-century Atlantic
world assumption (among elites anyway) that history has progressive form.
These texts display a reliance on notions of linearity, teleology, and so on,
which enables and conditions their constitution. But my primary goal is to
show how each text theorizes informal empire as disturbing, disrupting, or
challenging the forms of progressive history it takes as a given. In chapter 2,
for instance, I show that Anna Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven refuses
to admit informal empire into its vision of the future precisely because its im-
plied historical trajectory does not share linearity with the progress narra-
tive. Part II has chapters on texts by Vicente Fidel López, H. Rider Haggard,
and William Henry Hudson, and these in parallel fashion show how certain
assumptions about family pervaded nineteenth-century thinking about inter-
national relations, but each one also reveals how informal empire demanded
those assumptions be revised. Chapter 5, for example, shows how powerfully
Haggard’s texts rely on the assumption that individual families and national
belonging are cognate structures—as I detail in the introduction to part II.
Introduction 27
But his novels also suggest that informal empire promoted a vision of family
that was inimical to that mutual commitment. The chapters in this book thus
register the “collision,” to use Levine’s term, between an assumed version of
historical time or genealogical community and an alternate version erupting
out of new geopolitic al events. This is a way of thinking about geopolitics
in terms of affordances—how progress affords the denial of coevality, for
instance—though I am somewhat more interested in what the forms in ques-
tion fail to afford, or even actively deter. Informal empire collides with tradi-
tional models of progress and family b ecause they do not afford, and often
deter, its unusual logic.86
The introductions, therefore, lay the groundwork for the chapters to show
precisely what made informal empire an unruly and recalcitrant concept. I
argue across this book that for onlookers in the nineteenth c entury, informal
empire seemed to be self-contradictory and paradoxical. This is specifically
because it shared forms with the master narratives of progress and family, and
simultaneously implied directly contradictory forms. In its necessary grap-
pling with both freedom and imperialism, informal empire at once looked
like a progressive history and a regressive one, at once an imperial model of
international f amily and an anti-imperial one. The structure of this book aims
to highlight in the clearest possible terms how informal empire both relied on
and confounded—and ultimately could not be contained by—the forms that
so many people understood to shape their world. Each text I analyze finds its
own way of navigating this fault line. Some try to resolve it; some use it as po
litical critique; and others simply point out its existence. All, however, show
why form was the site at which informal empire often failed to be an easily
processed concept. Revealing the ways a text assumes its social world to be
formed makes it possible to see how informal empire disrupted the very foun-
dations of nineteenth-century thought.
In this sense, the collisions that I am interested in are not primarily be-
tween social and literary forms. Rather, I use literature as a site for better
understanding the collision between two social forms the text assumes to
exist—between progress and liberty, for example, or marriage and colonialism—
and that the text unfolds in order to grapple with. That is not to say, however,
that literature in this account is an invisible medium or that its own forms do
not play a role. In fact, as I have occasion to discuss, certain literary forms “af-
ford” the account of such collisions more or less effectively—such as how Nos
tromo’s disjointed structure reflects its skepticism about the applicability of
master narratives. All three chapters in part II, for example, offer readings of
novels, and this is no coincidence; the nineteenth-century novel had a con-
stitutive relationship to the various forms of the nuclear family and their over-
lap with the form of the nation. The historical novel in particular, as I dis-
cuss in chapters 4 and 5, lucidly affords an understanding of genealogical
structures. And as I show in chapter 2, Anna Barbauld’s use of anaphora,
personification, and direct address all help amplify her poem’s concern with
how nationalism produces both progressive history and colonial exploita-
tion. Catherine Gallagher describes the difference between Russian For-
malism and structuralism as one of scale; Russian Formalists, she argues, are
interested in the molecular level of the text’s composition (“an enlargement of
a detail”), while structuralists have a “molar” interest in the general shape of
a text (“an outline of the whole”).87 My approach uses a molecular attention
to texts in order to reveal a molar structure, not of the text, but of the text’s
view of competing social forms. I close read, in other words, in order to give
a structuralist account of history and family as the texts perceive them. This
method is what Levine, inverting Hayden White’s famous formulation, calls
reading for “the forms of the content.”88
Some similar work has been done. In the context of the formal empire,
Dipesh Chakrabarty shows how the properties of the progress narrative do not
admit certain experiences that defy its structure. Uday Singh Mehta argues
that progress’s relentless teleology even places strain on the imperial project
by implying the eventual maturation and liberation of the colonies.89 These
theories reveal how narrative form constrains both the perception of and the
execution of imperial possibilities. And within studies of informal empire,
Latin Americanist Jennifer French reads Benito Lynch’s novel El inglés de los
güesos not as allegorizing informal empire per se but instead ways of thinking
about informal empire. Her broader methodological stance is that “literature
is not a transparent representation of the social world, but rather an artful and
subjective model for thinking about the relation between language and poli-
tics.”90 And Ericka Beckman, another Latin Americanist, argues in Capital
Fictions (2013) that as Latin America emerged into the global economy, its lit
erature contended with the “strategies of representation,” the “tropes, meta
phors, and storytelling devices” of international capitalism. Her term “capi-
tal fictions,” therefore, links together both “the fictions generated by capital
[and] the specific expressions of those fictions within an assembled corpus of
images and texts.”91 One ambition of this book is to show how useful it might
Introduction 29
be for more scholarship to interrogate oppressive political structures through

a formalist analysis of the stories they try to tell.
Formalism, Comparativism, and Power

Attention to form helps us understand and critique power in a way that cur-
rent critical models of informal empire leave us frustratingly unable to do. In
what I referred to earlier as the binary model of informal empire, in which
many or most Britons saw Latin Americ a as a site for domination, while a
handful supported its sovereignty, we may feel relieved that not everyone turns
out to be an agent, witting or not, of imperial seeing. Soldiers fighting with
Bolívar, settlers living quietly in the pampas, or poets who supported the in-
digenous cause, can be celebrated as escaping the dominant mindset. But by
presenting support for sovereignty and desire for domination as distinct views
belonging to distinct subjects, the binary model does not help us understand
how both views might appear conjoined rather than separated. And in the
surface/depth model of informal empire, in which support for sovereignty is
resolved into an ideological cover for domination, it becomes hard to find an
outside to the imperial totality of f ree trade. Informal empire w
ill not be chal-
lenged by even overt anti-imperialism because it relies upon it, hides within
it, and weaves apologies out of it. Even the exceptional anti-imperialists iden-
tified in the binary model w ere merely voicing a sentiment that informal
empire could use. If informal empire vacillates between discourses of alle-
giance and exploitation, freedom and empire, but the latter always drives the
former, then power is a dialectic that absorbs its own critique. These models
represent two common approaches to the study of power in the humanities
and social sciences. Both view power as hegemonic and pervasive, but one
looks for sites of resistance while the other concludes that imperial power suc-
cessfully co-opts supposedly oppositional frameworks like cosmopolitanism
and liberation.
A formal approach, however, reveals the misalignments that make infor-
mal empire a fundamentally more contested and contestable notion. We can
see how informal empire is less like a dialectic—what Hegel called a “unity”
of “opposites”—and more like a paradox, a clash between two ideas (freedom
and domination) that repel one another and refuse resolution.92 Those two
ideas do not “mutually reinforce one another,” as Heinowitz argues, but rather
mutually destabilize one another, standing not in “apparent contradiction,”
but in contradiction as such.93 And we can see how that constitutive contra-
diction in turn conflicts with master narratives like progress and f amily that
expose rather than reconcile it. In this way, formalist analysis makes available
a different kind of critique of informal empire, one in which it is possible to
describe the paradox itself—to expose contradiction. Critiquing power, then,
does not have to mean standing outside of or arguing against hegemonic dis-
courses. It can mean revealing that the w ill to power itself conflicts with he-
gemonic discourses. To be sure, we may also wish to advocate for alternatives
to dominant formal arrangements of h uman experience like progressive his-
tory and the nuclear family. We ought, for instance, to follow Donna Har-
away’s call to rethink kinship in this moment of anthropocene emergency by
making “oddkin” rather than genealogical relations.94 But we can also use
formalism to expose what seems like a hegemonic undertaking as precisely
counter-hegemonic, in that it does not co-opt but rather butts up against com-
monly held values and forms of social life. This is what nineteenth-century
literature did with informal empire.
Reading this way makes it easier to see that although institutions like in-
formal empire have “succeeded,” that success was not a foregone conclusion.
Informal empire found its footing over time, and particularly as it lost its na-
tional aspect and disappeared into the less observed and observable work of
powerful transnational corporations, became less scrutinized. But the infor-
mal empire of the British nineteenth century was not nearly so invisible and
institutionalized as today’s worldwide financial imperialism. It was a new con-
figuration of conflicting ideas that pitted empire against progress, freedom
against family, and in the resulting conceptual fray often forced uncertainty
and reflection to the surface. Its eventual success was less a historical inevita-
bility than a lurching, contested effort to set common values against one an-
other. Returning to the nineteenth c entury, therefore, when informal empire
was emergent and experimental, still in the process of becoming conventional,
allows us to track the strange logics of an idea whose strangeness has now be-
come highly naturalized.
And although this model makes discourses, not literature, the object of its
formal analysis, literature turns out to play an important role in the explica-
tion of contradiction. That is because literary texts are exceptionally good at
pitting ideas against one another and allowing them to jostle for ascendancy.
A text can “enworld” an idea—it can go beyond merely describing progress
and allow the reader to step into a world whose innumerable contours bear the
Introduction 31
traces of it. And crucially, it can contain multiple ideas in this way: the plot
of a novel may hinge on competing visions of politics or family; the tension
in a lyric poem may arise from the speaker’s misalignment with some value
or custom. (George Eliot’s novels and Charlotte Smith’s sonnets are exemplars
of each.) And so while this book trains its formalism on the structure of the
ideas each text elaborates, not on the texts themselves, it nonetheless acknowl-
edges that literariness (aspects of literature like emplotment, metaphor, char-
acterization, and such) offers up an exceptionally clear view of how those ideas
interact with one another and the world. We will see that Simón Bolívar’s let-
ters and essays (chapter 1) nicely capture the contradictions of informal em-
pire, particularly in their use of elements like metaphor and juxtaposition, but
that the more robustly literary texts in subsequent chapters display more com-
plexity. This book, therefore, casts literature’s role in systems of imperial
power somewhat differently than is commonly done (either explicitly or by
assumption) in empire studies. Texts do not appear h ere as the complicit or
unwitting boosters of imperial ideology; rather, they stand in dynamic rela-
tion to a plural set of ideas, some of which may sometimes combine in em-
pire’s service and others of which may not, but whose combinations and con-
tradictions literature is actively, deliberately, thoughtfully, enworlding and
working through. My particular formalism helps lay this activity bare.
The comparative reading done h ere also renders the contours of concep-
tual paradox in clearer detail. Overwhelmingly, studies of informal empire
approach it from one direction, reading e ither British or Latin American lit
erature but not both. In this book I model a more inclusive and dynamic
method by reading both British and Latin American authors in their native
English and Spanish. This approach reveals that while they often have differ
ent perspectives on the likelihood and desirability of informal empire, they
nonetheless depict its forms in remarkably similar terms. On both sides of the
Atlantic, across the nineteenth c entury, and in various genres, writers consis-
tently cast informal empire as standing in tense opposition with dominant
notions of history and family. On the one hand, then, reading comparatively
reveals something structural at work in the misalignments of freedom, empire,
progress, and family—an antagonism that, because it was produced by mas-
ter narratives common to western thought, transcended differences of lan-
guage, culture, and geography, and was visible across the Atlantic world. On the
other hand, such commonality also reveals nuanced distinctions in how Brit-
ons and Latin Americans imagined history and community. For example,
Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Simón Bolívar both depict the progress narrative
as relentlessly linear and increasing, which makes informal empire a paradoxi-
cal suggestion of reversal, from a state of freedom in Latin Americ a to one
of imperialism. But while Barbauld uses such formal incompatibility as the
foundation for a broader rejection of British empire, Bolívar proposes reimag-
ining the progress narrative as having a global, not a national protagonist.
Doing so reflects his particular perspective as a Latin American seeking to
create forms of international exchange that might afford mutual gain rather
than inequality. Comparative reading therefore exposes the formal sites of
intersection and divergence among stories told from differing perspectives
about the same set of international relations.
Putting authors like Barbauld and Bolívar, or Vicente López and H. Rider
Haggard, into conversation has the further benefit of revealing informal em-
pire and its associated discourses as a bidirectional conversation. The infra-
structure of informal empire was raised by mutual labor on both sides of the
Atlantic, and so w ere its conceptual forms. We already know that the major
cities of Britain and Latin Americ a were cosmopolitan in the nineteenth
century. Britons headed to Latin Americ a in great numbers as soon as the
revolutions broke out, where they settled land, started newspapers, and helped
build institutions in the new nations. Latin Americans also arrived in London,
where their efforts to create an international coa lition of support for the lib-
eration of the Americas helped shape Britain’s notion of its role in the world
during this era of revolution. Isolating either “British literature” or “Latin
American literature,” therefore, diminishes the importance of such exchanges
to the development of international thinking in both traditions. Informal em-
pire prompted the nineteenth-century Atlantic world to reconceptualize the
very forms that freedom and empire could take and how bodies and capital
might be arranged accordingly. Thinking t hese forms anew was inseparable
from the intense mutual gaze that Britons and Latin Americans cast on each
other, and the comparative method of this book is an effort to reflect that.
The following chapters, therefore, take up Joselyn Almeida’s call to correct
what she terms a “monolingual transatlanticism.”95 Transatlantic studies has
ossified around the anglophone northern Atlantic, particularly the “special re-
lationship” between Great Britain and the United States. This book argues
that attention to the forceful impact of the Southern Americ as on flows of
Atlantic books, goods, bodies, and ideas, is not only overdue but ethically im-
perative. But that attention should not merely gaze outward from Britain.
Introduction 33
Latin Americans participated in, helped construct, and were affected by in-
formal empire, and so studying it only from the vantage of British thinkers
replicates the very kind of colonialism we seek to unpack. We cannot fully
understand forms of power if we do not listen to the voices of all t hose they
seek to arrange and contain.
The Forms of the Book

The six chapters in this book are not precisely chronological (a specific expla-
nation for this can be found at the beginning of part II), and t here are many
points of overlap between non-sequential chapters. It is not my goal to tell a
story about unfolding responses to informal empire over time, although some
notions of historical change do inevitably crop up. My argument is more syn-
chronic than diachronic, in that it aims to show how informal empire re-
mained a recalcitrant discourse across the nineteenth c entury, precisely b ecause
it was incompatible with some of the master narratives that persisted across
and unified decades that in other ways were very different. While transpor-
tation technologies, for instance, urban-rural demographics, and British over-
seas investment all changed drastically between 1810 and 1875, the progress
narrative continued to dominate understandings of historical time in the west-
ern world. For that reason, we see strikingly similar formulations of the prob-
lematic of informal empire in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812) and The Way
We Live Now (1875).
Nevertheless, despite not taking a strictly chronological approach, t here is
some pattern to the chapter organization. Part I, concerned with progress,
opens with two chapters on authors (Simón Bolívar and Anna Barbauld)
whose texts cast a speculative glance into the future, while the third chapter
turns to an author (Anthony Trollope) whose realist text looked squarely at
the temporality of his present moment—at “the way we live now.” Part II has
a cognate structure, although, being concerned with f amily, the first two chap-
ters (on work by Vicente Fidel López and H. Rider Haggard) discuss texts
whose genealogical concerns cause them to gaze centuries into the past, be-
fore a third chapter (on W. H. Hudson) once again returns us to the specific
realities of industrialization in the late nineteenth century. T hese chapters,
therefore, peer through and across one another in time, as e arlier authors try
to imagine a future that later authors will seek to genealogize. They also view
one another across the ocean. Each section begins with a Latin American
author before moving to British authors, as a reminder that Latin American

elites participated in setting the terms of their connection to Great Britain. If
and when Latin American and British texts appear to share ways of thinking,
I want to emphasize that this is not a result of derivative imitation or cultural
imperialism (especially as in most cases t hese authors were unlikely to have
read each other’s work), but rather evidence that informal empire clashed with
master narratives shared around the Atlantic world.
Three final notes before beginning. The first is that I have focused on lit
erature that treats British–L atin American relations in complex, nuanced
ways. I do not claim that all the literature of informal empire is concerned
with contradiction, formal or otherwise, and many British texts do not bother
themselves about the gaps between the ambitions of informal empire and the
master narratives of the time. I focus on these more complex texts not to sug-
gest a generalization about the literature of informal empire but rather to
show what dissent or uncertainty in the face of imperial power looked like.96
As G reat Britain experimented with a new kind of power, t hese texts reveal
the particular contradictions that had to be ignored or normalized in its ser
vice, thereby offering a glimpse of the cracks in imperial hegemony both be-
fore and during its dominance. Secondly, although it is well worth studying
the men and w omen who slipped quietly into the British–L atin American
contact zone, I focus here on voices that could more properly be described as
members of the interested and/or elite classes. That is b ecause, in my pursuit
of informal empire’s contorted rhetoric, I turn to those who w ere most likely
to wield rather than evade it. And finally, my readings track the ways that au-
thors and texts understood their world to be formed, as well as the theories
they developed in response as they sought to position Britain and Latin Amer
ica in relation to each other. As a result, I describe some beliefs and ideas that
may seem variously naive, unrealistic, or unpalatable. I do not suggest that
these texts always show us the right way to think about or respond to impe-
rial power—rather, I argue that tracing the forms of their thinking shows us
something useful about how that power operates in the first place.
pa r t on e
Pro g r e s s a n d I n for m a l
E m pi r e , 1808 –1875
Sequence, Protagonist, Paradox
The paradoxes of informal empire, as I show over the course of the next three
chapters, stood out in particularly stark relief when they encountered the nar-
rative forms of progressive history. To understand this misalignment, we first
must understand both progress’s immense ideological sway and its formal
structure.
“Progress” is a capacious term. It often has a positive connotation, but we
also speak of the progress of a disease or of climate change. It can refer to in-
dividual achievements, group developments, entire sectors of society, or the
very nature of social change. Students, corporations, technologies, and history
itself can all make “progress.” Its results can be tangible or intangible, quan-
tifiable or subjective. And, depending on how we deploy the term, we may
imagine progress to be contingent, lurching, arbitrary, linear, and/or inevita-
ble. Perhaps its only consistent meaning is simply change. But among t hese
uses of the term, one seems the most ambitious and the most constitutive of
modern thought. That is the notion that progress describes history itself—that
progress is the force that holds past, present, and future in legible relation to
one another, simultaneously explaining and controlling humanity’s collective
trajectory through time. Sometimes called the progress narrative, often classed
among so-called master or grand narratives, and occasionally distinguished
with a capital P, this idea emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
in the west as an entire epistemological and ontological orientation toward
historical change and the experience of being in time. It held not only that
individual civilizations made progress, but also that history itself was the man-
ifestation of a force called progress, of whose forward drive humankind was
the instrument and the engine.
36 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
The idea of history as progress has its own history. Before its emergence in
the second half of the eighteenth century,1 Europeans generally viewed history
as cyclical. The record of the past already contained all possible human events,
which could be predicted to repeat again and again in the f uture, while the
eventual end of history would be millenarian and unpredictable—God would
one day simply close the book of humanity mid-chapter. But by the mid-
eighteenth century, the rules of relation between past and future began to
transform u nder a new understanding, a belief that time was accelerating and
change was accumulating, so that history was not in fact cyclical but upwardly
linear. This progressive temporal vision inverted humankind’s relationship to
the future: coming events could not be predicted because they would always
be entirely new and different, but the final end of history now had a specific
shape—humanity was moving t oward a utopian perfection. The dominance
of this progressive historical vision was all but assured by the upheavals of the
French Revolution, after which it became nearly impossible to believe that the
events of history w ere mere repetitions, and western thinkers began to take for
granted the “expected otherness of the f uture.”2 But the transition from cycli-
cal to progressive historical consciousness was not abrupt or total; it was a
process of conceptual expansion spanning the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries. The word “progress” itself had to evolve, first from its limited
individual-case applications (progress in the arts, for instance, or in farming
technologies) to become a universal descriptor that made it possible to speak
of the progress of humankind or civilization. In its next iteration, progress be-
came not only a description for universal change but the propulsive, deter-
minist mechanism behind it—that is, not only could humankind or history
make progress, but it became possible to speak of “the progress of history.”
And finally, in the nineteenth c entury, progress achieved stand-a lone status
as a concept that needed no object; it became possible simply to speak of
“progress.”3
To say that “it became possible to speak” in certain ways is to say that the
shifting syntactical registers of the word “progress” also indicate epistemologi-
cal revolutions. Hayden White has famously shown that the shape of histori-
cal narratives carries ideological weight, and in François Hartog’s words, our
conceptualizations of the relations among past, present, and future—our
“chronosophies”—constitute “regimes of historicity” that set the conditions
of possibility for thought.4 The increasingly capacious and agential meanings
of progress in the nineteenth c entury, therefore, also indicate new ways that
Sequence, Protagonist, Paradox 37
eople were able to think of themselves in time. As Reinhart Koselleck puts

p
it, progress “conceptualized the difference between the past so far and the
coming future”; it achieved “the temporalization of history.”5 As a result,
people newly experienced history’s movement as linear, the future as radically
open and unknown, and time as constantly accelerating.6 The idea of progress
also helped create the entire intellectual discipline of the philosophy of history.
It was, as Stephen Bann argues, during the Romantic period that “history be-
came self-conscious”7—that it became possible not simply to retell history
but to theorize its dynamics. As progress became an intellectual discipline and
a hegemonic ontology in the nineteenth c entury, its explanatory power spread
to economics, politics, and natural history, and in its anthropological appli-
cations it was used to sort the people of the world into non-coeval “compara-
tive temporalities”8 that would lend the terms “barbaric” and “civilized” to the
mission of European empire. In short, it is no exaggeration to say that the shift
of the term “progress” from individual descriptor to universal mechanism
shaped the entirety of nineteenth-century western thought.9 It is this that I
refer to as the “historical consciousness” of the age.
Nor is it an overstatement to say that we are still t oday made in progress’s
image; institutions as durable as liberalism, imperialism, capitalism, secular-
ism, exceptionalism, and democracy have all relied on progressive ideology to
make and remake the world. To be sure, the waning of progressive ideology
can be traced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through
thinkers like Nordau, Spengler, Benjamin, and Valéry, and in intellectual cir-
cles it suffered a blow at the hands of poststructuralism, but its legacy has
been more powerful than its critics. Progress in the twenty-first c entury, there-
fore, lives on as a constitutive feature of our political and epistemological
landscape but is now differently formed, as we have come to see it as perhaps
less inevitable and more incremental than our predecessors did. Hereafter
when I discuss “progress,” then, I refer to its specific iteration in the nineteenth
century.
This history of progress is well known and frequently retold, but what is
less frequently discussed is its form. It is true that, particularly since Hayden
White, scholars have understood histories to be narrative in form and autho-
rial choices like subject position and scale to have political implications. But
while individual historical accounts are often treated as having formal
properties—which they do—scholars rarely acknowledge the fact that the ab-
stracted concept of progress itself has, and is recognizable b ecause of, specific
narrative form(s). It is the very recognizability of the progress narrative—its

simplicity and portability as a form—that has given it such forceful influence
around the world, but the formal features of progress are rarely articulated in
a narratological sense. T hese forms are the subject of the first half of this book.
Progress is far from a unitary notion, particularly in the nineteenth century,
when evolution, gradualism, Hegelianism, and Whig history—to name a
few—a ll relied on the basic idea of progress but nonetheless i magined it to
shape historical unfolding in varied ways. There is plenty of scholarship on the
divergence among such intellectual traditions, and what interests me is not the
ways they understood progress differently but rather the basic set of forms
common to them all.10 Therefore, I w ill not be tracing particular iterations of
progress, how it took shape differently in the hands of, for example, Kant,
Hegel, Comte, Mill, Marx, Darwin, Martineau, Spencer, or Bury. Instead,
following Mehta’s aphorism that “imperial narratives, perhaps all narratives,
especially those of power, lose their effectivity in proportion to how complex
they become,”11 I am homing in on the potent simplicity of the progress nar-
rative. I treat it as a form abstracted from its cases, an idea that has identifi-
able and iterable shape, a concept inseparable from the simple curved line of
its instantly recognizable graphonym—a philosophy, in short, with form. This
is not a turn away from history. On the contrary, I propose simply to invert
one common way that scholars have bridged history and form: rather than
once again recounting the history of a form (in this case, progress), I will in-
stead analyze the forms that this historical explanation takes. This, in turn,
will illuminate the reasons why nineteenth-century Britons and Latin Amer-
icans struggled to formalize the story of informal empire that so powerfully
shaped their histories.
So, what forms generate the nineteenth-century progress narrative’s upward
curve? First, it is diachronic. The primary purpose of the progress narrative
is to make meaningful connections among past, present, and f uture, and it is
therefore only legible as itself when expressed as change across time. The same
could be said about most if not all descriptions of historical unfolding, but it
is nevertheless important to note that progress is deeply dependent on its dia-
chronic structure, especially given that capitalism in the nineteenth c entury
begins to introduce the experience of time as a perpetual present increasingly
unmoored from past and f uture (more on this in chapter 3). The diachronic-
ity of progress also reminds us of its dynamism, as distinct from the model of
equilibrium, which defines itself precisely against the idea that temporal flow
has meaning.
A second and related form of the progress narrative is that it is linear. That
is to say, in terms of sequence, progress is both continuous and irreversible;
time does not stop, skip, or move backward. It is here that progress distin-
guishes itself from, for instance, a catastrophist explanation of geological
history, under which time may lurch forward (or backward) suddenly as the
result of a cataclysm unconnected to past events.12 It is no coincidence that as
progress reached its ascendancy in the early to mid-nineteenth c entury, catas
trophism gave way to the gradualist, uniformitarian explanation of geologic
change, which shares progress’s linear form. Linearity does not imply any par
ticular directionality, however, so we must also note that progress is defined,
thirdly, by its structure of increase. It does not descend or plateau but moves
only upward. In nineteenth-century thought, the content of such increase
may be named liberty, civilization, complexity, reason, order, or peace, but in
each case a progressive history imagines its object to improve, accumulate, or
grow over time without revisiting or repeating prior states.13 It is this specific
structure that separates progress from the degenerative and cyclical models of
history—a nd from Yeats’s vision of history as a series of “gyres” or cyclical
degenerations.
Conceptions of progress do not usually describe an unchanging rate of in-
crease, however; they assume that the rate itself increases, that human socie
ties accumulate knowledge and so change faster all the time. This gives the
progress narrative its fourth form: acceleration. At this crossroads progress di-
verges from the gradualist view of history, under which the pace of change is
constant. And finally, to fully describe the form of progress, we must add that
it is teleological. That is, on their own, diachronicity, linearity, acceleration,
and increase do not necessarily imply an end state, but progress typically does
assume that history moves t oward a final goal: a utopian future of h uman per-
fection.14 As Eric Hobsbawm points out, the exact lineaments of such perfec-
tion are often left vague precisely because utopia is a changeless equilibrium
at odds with the model of universal progress meant to precede it.15 And vari
ous progressive accounts of history disagree on why history moves toward its
telos (natural law, divine will, human effort), the specific contours of that telos
(peace, pure reason, socialism), and w hether it is achievable, but they typically
share the view that progress’s structure of increase does indeed move t oward
a describable fulfillment. Teleology provides a purposiveness to progress that

assures it cannot be explained as pure contingency.
The progress narrative, therefore, has five distinguishing forms: it is dia-
chronic, linear, increasing, accelerating, and teleological.16 These speak to
the order, rate, and destination of change, and are therefore all facets of
narrative sequence. Individually and in combination, they render progress
formally distinct from other narrative and nonnarrative models of history,
such as cycles, catastrophism, degeneration, equilibrium, radical contingency,
gradualism, or the gyre. Together they produce a single visual model—t he
upward, exponential curve that graphonymically expresses the concept of
history-as-progress—and they lend to any discussion of progress an under
lying set of assumptions about the structural relations between past, present,
and future.
This book pays attention to the forms of historical narrative not in order
to reject historicism in favor of hermetic formalism but rather to better un-
derstand the forces that form has unleashed in specific historical contexts. And
it is particularly clear that the sequence-based forms of progress contributed
significantly to the devastating ideologies of nineteenth-century British em-
pire. Consider that the combination of two of them—linearity and the struc-
ture of increase—make legible the narratological concept of anachronism: it
becomes possible to identify something as being out of joint with the flow of
time as soon as we understand the past to be hierarchically different from the
present and time to move only forward. This, then, is the potent formal com-
bination that nineteenth-century thinkers leveraged in order to conceive of
people around the world as themselves anachronistic, or locked in the past.
Progress’s relentlessly sequential forms re-rendered spatial distance as tempo-
ral distance, enabling the British Empire to consign racialized others, as Di-
pesh Chakrabarty puts it, to the “waiting room of history.”17 As both Chakra
barty and Johannes Fabian point out, we have not yet eradicated such dangerous
temporal relativity from the western intellectual tradition.18
But the sequential forms of progress have also troubled the project of em-
pire even while sustaining it. Among the important insights in Uday Mehta’s
Liberalism and Empire is his argument that the civilizing mission actually had
a sequence problem: the ideology of improvement holds that while colonized
others are “behind” their western counterparts, the empire w ill accelerate their
progress. Taken to its logical conclusion, this idea implies that the colonized
will one day achieve a level of civilization that no longer requires their
colonization—empire, in other words, will eventually produce its own obso-

lescence.19 To put this in the terms I have been using, the rate of acceleration
and the teleological conclusion of progress w ill eventually reduce the differ-
ence between colonized and colonizer to nil, thereby ending the justification
for colonial rule. Some imperialists (like Anthony Trollope, as I discuss in
chapter 3) saw the formal structure of progress in rigid enough terms to sup-
port the eventual end of empire that it implied. Others ignored or deferred the
question, counting on the colonies to remain in an ironically anti-progressive,
permanent “in between” state, an eternal “not yet.”20 The rhetorical effort to
describe the colonies as “eternally adolescent, always developing but never de-
veloped enough” is what Jed Esty refers to as “the temporal paradox of em-
pire.”21 This highlights two key points: first, that institutions like empire didn’t
always find a perfect fit with the forms of progress and second, that progress’s
forms are elementary and undeviating enough to make such frictions clearly
discernible.
Mehta’s and Esty’s arguments about temporality also highlight how the
progress narrative relies on sometimes inconsistent assumptions about what
we might term its “protagonist.” Even when it is used to describe universal
historical unfolding, it is not uncommon for the implicit protagonist of this
narrative to be a more exclusive subset of humanity, such as western culture,
bourgeois culture, or a specific nation or imperial regime. So while I consider
the sequential forms of progress such as its linearity to be constitutive, I refer
to its protagonist as a secondary form (with its own formal features, a notion
that I elaborate in the chapters ahead) b ecause it may vary among mankind,
England, the west, or the anglophone diaspora with enough frequency that
no protagonist can be declared a formal default. Setting is another secondary
form. It is hardly separable from protagonism, since discussions of progress are
so often rendered specifically national or global, but although two p eople
might agree that E ngland is progressing, one might locate the source of that
progress on English soil while the second attributes it to the increasing re-
sources and power of colonial expansion. So just as empire is a catalytic
context for the sequential forms of progress, the imperial theater also renders
differences over setting and protagonist highly visible. The assumption that
progress is Britain’s story, for instance, implies that colonies might perpetu-
ally serve the needs of British profit and power, while arguments for decolo-
nization might rely precisely on an effort to center an alternate protagonist,
such as Indian nationalism, the global south, or universal humanity. The
notion that the colonies might never emerge from perpetual adolescence as-
sumes that they are not the protagonists of progressive history.
The forms of progress, therefore, both produced imperial consciousness
and created logical inconsistencies with imperial policy. It is these inconsis-
tencies that interest me most—the jagged sites where imperial ideology and
the specific formal features of the progress narrative failed to align. And as I
will argue in the chapters that follow, such frictions between progress and em-
pire are even more visible and more problematic in the specific context of
British informal empire in Latin America. It is the argument of this book that
master narratives like progress chafed much more against the premises of in-
formal empire in Latin America than they did against the logic of territorial
colonialism, and that informal empire was therefore much more of a misfit
with nineteenth-century British thought than recent critical accounts of its
smooth insidiousness typically convey.
These formal misalignments return us again to history; they occurred in
large part because of the specific nature of British informal empire in the New
World, which was carried out right on the heels of Latin America’s indepen
dence from Spain in the 1820s. What made British imperial influence in Latin
Americ a distinct—apart from the sheer geographic size of the region—was
that in the early nineteenth c entury, names like Mexico, “Chili,” and “The
Argentine Republic” rang in British ears with very recent echoes of postcolo-
nial liberation. Latin America, in short, signified progress—progress out of the
benighted era of Spanish rule, progress toward republican ideals, and progress
toward the ultimate triumph of liberty in the world—precisely during the era
of intensifying historical consciousness and the triumph of progressive histori-
cal thought. Meanwhile, however, these new nations w ere desperately eco
nomically vulnerable, and many British merchants and politicians saw an op-
portunity for a kind of vulture capitalism that was well understood to be
imperial in nature. Explanations for Britain’s informal imperial desire in Latin
America at this precise historical juncture, therefore, ran seriously afoul of the
sequential forms of progress. If progress is both linear and ever increasing,
then nations that have just emphatically demonstrated their achievement of
an elevated stage should not logically be returned to a lower one—in this case,
re-subordination to European power. As I will show, this friction was exac-
erbated by the growing conviction that the economic policy mechanism of
progress was f ree trade, an imagined lever for the advancement of liberty, in-
novation, and culture that was in reality an instrument of inequality and

colonial rule.
If history was advancing according to a linear and increasing structure,
then, informal empire had problems of narrative form. That is not to say that
the material and social realities of informal empire did not proceed apace,
because over the course of the nineteenth century they did, and no conflict
with the progress narrative ever stood in the way. But as I w ill show in the first
three chapters of this book, onlookers interested in writing Latin America into
world history consistently found that British informal empire crashed illogi-
cally against the specific sequential forms of the progress narrative. Simón
Bolívar, for instance (chapter 1), struggled to explain how Latin America’s de-
pendence on British power could be sequentially subsequent to their inde
pendence from Spain in a progressive structure of increase. Anna Laetitia Bar-
bauld (chapter 2), looking at the same historical moment from the other side
of the Atlantic, saw Latin Americ a’s progress as incompatible with Britain’s
imperial interests precisely because they could not occupy the same temporal
instant in progress’s linear, forward flow. For his part, Anthony Trollope (chap-
ter 3) argued that the intensifying capitalist institutions undergirding infor-
mal empire in Latin Americ a were breaking the progressive temporality of
history altogether, replacing its fundamental diachronicity with stasis, or the
treadmill of accumulation. As they wrote British informal empire in Latin
America into their narratives, these authors showed how it both refused ac-
commodation within the sequential forms of progressive history and created
a conflict over who the protagonist of that history might be.
Part I of this book, therefore, focuses on the years 1808–1875 because they
encapsulate two overlapping historical eras: the years when informal empire
in Latin America became possible, and the height of progressive historical con-
sciousness. The year 1808 marks the Latin American revolutionaries’ first
diplomatic contact with London on the eve of their breach from Spain. And
1875 is the date of Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, a novel that
grapples simultaneously with what was by then widespread informal empire
in Latin America and the dawning notion—captured in its temporally poised
title—that progress might be on the wane. Progress predates these years, and
informal empire lasted a fter them, but this range pinpoints their historical
overlap, a period when a new idea about empire collided with a dominant idea
about time, and the two sat together uneasily at best. The following chapters
use poems, letters, essays, travelogues, and novels to track the way Britain’s
imperial control over Latin Americ a butted up against the structure of the
progress narrative—that is, how two hegemonic ideologies, empire and prog
ress, failed to align. As I argue, it was the forms of progress—its sequence
(diachronicity, linearity, increase, acceleration, and telos) and protagonist—
that created this friction and helped expose the paradoxes of informal em-
pire. In the hands of t hese writers, then, narrative form became a powerful
argument against the specter of informal empire.
c h a p t e r on e
(In)dependence
Simón Bolívar and Revolutionary Forms of Progress
At the end of the eighteenth century, the Atlantic world was rocked by the
American, French, and Haitian revolutions in quick succession. Latin Amer
ic a was the next domino to fall, and its wars of independence in the early
nineteenth century caused perhaps the most wide-reaching shifts in power;
they w ere a massive social, economic, and geopolitical event. But Latin Amer-
ican independence was also a narrative event. Revolutions disrupt. They in-
terrupt the flow of history, promising to break from the past and redirect the
future along a new trajectory. And the uprisings that shocked the world be-
tween 1775 and 1825 were spurred by Enlightenment philosophies that had
also, simultaneously, spurred a new historical consciousness, denaturalizing
and interrogating the very structure of history itself. As Jeremy Adelman puts
it, the phenomenon of independence in the Atlantic world “meant that p eople
could make—a nd thus write—history anew. . . . The quest for sovereignty
also involved efforts to plot narratives to evoke a sense of history of a p eople
coming into being.” 1
In the midst and aftermath of independence, revolutionary leader Simón

Bolívar would be a principal author of Latin Americ a’s new narratives. He
knew that it was a complicated task. On the one hand, postcolonial indepen
dence suggested a thorough divorce from the institutions and hierarchies of
the past. Visiting Rome in 1805, several years before he would lead the revo-
lution, Bolívar reportedly declared: “Este pueblo ha dado para todo, menos
para la causa de la humanidad. . . . Mas en cuanto a resolver el gran problema
del hombre en libertad, parece que el asunto ha sido desconocido y que el
despejo de esa misteriosa incógnita no ha de verificarse sino en el Nuevo
Mundo.”2 Casting “the great problem of man set free” as unique to the Amer
icas, Bolívar set up postcolonial independence as a radical break not only
from Spain’s control but also from Europe’s l imited set of ideas about liberty.
On the other hand, this breach also augured an uncomfortable return. Even
before the fighting began in Venezuela, Bolívar’s desire to break from Spain
was paired with a desire to unite with E ngland. He studied English models
of government and education, courted British economic and political support,
and traveled to London to solidify diplomatic relations. This was an effort to
stabilize the revolutionary cause with much-needed funding and supplies, but
it was also part of Bolívar’s long-term goal of joining Latin America and Great
Britain in geopolitical partnership. He was well aware, however, that tether-
ing fragile new nation-states to a global economic juggernaut might only re-
establish imperial dependence.
In this chapter, I focus on the quandary Bolívar faced in the 1810s and 1820s
as he imagined the possible stories that might describe Latin America’s en-
trance into the global community, stories that could “give [meaning] to sov-
ereignty.”3 He had recent examples on which to draw, and he was especially
inspired by the independence of the United States, but the story of Latin
Americ a wasn’t so easy to tell. Bolívar wanted sovereignty and progress for
Latin America. To a significant degree he also pursued British informal em-
pire as a solution to instability. The fact that both courses seemed possible
points up the strangeness of informal empire in the first place, its joint reli-
ance on the ideas of Latin American sovereignty and subjection. And as Bolívar
explored this conjunction, he had to grapple with a paradox: how to argue si
multaneously for the sovereignty and dependence of his p eople, all while
telling a story that accorded with the common assumption that history had
progressive form. As I w ill show, his solution was to revise the progress nar-
rative itself, specifically its sequence and protagonist, and reshape it into a form
that could accommodate both informal empire and Latin American sover-
eignty. Through readings of Bolívar’s letters and essays between 1808 and
1826 (roughly the duration of the wars of independence), I argue that even this
attempted resolution could not solve the paradox of informal empire.4 He sim-
ply could not resolve its structural dependence on both freedom and subju-
gation within a progressive model of historical time.
Bolívar and Britain

Simón Bolívar is by far the most prominent figure of Latin American inde
pendence, “one of the few leaders . . . who remained fully engaged in the
struggle from beginning to end.”5 He oversaw the creation of “Gran Colom-
(In)dependence 47
bia,” an early experiment in Latin American nation-formation covering the

vast landmass that now includes Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama,
and he served as its president for eleven years. He was temporarily president
of Bolivia (named for him) and he also achieved the final liberation of Peru
and served as its president for three years. He is known by the succinct mon-
iker “the Liberator,” and it is hard to overstate e ither his role in Latin Amer
ic a’s shift to self-rule or his cultural legacy as a figure for revolution. But in
many ways he was an unlikely actor for the part.
Born in 1783 into the elite class of Creole plantation owners in Venezuela,6
the privileged Bolívar came into adulthood possessed of a slaveholding plan-
tation and several copper mines, surrounded by a social circle of aristocrats
loyal to Spain. He did not seem likely to become one of the continent’s most
committed abolitionists and the face of revolution. But Bolívar’s lifetime saw
the arrival of globalization in South America. Despite Spain’s best efforts to
enforce isolationism and trade monopoly, Venezuela could not stay seques-
tered from the Atlantic flows passing through nearby Jamaica, Haiti, Trini-
dad, Curaçao, and other international hubs. By the early nineteenth c entury,
British industrial goods in particu lar had permanently infiltrated Spanish-
American trading, and “these were precisely the years when Bolívar began to
be conscious of the wider Atlantic world. He saw a new economic metropolis
[Great Britain] displacing Spain in America.”7 These networks also carried Eu
ropean ideas. News of the American, French, and Haitian revolutions ar-
rived, and so did Enlightenment philosophy—especially notions of universal
human rights, reason, and progress.8 As a young man, Bolívar read avidly,9
traveled throughout Europe (where he met the likes of Alexander von Hum-
boldt), and returned to South America with a commitment to independence
steeped in Enlightenment principles.
From his earliest participation in the revolutionary project, Bolívar wanted
the British involved, and he w asn’t alone. Francisco de Miranda—Bolívar’s
predecessor in the independence struggle—had been in and out of London
since the 1780s, trying to attract support for Latin American revolution. And
in 1810, when Venezuelan leaders established their own government as a pre-
liminary step t oward declaring independence, they sent a group of revolution-
aries including Bolívar to E ngland to open lines of communication. During
a multi-day series of conversations with the foreign minister, the Marquis of
Wellesley, they heard the official government line: because Britain had recently
sided with Spain against Napoleon, they w ere not in a position to support
Latin America against Spain. But although the Venezuelans failed to receive
an outright declaration of support,10 Bolívar was undaunted. In a report to the

revolutionary leadership back home, he wrote:
Esté V.S. persuadido, como nosotros lo estamos, de que a pesar del tono de ti
bieza y reserva que se nota en su contestación a nuestras proposiciones, y en el
memorándum que ahora acompañamos, hay en este gobierno disposiciones efec-
tivas y muy favorables hacia nosotros; disposiciones que cuadran demasiado con
el estado actual de las cosas y con los intereses de la Inglaterra para que puedan
disputarse o ponerse en duda. No se necesita mucha perspicacia para descubrirla
en los papeles mismos que citamos, sin embargo de que han sido hechos para co-
municarlos a los españoles y además esperamos que se aumenten y desenvuelvan
cada día, a proporción que se vaya acercando la España a su disolución.11
Bolívar is d oing a bit of close reading h ere, interpreting Wellesley’s “tone of

coolness and reserve” as a purely diplomatic front masking his actual “inter-
est” in Latin American revolution. “Interest” is r eally the operative term, cap-
turing a crucial duality: Britain’s interest in humanitarian affairs, and their
desire to pursue their own best interests in the global market. Bolívar was right
that he had piqued both Britain’s curiosity and their avarice.
Indeed, this meeting was only the beginning of what would quickly be-
come a robust relationship between Britain and Latin America. Official
partnership was not yet possible, but Britain was gaining ground in the Latin
American trading routes, and Caracas had an ear in London. Bolívar stayed
for six months, and by joining Miranda’s circle he met figures like Joseph Lan-
caster and William Wilberforce, whose ideas about social institutions would
influence him for the rest of his life.12 Like many Latin American revolution-
aries Bolívar was an anglophile,13 and throughout the wars of independence
and their aftermath, he would maintain correspondence with British officials,
build British-inspired schools and governments, court British business, and
attempt to persuade his countrymen of the importance of such moves. Perhaps
nothing better captures the depth of this interest than the ten years he spent
organizing the Congress of Panama, his plan to unify Latin America through
a Pan-A merican confederation of states. In addition to inviting the hispano-
phone American nations, he wanted to reserve one extra seat at the t able—for
Great Britain.14 He believed that the British “should be given rights of South
American citizens, and South Americans should emulate the British and em-
brace their moral code.”15 When the Congress finally met in 1826, they admit-
ted Britain only as an observer, but Bolívar had already spent fifteen years
(In)dependence 49
opening the cultural and economic channels that reduced official partnership
to a mere formality.
Duality
The frequency of Bolívar’s overtures to the British, as well as the advantage
the British took of them, are both easy to confirm. What merits close atten-
tion is the dual rhetoric he adopted as he courted a relationship he knew would
both promote and limit Latin America’s independence. In 1814 Bolívar wrote
to British Foreign Secretary Castlereagh, opening with this blunt proclama-
tion: “Buscando en la presente revolución de la América el objeto de los pue
blos en hacerla, han sido estos dos: sacudir el yugo español, y amistad y comercio
con la Gran Bretaña.”16 The emphasis in italics belongs to Bolívar himself, who
wanted to convince Castlereagh that a relationship with Britain was equally
as important to him as the overthrow of Spain. It w asn’t just flattery; he r eally
worried that Latin America c ouldn’t achieve the one without the other. But
notice that t here is a second pairing in this short passage: Bolívar’s dual ap-
peal to British friendship and British commerce. Each of t hese two pairings—
Latin American freedom from revolution and a relationship with Britain,
and Britain’s desire for partnership and profit—entails a volatile, tense con-
tradiction which is itself the constitutive structure of informal empire. Each
one, as we will see, also places a strain on the linear, upward, curved form of
the progress narrative.
The second pairing, a Janus-like appeal to Britain’s self-abdicating human-
itarianism and its self-interested desire for financial gain, is deeply embedded
in the British–L atin American relationship in the first quarter of the nine-
teenth century, in writing from both sides of the Atlantic. For years Miranda
had been making the same pitch to the British that Latin American freedom
could be justified by both liberty and commerce. That sentiment had been
repeated in British publications and whispered in government offices, and in
1812 Andrés Bello used his London publication of the Venezuelan constitution
to make the same dual argument.17 It was, in short, the standard rationale for
British involvement in Latin Americ a, proffered by Englishmen and Latin
Americans alike.18 Bolívar himself used it regularly. In 1815 he was in Jamaica,
attempting to regroup a fter a number of setbacks in the revolution, and he
wrote to Wellesley, worrying that the Latin American cause would be lost
“unless strong, skillful [British] craftsmen help construct the edifice of our
freedom.”19 The double notion of liberty and industry is so intertwined in his

syntax as to become the tenor and vehicle of metaphor, as he asks the “skilled
craftsmen” of England to build Latin America’s “freedom.” Given the impor-
tance Bolívar placed on financial stability as a necessary element to secure
freedom, and freedom as a necessary element to secure financial stability, it
is not even clear which functions as the tenor and which the vehicle.
Such rhetorical commingling is more the rule of Bolívar’s writing than the
exception. During this same exile in Jamaica, he wrote the document we now
call the Jamaica Letter, which has become his single most famous text. It was
a long letter ostensibly written to his British friend Henry Cullen, but this
conceit allowed him to address the entire English-speaking world during a
grim moment for the revolution. The letter would be published—in English—
and it was, in short, an “effort to challenge England and European liberals to
have the imagination to sponsor American independence.”20 Though he
speaks of “Europe” throughout the letter, it is clear that Britain was his pri-
mary intended audience,21 particularly in passages like this one: “Civilized
Europe, merchant, lover of liberty, w ill she allow a decrepit serpent to devour
the most beautiful part of the globe out of pure venomous rage? What? Is
Europe deaf to the clamour of her own interests? Has she no eyes to see jus-
tice?”22 In just forty-four words Bolívar twice makes his familiar simultane-
ous appeal to freedom and commercial enterprise. First he defines Europe as
“civilized” because of its two principal roles: “merchant” and “lover of liberty.”
He then repeats the pairing with a bodily metaphor in which Europe’s ears
listen for commercial opportunity in “her own best interests,” while her eyes
watch for abuses of “justice” inflicted on o thers. L
ater in the letter he returns
to the theme, affirming that Europe should promote Latin American indepen
dence “not only b ecause world equilibrium demands it but b ecause this is
the legitimate and sure way to acquire overseas markets. Europe . . . [would
be] fully justified by reasons of fairness and enlightenment to proceed on this
course dictated by her own best interests.”23 The frequency with which Bolívar
makes this dual appeal to liberty and commerce shows how central both ar-
guments were to the specific context of British–Latin American relations in
this moment. Judith Ewell suggests that Great Britain made a logical ally for
Spanish America because it was “the sole great power that could find liberal-
ism compatible with self-interest,”24 and as Karen Racine claims, the idea of
Latin American independence began to attract “two types not usually found
together: romantic poets and merchants.”25
(In)dependence 51
On the one hand, then, Bolívar’s rhetoric is simply strategic: he knows that
the British w ill welcome both a moral and a financial reason for intervening
in Latin American affairs, and he offers them both. But on the other hand,
the pairing touches a deeper question about the relationship between British
morality and British profiteering at the dawn of the nineteenth century. In
their justifications for territorial empire, European powers generally tried to
mask the latter motive; the very idea of the civilizing mission was crafted to
suggest that altruism was at stake and self-interest was not. But in the case of
informal empire, Bolívar and others place Britain’s self-interest at the center
of the discussion, an open enticement to their participation in the indepen
dence project. The duality, then, is not a surface/depth or a real/false struc-
ture in which the pursuit of another’s gain is the cover for Britain to pursue
her own. The two drives, despite their antagonism, are both foundational to
the explanatory logic of informal empire.
They are antagonistic, of course, because Britain’s “love of liberty,” her in-
terest in “fairness and enlightenment,” references her support for Latin Amer
ic a’s freedom from imperial European rule, while her status as “merchant”
in pursuit of “her own best interests” references a commercialism that was ob-
viously imperial. Although the term “informal empire” d idn’t exist in his day,
Bolívar knew very well that British commercial power overlapped danger-
ously with British imperial power. He knew that independence from Spain
might mean “exchanging one tyranny for another,” becoming “a mere pawn
of the Napoleonic Empire in 1808 or of a nascent British Empire.”26 But he was
willing to take the risk because he thought there was no choice; the survival
of the new Latin American states depended on Britain’s powerful support.27
In his 1815 letter to Wellesley he worries Latin America w on’t actually achieve
its independence “unless Great Britain, the liberator of Europe, friend of Asia,
and protector of Africa, consents to be the savior of America.”28 Surely his lan-
guage flatters Britain’s sense of its own liberal authority, but the language of
“protector” and “savior” also places Latin America in uncomfortable company
among other regions of British influence, including violent territorial takeovers
in South Africa and India—happening in these very years under Wellesley’s
own guidance. Bolívar, in short, knew that by appealing to Britain’s “love of
liberty,” he was courting its imperialism.
It w
asn’t only in addressing British audiences that he used such language:
eighteen months e arlier he had made much the same argument to his own
countrymen as he tried to convince them to support an alliance with the
British. In an essay in the brand new Gazeta de Caracas, he urged Venezue-

lans to embrace rather than fear Britain’s power: “Nadie dude que la Nación
poderosa [la Gran Bretaña] que ha defendido constantemente en despecho
de la fortuna, la Independencia de la Europa, no defendería igualmente la de
la América, si se viese atacada. Alegrémonos al contrario por el irresistible as-
cendiente que ella va a tomar sobre ambos Emisferios para afianzar la liber-
tad del Universo.”29 Bolívar acknowledges Britain’s immense power—its “ir-
resistible ascendancy” over the entire globe. But he simultaneously suggests
that such imperial hegemony is a guarantor of freedom for all. It’s a paradoxi-
cal assertion that he only makes more succinct later in the essay, writing: “A
[la] sombra [de Inglaterra] la América podrá afirmar su libertad.”30 This 1814
statement is strikingly reminiscent of—indeed nearly syntactically identical
to—James Mill’s 1809 declaration on the other side of the Atlantic that Span-
ish America will be able, “under the protection of Great Britain, to constitute
[itself] a free and independent nation.”31 Both men invoke Latin American
freedom as a category that can be asserted within the constraints of British
power. Both “protection” and “shadow” suggest Britain’s supremacy in the re-
lationship, with Bolívar’s term being perhaps the more aware of imperialism,
as “shadow” is an ominous image that not only implies Britain’s standing but
also a limit to Latin America’s potential, a dimming of its enlightenment.
So, what appears in so much of Bolívar’s writing as the apparently effort-
less commingling of two ideas—British altruism and British commercialism—
turns out to be somewhat more unsettled. British commercial power is
indeed imperial, which means that the pairing is something more like
British-backed liberty and British-imposed subjugation, placing Bolívar in the
paradoxical position of suggesting that British imperial power is a “guaran-
tee of universal freedom.” This contradiction, as we w ill see, is only exacer-
bated by the necessity of telling Latin America’s story within the formal con-
straints of the progress narrative. As he appeals to liberty, cosmopolitanism,
and human rights on the one hand, and imperial f ree trade, industry, and so-
cial hierarchy on the other, he will have to reshape progress itself.
Bolívar’s relationship to narratives of history was all the more complex
because Latin American independence suggested another pair of conflicting
trajectories: rupture with the past and restoration of past rights. As the Cre-
ole elite began to write themselves into world history, they sought to legitimize
their own rule over the indigenous while also drawing on the injustices of in-
digenous history to buttress their claims to sovereignty.32 To this day, Latin
(In)dependence 53
America carries the legacy of a number of tensions, including “regionalismo/

occidentalismo, indigenismo/europeización, tradicionalismo/progreso, telu-
rismo/modernidad, colonialismo/Ilustración, [and] barbarie/civilización.”33 As
Mariselle Meléndez notes, the nineteenth-century Latin American essay—of
which the Jamaica Letter is a signal example—was the genre in which Creole
authors confronted t hese paradoxes, wavering between “la evasión y la re
conciliación” as they attempted to reassemble a fragmented past into a coher-
ent national history.34 Was Latin Americ a ushering in an unprecedented
future, climbing progress’s uncharted new states of being, or was it returning
to its histories, both indigenous and colonial? As Bolívar attempted to give
form to British–Latin American relations, he faced precisely such questions
of narrative coherence, particularly t hose inspired by the paradoxical duality
of imperial f ree trade. What kind of progress is a progress toward dependence?
Appealing to Britain’s twinned interest in Latin American freedom and its
own commercial supremacy meant that he had to find a way to make progress
tell a bidirectional story. Historical narrative form already interested Bolívar,
who preferred history to all other studies and was especially fond of “histori-
cal political surveys.”35 Tellingly, according to Lynch, he read ancient history
“not for practical lessons or exemplary institutions” but instead for, among
other things, “the quality of its narrative.” Nor did he treat such narratives as
having a fixed or sacrosanct form; he advocated, for instance, that students of
history read it backward beginning from the present.36 Perhaps this explains
why, as he wrote informal empire into existence, he was willing to revise the
narrative forms of progress that got in the way.
Sequence: Linearity and Increase

The underlying sine qua non of British informal empire in Latin America was
that it depended on the sovereignty of its target states, not as a precondition to
empire but as a concurrent condition.37 But one of the signal formal features
of the progress narrative is its sequence, in particular its relentless linearity
and its structure of increase. It promises to be an engine of ever-increasing
upward advancement in technology, liberty, and the arts. U nder a progres-
sive epistemology, therefore, the prospect of informal empire suggested a para-
dox: that a nation might simultaneously occupy two positions—sovereignty
and imperial subjugation—which otherw ise appeared as sequential events
on progress’s upward curve. It implied both having sovereignty and being
dependent, being both free and unfree. Not progressing away from e ither but
toward both. So inviting Great Britain into this commercial relationship,
where commerce somehow meant both imperialism and freedom, appeared
to be conceptually irreconcilable.
Bolívar’s solution, developed across many of his texts, was to describe in-
formal empire as a developmental stage on the way toward complete indepen
dence. In an 1826 letter to José Rafael Revenga, Gran Colombia’s Minister of
Foreign Relations, he describes his hope that Britain w ill help guide and sta-
bilize the Pan-A merican confederation of states that he had long wanted to
organize. He sees this stewardship as a phase in Latin Americ a’s growing
independence:
An alliance with G
reat Britain would give us g reat prestige and respectability.
Under her protection we would grow, and we would later be able to take our place
among the stronger civilized nations. Any fears that powerf ul England might
become the arbiter of the counsels and decisions of the assembly, that her voice,
her will, and her interests might determine the course of its deliberations are re-
mote fears; and, should they one day materialize, they cannot outweigh the
positive, immediate, and tangible benefits that such an alliance would give at this
time. First the Confederation must be born and grow strong, and then the rest
will follow. During its infancy we need help so that in manhood we w
ill be able
to defend ourselves. At present the alliance can serve our purpose; the future will
take care of itself.38
Note first how steeped his language is in the assumption of progressive his-
torical time. He conceptualizes international politics entirely through the fig-
ure of maturation, which is a direct function of progress’s insistent sequen-
tiality. Latin Americ a w
ill grow from “birth” to “infancy” to “manhood,”
a tripartite development whose stages map onto political sovereignty (the birth
of organized self-governance through the confederation), informal empire
(Britain’s “protection”), and full independence (the ability to “defend our-
selves” as one of the world’s “civilized nations”). Marking these changes with
the words “first,” “then,” and “later,” Bolívar relies on the very relentlessness
of progress’s sequential form to suggest that informal empire is merely a stage
in Latin America’s upward trajectory—an improvement on colonization and
a precursor to total independence. H ere sequence and teleology intersect, since
progress’s upward climb is so certain as to be inevitable; once set in motion,
Bolívar writes, “the f uture w ill take care of itself.” Informal empire, u nder
(In)dependence 55
which Latin America may find itself subject to E ngland’s “voice, her w
ill, and
her interests,” will apparently give way, inexorably, to total freedom. The forms
of progress do not merely afford it but in fact require it to be so.
This means, however, that while elsewhere Bolívar firmly yokes Britain’s
interest in power with her interest in Latin American freedom, he must h ere
split them apart. It is clear that inviting Britain into this council runs high
risks: it might make England “the arbiter of the counsels and decisions of the
assembly.” While calling those “remote fears,” Bolívar nonetheless admits they
may come to pass and suggests that existence u nder the sway of British power
is preferable to no existence at all. Latin America, in other words, may very
well have to pass through another phase of imperial rule on its way to full
“manhood.” Informal empire was a conceptual paradox in terms of progres-
sive history b ecause it suggested that Latin America must be both free and not
free at the same time. Here Bolívar breaks that duality apart by arguing that
British control of Latin America is not in itself freedom. Allowing Britain to
direct the assembly would indeed precisely not be self-governance. This would
itself appear to defy sequential progress by returning newly independent Latin
America to a state of dependency, but Bolívar manages this seeming contra-
diction by suggesting that informal empire is temporary, a lever for the attain-
ment of freedom in the future. In this way, he does not have to conceive of
freedom and dependency as simultaneous states; he renders them sequential—
first comes British imperial rule and then comes Latin American freedom.
And so, b ecause progress does not afford a concept of informal empire—
because it formally deters it—Bolívar uses progress’s own relentless sequence
to crack informal empire apart, to split its two constitutive drives (domina-
tion and liberation) into sequential rather than concurrent states. He is now,
however, courting informal empire while undermining its basic structure.
This 1826 letter is far from the only instance in which Bolívar mapped out
this stagist trajectory for the future of Latin America. He had implied the same
thing in his 1815 Jamaica Letter for a British audience, writing: “When we are
at last strong, under the auspices of a liberal nation that lends us its protec-
tion, then we w ill cultivate in harmony the virtues and talents that lead to
glory; then we will follow the majestic path toward abundant prosperity
marked out by destiny for South Americ a.”39 And he put it even more suc-
cinctly in an 1823 letter to Bernardo de Monteagudo, his colleague in Peru:
“All t hings considered, we s hall have guardians during our youth, masters dur-
ing our maturity, and freedom in our old age.”40 In both of these examples
we can again see the sheer relentlessness of the sequential forms of progress as
Bolívar understands it. It is inexorably linear and increasing. And he is insis-
tent that despite t hese forms, he can appeal to both Britain’s self-interest in
power and her altruistic interest in Latin American freedom by splitting them
into consecutive events, disarticulating informal empire’s constitutive claims
in order to argue for it. But even as he tries to unwind the paradox, we see it
reemerge: in depicting the state of informal empire that he is promoting, he
is forced to describe British influence as having “masters in our maturity,” a
phrase that reintroduces the very simultaneity he is trying to cleave apart. This
image challenges the developmental logic of imperial progress by suggesting
that the childlike need for paternalistic rule (“masters”) coexists with an adult-
hood (“maturity”) that implies the obsolescence of that very paternalism. No
matter how he tries to re-form it, British informal empire simply defies the
logic of the progress narrative.
It should be obvious at this point that Bolívar was comfortable with both
strong central power and compromise. His highest priority was independence
from Spanish colonial rule, and he was willing to sacrifice both individual
liberties and national sovereignty in order to declare Latin America indepen
dent. For instance, while he was a vocal abolitionist, he also feared that a na-
tion as young and heterogeneous as Venezuela was not ready for democratic
principles. His thinking contains a blend “of Enlightenment and democracy,
of absolutism and even counter-revolution.”41 And so he admired the model
of a strong, centralized, pseudo-monarchical government that might improve
individual lives without imposing a potentially dangerous social equality—a
configuration he borrowed from the British “reform-minded aristocracy.”42
Even before the British arrived to manage Latin American industries and in-
fluence their policies, therefore, Bolívar and others (see chapter 4) were al-
ready working to model their new nations after British institutions. Countries
like Venezuela and Argentina emerged already heavily influenced in their very
constitution by British thought. So at least he may have been right to argue
that real independence was still waiting in the future.
But Bolívar nonetheless remained optimistic that Latin America’s subjec-
tion to British influence would in fact be temporary. Indeed, his narrative so-
lution to frame informal empire as a mere way station on the route to full
sovereignty is appealingly simple. But it also relied on a different version of the
progress narrative than the one the British adhered to—that is to say, Bolívar
(In)dependence 57
was working with a conception of progress from Latin America’s point of view,
while progress to the British meant their own. One area of disagreement would
likely emerge over the implication, embedded in Bolívar’s sequencing, that
informal empire is a weaker or lesser form of colonialism, a slackening of pow-
er’s grip before it lets go. As Gallagher and Robinson famously describe it,
however, informal empire is in fact the primary form of colonial power, op-
erating more efficiently and therefore being more desirable to the imperial
metropole.43 And historically we have seen the ultimate preference by power
ful actors (nations or corporations) to gain leverage by deploying merchants
instead of soldiers. The worldwide shift from territorial colonialism to infor-
mal empire represents not the loosening of control by the global north but
rather the economizing of it. As two stages in a sequence, then, formal and
informal empire read to Bolívar as progress toward the independence of Latin
America, but to Europe they likely implied progress t oward their own global
hegemony. Secondly, as we know, “empire” and “temporary” are not often
bedfellows, particularly not from the point of view of the imperialists. Bolívar
seems confident on this point, writing that “the f uture w ill take care of itself,”
as though graduation from colonial structures r eally is as inevitable as aging.
But imperial powers like Britain worked hard to delay, dispel, and foreclose
the eventual maturation implied by the progress narrative. Though they de-
ployed the rhetoric of parents helping to civilize their children, they had no
intention of ever letting these children mature to independence.44 What telos,
in other words, was this history marching toward? Latin America’s progress
narrative demanded freedom, while Britain’s demanded their own power.
Bolívar’s effort, therefore, to plot informal empire as a developmental stage
in Latin America’s progress needed further management. It was not enough
to rely on progress’s inexorable sequence and structure of increase, nor even
its teleology, to secure a vision of Latin America’s eventual freedom. That is
because Britain’s own view of the progress narrative relied on those very
same forms—sequence, increase, and teleology—to describe its own ever-
increasing international control. Bolívar might have produced a vision of
British influence in Latin America as a kind of paradoxical but mutual posi-
tion of advantage. But which direction would they go from there—toward
Latin American freedom or ongoing British rule? Progress was still a relative
concept, and for that reason, Bolívar needed another revision: he had to change
the protagonist.
Protagonist
To the extent that narratives of history are authored, they support the sociopo
litical goals and values of those who write them. In writing world history,
therefore, a nation w ill use a formal structure that f avors its own self-perception
as exceptional. Hayden White calls this a “narrative center,” a perspective that
satisfies the “impulse to rank events with respect to their significance for the
culture or group that is writing its own history.”45 Drawing on literary formal-
ism, we can use the more familiar and perhaps more evocative term “pro-
tagonist.” Nations cast themselves as protagonists of history, which, u nder the
regime of progressive historical consciousness in the nineteenth century, meant
casting themselves as the protagonists of progress. This is why Bolívar’s vision
of Latin American progress through British informal empire was still a formal
problem. His hope that Latin America would pass through a stage of depen
dency on G reat Britain and then mature out of it made one very unlikely as-
sumption: that despite their own self-identity as the protagonist of history,
Britain would be content to seize power in the Americas and then allow that
power to wane.
Latin America was no exception to White’s rule; the new nations wanted
to self-determine, to be protagonists of their own new progressive histories.46
But it was not immediately clear who the “us” of that story would be. As Mat-
thew Brown notes, “nations were much more the consequence of the wars of
independence than they w ere their cause,”47 and in the 1810s and 1820s the
Creole elite w ere suddenly tasked with what Eric Hobsbawm calls the “inven-
tion of tradition”—the rapid crafting of national identities where there had
been none. That identity was a complicated category. Even before becoming
entangled in late eighteenth-century globalization and the aftermath of de-
colonization, Bolívar’s continent was already the site of clashing European
and indigenous epistemologies and sensibilities.48 The revolutionary Creoles
wanted to claim native connection to the land via indigenous history and the
tragic narrative of the Conquest, but they also wished to declare a place in the
civilized world through their Spanish heritage, the valor of the Conquest, and
a powerf ul Enlightenment progress narrative. Crafting “one nation with a
common memory . . . unified by a shared past”49 was a narrative problem, and
Bolívar, lover of historical narrative, was acutely aware of the importance of
defining a protagonist. Rojas notes that his Jamaica Letter is “uno de los pri
meros textos en que se hace explícita la representación de la tensión que registra
(In)dependence 59
el término nosotros, desde el cual se intenta definir lo identitario latinoamer-

icano.”50 In it, Bolívar argued that his people were both “Americans by birth
and endowed with rights from Europe,”51 and in his famous address to the
Congress of Angostura he declared that because of migration, slavery, and in-
termarriage, “es imposible asignar con propiedad a qué familia humana
pertenecemos.”52 Part European, part American, part African, and part indig-
enous, it was no simple task to say who the “us” of Latin American history was.
This, however, was a boon to Bolívar in the m atter of his progressive for-
mal paradox. Since it mattered a great deal whose progress narrative informal
empire formed a part of, and since Latin American identity was already un-
certain, Bolívar seized an opportunity to merge British and Latin American
identity into a shared protagonist of history. In cultural, political, commercial,
and institutional ways, he repeatedly tried to join Britain and Latin America
into not merely partners but kin.53 In addition to planning for E ngland to join
a Pan-A merican confederation and offering citizenship rights to any Britons
living on South American soil, he also sought British investors to purchase and
operate local Latin American businesses, and he hoped that Latin Americans
would “emulate the British and embrace their moral code.”54 He even imagined
Latin America as a site for the literal replication of British values, writing to
British merchant Maxwell Hyslop in 1815 that the states of Latin Americ a
“only await the dawn of liberty to take to their bosom the continental Euro
peans and in a few years make another Europe of America.”55 He wrote the
Bolivian constitution to be, in his own words, “an alliance between Europe
and America, between soldier and civilian, between democracy and aristoc-
racy, between imperialism and republicanism,” seeking and receiving British
approval of the way it emulated British institutions.56 Bolívar, it is clear, wanted
much more than a merely utilitarian allegiance with Britain; he looked to blur
the boundaries of their imagined community and give the British shared au-
thorship in his emerging national projects.
Britain’s own institutions allowed for the blurring of national identity, too.
An existing law prohibited British soldiers from fighting on behalf of other na-
tions, but it said nothing about nations in formation, nor revolutionary up-
risings on behalf of nations not yet born. The liminal status of Latin Amer
ic a, therefore, allowed the British government to look the other way while
thousands of volunteers, either suffused with emancipatory enthusiasm or
weary of poverty, left to fight under the Venezuelan banner. London outfit-
ters produced Venezuelan uniforms, and the new conscripts showed them off
in the streets before embarking for Americ a. Support for the liberty of the
Spanish colonies flowed through the newspapers, and the public responded
positively to t hese volunteer soldiers, who ironically would not have been le-
gally permitted to wear the Venezuelan colors if Britain had recognized the
very national liberty they w ere g oing to fight for.57 Both sides, therefore, par-
ticipated in a growing cultural and institutional intimacy that spoke to shared
rather than competing interests.
Such permeable i magined community helped Bolívar envision informal
empire as a temporary stage in the progress narrative because it suggested that
Britain and Latin America were together a singular historical protagonist. If
progress was Britain’s story and Latin Americ a’s story separately, then their
interests would inevitably diverge, resulting in a zero-sum struggle over re-
sources. Likely foreseeing this, Bolívar instead imagined a network of na-
tions held together in mutually beneficial relations and seeking the best inter-
ests of all. He called this “Universal Equilibrium,” a concept sometimes
linked to the intellectual underpinnings of the United Nations.58 It was his
lifelong hope to see international politics conducted on a federalist model in
which a central authority (such as a congress of nations) would set guidelines
for the success of all members, while still allowing each to develop its own
culture and institutions. His vision is clearest in his plan for Pan-A merican
confederation—the Panama Congress—with which he intended to unite the
hispanophone American states and G reat Britain. In a drafted code for the
relations between member-states, Bolívar outlined seventeen concrete bene-
fits to uniting in such intimate connection, ranging from military defense to
shared cultural practices. Referring again to the notion of shared identity with
Britain, he promises that “el carácter británico y sus costumbres las tomarían
los americanos por los objetos normales de su existencia futura.” In the same
list of outcomes he also says that relations between E ngland and Americ a
“lograrían con el tiempo ser unas mismas,” that “un equilibrio perfecto se es-
tablecería en este verdadero nuevo orden de cosas,” and that “en la marcha de
los siglos, podría encontrarse, quizá, una sola nación cubriendo el universo—
la federal.”59 It was a hope he shared with—a nd perhaps learned from—
Miranda, who likewise “viewed the Atlantic world as a unified political space”
in which “liberty was a shared project; its advance in one region would guar-
antee its progress in others.”60 In other words, if “the Atlantic world” (or even
the entire globe) is the protagonist of history, then progress cannot be zero-
sum but instead must be shared.
(In)dependence 61
Bolívar’s set of plans to unite the Americas and Britain was the very docu-
ment he was referring to when he assured Revenga that “under [Britain’s] pro-
tection we would grow, and we would later be able to take our place among
the stronger civilized nations.” This, then, reveals the deeply intertwined na-
ture of Bolívar’s two formal revisions to the progress narrative. As the state-
ment to Revenga shows, he imagined that informal empire could be a sequen-
tial stage in the progressive unfolding of Latin America’s history, in which
Britain’s self-interest might first be appealed to in order to secure their influ-
ence, and their altruism might then be appealed to in order to shake it off. But
this gambit, uncoupling the dual drives of informal empire into consecutive
rather than concurrent states, assumed that the British w ere not invested in
their own progressively increasing power. Which is why Bolívar directly ties
his experimental progressive sequence to his experimental progressive protag-
onist, imagining that t here are not competing progress narratives but a single
one that produces the best possible outcome for all the world’s nations. Under
this vision the future of sovereignty and prosperity would indeed simply “take
care of itself.” Bolívar was not naive about British aspirations to power, but “if
Britain wanted to assert itself in América, Bolívar wanted to guide it.”61 That
guiding, as we can see, took place as a negotiation of the formal properties of
historical progress. He believed that shaping the forms of history meant dic-
tating the shape of international relations.
Paradox
The paradoxes of informal empire, however, would escape and defy even these
acrobatic revisions to the progress narrative. This is due to the massive eco-
nomic imbalance between Britain and Latin America that was both necessary,
because it made informal empire enticing in the first place, and also funda-
mentally disruptive to a singular vision of progress.
The fledgling nations of Latin Americ a desperately needed industry and
political recognition, and they had precious little to bargain with. From our
vantage point, Bolívar made startling offers to G reat Britain in exchange for
support. In his 1815 letter to Hyslop, he requested rifles, ships, money, and sol-
diers, suggesting that “with this aid, the rest of South Americ a could be
protected from danger; and, at the same time, the provinces of Panama and
Nicaragua could be turned over to the British government for the latter to
make of them the center of commerce by building canals which, a fter the
dikes guarding both oceans have been broken, will reduce all distances, how-
ever long, and permanently establish British commercial supremacy.” In the
same letter he also let Hyslop know that in South Americ a “t here could be
extracted in the short period of only ten years more precious metals than those
which now circulate in the entire world. The mountains of New Granada are
of gold and silver. A small number of mineralogists could discover more mines
than those of all Perú and New Spain. What immense expectations this small
part of the New World holds for British industry!”62 We can see Bolívar os-
tensibly discussing partnership but realistically inviting colonial rule, offering
to “turn over” Panama and Nicaragua to British interests and handing over
unfettered access to the natural material riches of the region in support of
Britain’s “permanent” “commercial supremacy.” In the end, Bolívar’s efforts
helped usher in the financial structures that all but ensured Britain’s influence
in Latin America throughout the nineteenth century. He welcomed foreign
investment and foreign immigration and was satisfied with South American
exports being primarily agricultural. Over the first half of the nineteenth
century, South America made little progress in developing its own industry
and manufacturing, relying on imports and losing badly in international price
competition. Bolívar “was not unduly concerned for the survival of artisan
industries or the achievement of economic self-sufficiency,”63 and his economic
thinking “showed l ittle sign of that nationalist reaction to foreign penetration
that l ater generations expressed.”64 He set an example that would become the
norm, renting and selling his own copper mines to British investors and rec-
ommending the same practice to the Peruvian government.65
British influence was materially enticing because Britain was so rich. But
Bolívar’s narrative vision depended on this imbalance as much as his commer-
cial vision did. Despite envisioning the progress narrative as a globally shared
form rather than a function of individual nationalisms, Bolívar’s hope for
Latin American stability through British finance still required Britain to be
a prominent superpower. In an essay titled “Reflexiones sobre el estado actual
de la Europa, con relación a la América,” published in the Gazeta de Caracas
in June 1814, he argued that Britain’s main motivation for helping Latin Amer
ica was that it would not want to lose its own clear position of primacy in
Europe.66 And in his draft code for the Panama Congress twelve years later,
he retained this dependence on precisely England’s immense power, arguing
that “la reforma social, en fin, se habría alcanzado bajo los santos auspicios de
la libertad y de la paz, pero la Inglaterra debería tomar necesariamente en sus
(In)dependence 63
manos el fiel de este balanza.” Tellingly he concludes by admitting that “la

Gran Bretaña alcanzaría, sin duda, ventajas considerable por este arreglo.”67
Britain’s involvement in Latin America depends on their lopsided power and
their ongoing pursuit of their own gain.
So although he imagines the world in “Universal Equilibrium,” Bolívar re-
peatedly reveals his dependence on a Great Britain that works on behalf of
its own interests and its own dominance over the rest of the world. His aspi-
ration to see the Latin American nations become part “of a larger international
community that could reduce conflict and protect the interests of the weak”
failed, according to Ewell, “because his idea of Spanish American unity was
premature. The nineteenth-century age of romantic liberalism favored na-
tional projects over international ones.”68 Ewell’s point is couched in the
ideological context of the age; I would put it in formal terms. Bolívar wanted
“freedom and peace” as part of a universal international progress, but achiev-
ing this goal required Britain to pursue its own “considerable advantages” as
a self-interested and discrete national actor. This is the paradox of informal
empire: it argues for Latin America’s increasing freedom and Britain’s increas-
ing power, and both are essential, constitutive elements of the relationship.
Informal empire depends on both visions of progress—t hey are differently
defined and mutually exclusive, but this conflict is precisely what informal
empire consists of. For this reason, Britain’s self-interest simply cannot be dis-
solved into Bolívar’s utopian vision of shared global benefit. T here is no in-
formal empire in the first place without Britain’s self-interest, and Britain’s
self-interest will pursue the entrenchment, not the eventual lifting, of infor-
mal empire.
Occasionally, Bolívar’s attempts to justify allegiance with a power the size
of England betray his fearful awareness of their implications, as in this re-
markable 1825 letter to the vice president of Colombia, Francisco de Paula
Santander:
[Los ingleses] exigen para reconocernos que sacrifiquemos algunos de nuestros

principios políticos . . . y sí no los sacrificamos, la Inglaterra nos disuelve como
el humo, pues yo repito que su omnipotencia es absoluta y soberana. La prueba
de esto es que una pequeña escuadrilla francesa nos está bloqueando, insultando
impunemente. ¡Qué poder! ¡Qué resistencia la nuestra! Saquemos partido de esta
vejación y liguémonos de alma y cuerpo a los ingleses, para conservar siquiera las
formas y las ventajas de un gobierno legal y civil. . . . [N]o podemos existir
aislados ni reunidos en federación sino con el beneplácito de la Inglaterra. . . .

Este es el imperio romano a fines de la república y a principios del imperio. La
Inglaterra se halla en una progresión ascendente, desgraciado del que se le
oponga: aun es desgraciado el que no sea su aliado o no ligue su suerte a ella.
Toda la América junta no vale a una armada británica; toda la Santa Alianza no
puede contrarrestar a la fuerza compuesta de sus principios liberales con sus in-
mensos tesoros; medios empleados por una política sagaz e invencible, que
todo lo que intenta logra.69
Written some years a fter the final achievement of independence, this letter
could be said to perfectly describe both the failure of Bolívar’s vision and Latin
America’s already abject subordination to Britain. Though free of Spain, the
new nations had not yet received international recognition as sovereign states,
a carrot that E ngland used to extort egregiously lopsided trade deals. In this
letter Bolívar laments to Santander that in exchange for a treaty of formal rec-
ognition the British are “demanding that we sacrifice some of our political
principles,” and he argues that if they do not agree, Britain will “dissolve us
like smoke.” This is a textbook definition of what scholars have now termed
informal empire: the compromising of political sovereignty in exchange for a
financial relationship that is necessary to survival. “We cannot exist,” Bolívar
writes, without capitulating to British desires.
The paradox that informal empire forces Bolívar into, then, is that he needs
the very lopsided British power that in turn refuses to be shared. Latin Amer-
ican survival depends, in Bolívar’s view, on British support, but the reason it
is British support and not French, German, or Italian is precisely because Brit-
ain is a massive imperial force. And so, whereas elsewhere he argues that
Britain’s dual love of liberty and love of wealth w ill combine to make her act
in the best interests of Latin America, h
ere he suggests that t hese very same
dual attributes (“the combined force of her liberal principles and her immense
wealth”) give Britain “absolute and insuperable” “omnipotence.” This exposes
the way that this duality is in fact an opposition—British self-interest and
British liberal principles might both belong to informal empire’s strange logic,
but they cannot be resolved into a single settled idea. Each w ill always emerge
to disrupt and challenge the other. His attempt to establish equilibrium with
the Panama Congress seven months later might therefore be seen as a last des-
perate attempt to persuade himself and the world that England would not be
“absolute and insuperable” permanent masters of the f ree New World.
(In)dependence 65
Conclusion
As this chapter has begun to show, and as the following chapters will expand
upon, informal empire clashed with the dominant historical model of the
nineteenth c entury: progress. The notion of imperial influence in sovereign
states implied both Latin American sovereignty and British imperialism, both
a progress narrative belonging to Latin America and one belonging to Britain.
Their irreducible mutual exclusivity was the very stuff of informal empire.
Because he sought informal empire, because he welcomed and aided it, Bolívar
faced the challenge of writing it into the histories he was already helping draft
on behalf of new nations, and which he fervently hoped would have progres-
sive shape. The only way to fold informal empire into the forms of progress
was to revise t hose forms, but even this was not enough to defuse the para-
dox at its core. He could find no narrative form that would describe both
Britain’s unstoppable global ascendancy and Latin America’s place in an eq-
uitable global alliance. And since he could not imagine informal empire with-
out the former, he could likewise not persuasively plot informal empire as a
path to the latter. He instead circled around and around the two ideas (sov-
ereignty and subjection, partnership and hierarchy, the idea of having “mas-
ters in our maturity”), using their friction to court informal empire and there-
fore never being able to eliminate e ither. In the next chapter we w ill hear the
echoes of his rhetoric in British voices, but Simón Bolívar is not the author of
informal empire. The idea preexisted his turn on the world stage, and inter-
ested British parties worked avariciously to advance it during his time. None-
theless, he did participate in a conversation among Americans and Europe
ans that came to define Latin Americ a’s material relations to the global
economy.
And his efforts have something to teach us. Because Bolívar knew that prog
ress might well be a vehicle only for the already powerful—or as Marx
would later put it, because “all progress of the spirit has so far been progress
against the mass of mankind”70 —he tried to write a narrative in which Eu
ropean self-promotion and the advancement of peripheral parts of the world
could be mutually driving. It was, we might say, hopelessly utopian. (It
certainly would not be Marx’s model.) But in the very context—Latin Ameri-
can independence—in which Benedict Anderson suggests that nationalism
was born,71 we see the Liberator experimenting with transnational and global
models of belonging. The age of “romantic liberalism” may have favored
nationalism, but Bolívar shows us how its forms could be recombined into
alternate social visions as well. Returning to his formal experimentation,
therefore, reveals the vast implications embedded in the smallest instances of
narrative form, and it reminds us that this may still be a story worth trying to
revise and rewrite.
c h a p t e r t wo
“Dependant Kings”
Anna Barbauld and a Paradox Deterred
The year 1811 was a pivotal one for an unlikely pair of figures who probably
never met: youthful Venezuelan revolutionary Simón Bolívar and elder states-
woman of British literature Anna Laetitia Barbauld. In July of that year,
Caracas declared independence from Spain, an event that would change the
course of Atlantic history and both thinkers’ lives. For his part, Bolívar took
to the battlefield in Venezuela and began what would be his enormously suc-
cessful military and political career. Meanwhile, Barbauld took to the pen and
wrote Latin American revolution into what would be the final poem of her
career. She called it Eighteen Hundred and Eleven.
A fter four decades as an author, Barbauld retired because of the scathing
reviews London critics heaped on Eighteen Hundred and Eleven. But their hos-
tility to the poem was less an indictment of its quality than it was a sexist
and jingoistic reaction to a woman who dared to controvert E ngland’s status
as a global power.1 Eighteen Hundred and Eleven is a bold, 334-line prophecy
in heroic couplets, warning that b ecause of its participation in the Napoleonic
Wars, combined with its materialism and corruption, Britain is poised to fall
into ruin like so many empires of the past. Described this way, Barbauld’s
poem doesn’t seem at all concerned with Bolívar’s revolution. But the Napo-
leonic Wars were not only a European affair; they were also the direct cata-
lyst of Latin America’s independence. Barbauld was well aware of this concur-
rence: her poem begins by lamenting war in Europe but concludes with the
powerful image of South America bursting the yoke of European imperialism
and stepping forth as the next great civilization to fill the void left by Great
Britain’s collapse. The poem thus prophesies not only the fall of the British
Empire, but also, significantly, the transfer of world leadership to Latin Amer
ica. Its title commemorates a year in which simultaneous war on both sides
of the Atlantic augured a radical shift in global power.
Like Bolívar, and like many of her own countrymen, Barbauld recognized
that Britain was likely to seize on Latin American independence as a chance
to dominate new markets and grow its own commercial power. And like
Bolívar, she recognized that t here was something inherently contradictory in
this idea, which saw the British espousing two competing impulses toward
Latin America: to liberate it and to rule over it. Eighteen Hundred and Eleven,
therefore, was timely. As one of the first British literary works to consider a
postcolonial Latin America, it entered directly into the new conversation about
what we now call informal empire. And although that term did not yet exist,
Barbauld was certainly thinking critically about the emergence of financially
driven pseudo-independence as a troubling category. Anne Mellor and Mag-
gie Favretti have both noted that Eighteen Hundred and Eleven condemns Brit-
ain’s corrupt and unfair commercial policies.2 But Barbauld’s critique spe-
cifically links this corruption to informal empire when she describes London
as a city
[w]hose merchants (such the state that commerce brings)

Sent forth their mandates to dependant kings.
(ll. 163–164)3
This compact couplet perfectly captures the mechanisms of informal empire.

Imperial power here does not take the traditional territorial form; the word
“kings” reminds us that the foreign lands in question are not territorial colonies
but self-governing independent states. But these sovereigns are nonetheless
“dependant”—not on the British crown but on its “merchants.” The densely
evocative phrase “dependant kings,” therefore, evokes not only informal em-
pire’s defining structure but also its defining paradox, verging on an oxymoron
that describes foreign states as simultaneously sovereign and subordinate. As
Barbauld savvily—presciently—notes, this paradox is rapidly becoming the
new normal under global capitalism. It is simply “the state that commerce
brings.” And while ambitious officials expected informal empire to expand
British power, Barbauld casts this paradoxical arrangement as one of the rea-
sons that London has become a corrupt metropolis hurtling toward collapse.
As I argued in the previous chapter, this paradox puts informal empire into
direct conflict with the dominant nineteenth-century model of civilizational
change: the progress narrative. And I suggested that Simón Bolívar sought
“Dependant Kings” 69
rhetorical solutions to this paradox because he urgently wanted both Latin

American independence and the stability of British protection. In this chap-
ter I will show that Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, by contrast, ex-
poses the conflict between informal empire and the dominant models of
historical form. Its metahistorical forms reveal that both cyclical and progres-
sive histories, like any stories, have distinct formal features, specifically a
protagonist, a linear sequence, and a telos. From this basis, the poem suggests
that Britain’s competing impulses toward Latin America—to liberate it and
to dominate it—cannot be combined into one coherent narrative of histori-
cal time. Rather than papering over the formal paradox of informal empire,
then, Barbauld’s poem lingers over it, ultimately rejecting it as a structurally
untenable doctrine. By envisioning British decline and Latin American ascen-
dancy, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven narrates a future in which informal
empire stands outside of historical progress and cannot be assimilated within
conventional imperial discourse. Therefore, the poem’s most damning critique
of informal empire appears at the level of its discontinuous narrative form.
Barbauld’s vision of British power relocating to the new capitals of South
America ultimately constitutes a savvy critique of informal empire in the very
moment that it began to coalesce and take discursive form.
Barbauld and Historical Narrative

Anna Barbauld was certainly not the only Londoner thinking about the rum-
blings of war in Caracas. In fact, to say that the possibility of Latin Ameri-
can revolution got Britain’s attention would be stating the case mildly. For
generations the British had been telling and retelling the bloody story of the
Spanish Conquest, but the contemporary reality of Latin America lay hidden
in obscurity behind strict Spanish and Portuguese control. The dawn of the
nineteenth c entury rapidly lifted that curtain. In the span of just a few years
British ideas about Latin America shifted abruptly from the historical and ro-
manticized t oward the contemporary, immediate, military, and commercial.
The revolutionary unrest dangled the tantalizing prospect of reopening a mas-
sive portion of the globe that had been off-limits for centuries, and almost
overnight it became possible to imagine Central and South Americ a finally
throwing open their borders.
But while the British w ere desperately interested in Latin Americ a, their
actual foreign policy lacked coherence. It was at times overtly colonial, such
as when British military squadrons invaded Buenos Aires and Montevideo in

1806 and 1807. The public, however, was thoroughly compelled by the inde
pendence cause, which inspired British writers, soldiers, and merchants alike.
These two opposite impulses—to colonize and to liberate—had each been
integral to British post-Enlightenment foreign policy, but not usually at the
same time in the same place. And yet as unrest in Latin America threatened
to create a power vacuum of unprecedented geographic scale, both empire and
independence were appealing visions. Informal empire embraced both. This
duality was readily visible, as in James Mill’s 1809 declaration that in the case
of Latin America, Britain need only decide “whether she shall secure to her-
self an immense advantage . . . whether t hose colonies s hall be enabled, under
the protection of G reat Britain, to constitute themselves a f ree and indepen
dent nation.”4 It was quite easy to assume, apparently, that Latin Americ a
might be simultaneously “free” and “secured” to Britain, simultaneously in
dependent and “under the protection” of a foreign government. But although
informal empire caught on, it was a strange idea, one that had to be recon-
ciled against the linear, teleological drive of the progress narrative. Progress
could help explain both empire and independence, but wrapping progress
around both ideas at once was difficult to conceptualize.
Eighteen Hundred and Eleven is directly concerned with this question of
historical and narrative discontinuity. Regardless of their particular point of
entry, critics have long noted that the poem is awkwardly multivocal—that
it contains heterogeneous perspectives. Those focused on its politics have de-
bated w hether it offers a specific critique of British involvement in the Napo-
leonic Wars or a much more general anti-imperial manifesto.5 Penny Brad-
shaw suggests that in terms of genre, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven manages
to be both an English dystopia and a New World utopia. And Evan Gottlieb
notes a gendered tension between “a female-centered viewpoint [and] a globe-
spanning scope.”6 By invoking national, transnational, and global communi-
ties, the poem forces its readers to ask where it plants its feet. What kind of
in-group does it belong to, and upon whom does it cast its gaze? It seems by
turns to be anchored in English nationalism, in aspirational Enlightenment
cosmopolitanism, in the postcolonial Americ as, and in the longue durée of
historical change. Nicholas Birns is most succinct when he describes Eighteen
Hundred and Eleven as having a “multifocal” vision.7 This refrain of multi-
plicity, however, can tend to imply disorganization. I would like to schema-
tize things somewhat by arguing that these are all concerns of narrative form.
hether the poem is European or American, national or global, present-or

W
future-oriented, are questions about how it combines the formal elements of
narrative into an ideological whole. Approached this way, the poem’s overall
form reveals a fundamentally coherent logic.
Focusing on narrative form draws our attention to an oddity that critics
have consistently bypassed: Eighteen Hundred and Eleven is unmistakably split
into two distinct halves. For 214 lines, it recounts the rise and fall of ancient
empires, the rise and fall of Great Britain, and the subsequent ascendance of
the Americas. This narrative concludes and then, at line 215, starts over, tell-
ing the same historical events over again but in a different configuration. To
illustrate this, I have “graphed” the poem’s two narratives (chart 1).
This image does not represent the form of the poem. Nor am I suggesting
we should consider Barbauld’s poem as a historical narrative per se. Eighteen
Hundred and Eleven is a complex assembly of forms, including couplets and
personifications, allegories and action. Rather, what this chart shows is how
each half of the poem imagines history itself to be formed—how each half
understands world events like the rise and fall of empires to be meaningfully
arranged into a narrative. These two distinct unfoldings of the same events
each rely on one of the prominent historical theories of Barbauld’s day: the
idea that history climbs upward along the progress narrative, and the idea that
it simply repeats cyclically.8 In the dawning age of intense historical conscious-
ness, progress had begun to usurp cyclicality, but each well-k nown theory
represented an entire epistemological orientation toward time. The first nar-
rative of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven places Great Britain at the center of a
story about progress and decline. The second version, however, insists that this
story is not singular but repeated, reproducing over and over in a kind of nar-
rative sine wave. Each offers a theory about the formal structure of history.
Though they recount the same events taking place over the same number of
years, one tells a story of national exceptionalism; the other tells a story of re-
petitive global change. By presenting the same events in two different narra-
tive forms, Barbauld’s poem shows how such reconfigurations produce dis-
tinct ideologies of historical change.
I argue, therefore, that the most fruitful way to approach the multifocal
nature of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven is to see it as a product of multiple “nar-
rative centers” that give form to distinct geopolitical ideologies. I borrow the
idea of a narrative center from Hayden White, who defines it as the central
subject of a historical narrative that provides an organization of events and a
Narrative 1 Narrative 2
Latin
British Empire Babylon Rome Great Britain America
United States
as afterlife
World for British
history culture
line break 214/215
Chart 1
meaningful way of interpreting them.9 At a glance, the difference between the

poem’s two narratives appears only to be one of scale. The first history looks
simply like a subsegment of the second, magnified and expanded. But as phi
losopher David Carr puts it, different scalar levels of historical narrative are
not merely different in scale: rather, it is “the reference to the we” that sepa-
rates them.10 They may retell many of the same historical events, but their
forms alter their audiences and their arguments about history. As literary
scholars know, a change in “narrative center” or “the we” of a story—what we
might call a protagonist—is no superficial formal move (think of the two nar-
ratives in Bleak House): it corresponds to differences in setting, pace, narra-
tive arc, tone, perspective, and even person. A protagonist has the power to
include and exclude audience members, or in Carr’s terms, to establish the
“we” of the text. By equating White’s “narrative center” with the literary term
“protagonist” I am explicitly arguing that not only do narratives shape both
nations and texts, but also that much like a national boundary, a protagonist
crystallizes the collusion between formal structure and ideological orientation,
or form and content.
In what follows, I w ill elaborate the significance of the dueling narrative
forms of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven. Its two histories, I w ill show, have ideo-
logically distinct protagonists: (1) Great Britain and (2) world culture. One is
nationalist, the other globalist; one progressive, the other cyclical. By suggest-
ing that each one might tell a different version of world history, Barbauld’s
poem reveals that the narratives used to justify empire are constructed, non-
universal stories with geographic and ideological leanings. And protagonism
affects other narrative forms as well: both the setting and the sequential forms
of history, such as linearity and increase, shift in relation to narrative perspec-
tive and give different form to historical events. By ending her second narra-
tive (and therefore the poem) with Latin American independence, Barbauld
suggests that these stories are not only subjectively formed but also especially
vulnerable in the face of revolution, with its inherent power to threaten nar-
rative continuity. The poem seems to wonder how something as cataclysmic
as New World independence can be incorporated into a Eurocentric history,
whether progressive or cyclical in form. In conclusion, I w ill argue that Eigh
teen Hundred and Eleven intervenes in informal empire’s paradoxical desire to
both colonize and liberate Latin America; by depicting Britain’s imperial am-
bitions and its pretensions as a global emancipator as two different temporal
moments in history, the poem uses sequential form to expose informal em-
pire as a narrative paradox and a moral hypocrisy.
Historical Protagonism and Setting

The first half of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven assumes a narrative historical
form, or a version of historical unfolding, in which Great Britain is the pro-
tagonist. This story has a first-person narrator whose diction and tone clearly
mark her as a British nationalist:
Yet, O my country, name beloved, revered,

By e very tie that binds the soul endeared,
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Not like the dim cold Crescent shalt thou fade,
Thy debt to Science and the Muse unpaid;
Thine are the laws surrounding states revere,
Thine the full harvest of the m
ental year,
Thine the bright stars in Glory’s sky that shine,
And arts that make it life to live are thine.
(ll. 67–78)
This speaker uses a formal invocation and possessive diction—“O my

country”—to give Britain elevated, exceptional status. That she further ex-
presses the sacrality of the nation’s very name and her “soul’s” thorough bond-
age to it suggests the fetishistic operations of nationalism. So while she does
the narration, she recedes in importance compared to the nation she eulo-
gizes. Addressing Britain directly, and emphasizing that direct address by the
repeated anaphoric “thine,” she sets her country apart as both the audience
and central subject of the narrative. This is apt for national narratives, which
take the nation as their subject but which also summon that very national
community into existence as an audience. The speaker, therefore, serves as
narrator, while Britain occupies the role of protagonist.
Protagonism is indivisible from a narrative’s other features, such as setting
and plot structure. So naturally this story about Britain is set almost exclu-
sively in and around London. The narrator makes her geographic biases ex-
plicit in line 75 when she describes other nations as “surrounding” Britain in
a fancifully heliocentric vision that bolsters blinkered nationalism. This per-
spective (inside looking out) enables the narrator’s belief that even in its col-
lapse Britain is exceptional, since unlike empires of the past its legacy w ill
never “fade” (l. 73). And it also circumscribes the possibilities for emplotment.
In this nationalist history, world history does not unfold chronologically;
rather, the story begins and ends in London and only considers past and future
empires in their relation to the British capital. Consider the closing scene of
this narrative, in which US Americans, at the height of their own imperial
power, choose to return to the ruins of London:
Oft shall the strangers turn their eager feet

The rich remains of ancient art to greet,
The pictured walls with critic eye explore,
And Reynolds be what Raphael was before.
On spoils from every clime their eyes s hall gaze,
Egyptian granites and the Etruscan vase;
And when midst fallen London, they survey
The stone where Alexander’s ashes lay,
Shall own with humbled pride the lesson just
By Time’s slow finger written in the dust.
(ll. 205–214)
This final scene positions E ngland as a kind of museum that h ouses not only
the US Americans’ cultural past but all the important pasts of world history.
Egypt and Rome are not elaborated in their historical fullness but rather sub-
ordinated to the ways in which they have been experienced—and collected—
by the British. Renaissance Italy, metonymized by Raphael, appears only so
that it may cede its place to Britain and Reynolds. As the narrator made
clear earlier when she exulted that “Thine are the laws surrounding states
revere, / Thine the full harvest of the mental year” (ll. 75–76), culture cul-
minated in the British Empire and still rightfully belongs there even a fter
its demise. Even though Britain passes the torch to the United States, there-
fore, this does not imply cyclical history b ecause Britain remains the locus
of attention, culture, and heritage. The entire narrative of history revolves
around it.
The form of the poem’s narrative, then, does not match the form of the
historical narrative it conveys. We understand historical events to have oc-
curred chronologically, but the poem’s first narrative presents them out of
order, in a looping structure that begins and ends in Britain. The strangeness
of this disordered syuzhet does not suggest that the fabula of history is itself
circular; rather, the looping structure of the poem’s narrative implies the pro-
gressive, linear form of historical narrative. Its temporal and geographic an-
chor in Britain serves to stamp history with a nationalist perspective that el-
evates the significance of Britain’s imperial power above what came before and
after, and it implies that history is relevant only insofar as it frames Britain’s
exceptional progress. (This is why, in chart 1, I have represented the dimin-
ished importance of the forelife and afterlife of Great Britain as truncated tails
on the narrative arc.) Of course, in a key way this is not a traditional progress
narrative, in that it predicts its protagonist’s dramatic fall. But Britain’s after-
life in the United States offers a consolation that salvages exceptionalism even
in the transfigured telos of this alternate progress narrative. A British protag-
onist and setting, therefore, produce a version of historical events that takes
progressive form.
This ending does not end the poem, however; at line 215, history begins all
over again, returning to the beginning but with a different speaker, protago-
nist, tone, setting, and plot structure. G reat Britain is no longer the central
subject of history—this time history’s protagonist is the entire world. The sec-
ond narrative opens with this dramatic couplet:
There walks a Spirit o’er the peopled earth,

Secret his progress is, unknown his birth.
(ll. 215–216)
This is an abrupt change of subject and tone from the preceding lines, in
which US American pilgrims stood over Alexander’s grave. Our setting now
is not London but the entire “peopled earth,” and our protagonist is not Brit-
ain but a disinterested “Spirit,” whose “unknown birth” ties him to no par
ticu lar culture. This quasi-Hegelian Spirit is an anthropomorphized incar-
nation of translatio imperii, who catalyzes the rise and fall of empires by
traversing the globe and shining “the animating ray” of civilization (l. 261) on
different nations in turn. This couplet also indicates that the reader will now
follow the Spirit’s “walk,” a linear movement over the earth rather than the
circular motion of egress and return that helped center the first narrative in
Britain. In this sense, t here is a certain irony to the way Eighteen Hundred and
Eleven depicts historical form. The circularity of its first narrative conveys pro-
gressive unfolding, while the linear movement in the second narrative con-
veys cyclicality. Literary form here (which is to say the poem’s plot structure)
does not mirror or reflect the external, socially shared narrative forms of his-
tory as such. Rather, its own expressive use of form conveys the sense of that
differently formed institution, revealing a way in which form connects the lit-
erary to the social without operating as a rigid container overdetermined in
advance.
It is no accident that the very meaning of the word “progress” changes in
the first couplet of this second narrative. The first narrative was concerned
with the progress of British civilization, but here we are given to understand
immediately that it is now “his progress” (the Spirit’s “walk”) that matters.
Progress no longer means civilizational advancement in the hierarchical sense;
it means relocation in the strictly spatial sense. The change to a setting and
protagonist that are both global and non-exceptionalist, therefore, produces
a new plot structure—not a progressive history but a cyclical, chronological
wave. This version of history recounts each empire—Babylon, Troy, Rome,
and Britain—by narrating each one in the order the Spirit visits it, in the de-
tached third person, and with equal textual space. The second-person ad-
dress to G reat Britain (“thy,” “thine,” “my country”) disappears, and the story
of England’s rise and fall fades in importance, becoming just one among many
such rises and falls that blend into an “impressionistic list of regions and
city-states”11 and concludes with the Spirit’s visit to South America. By de-
moting Great Britain from its status as protagonist, then, the poem has also
made the corollary shift to a global setting and a cyclical narrative structure.
The shift is not one of scale, per se, but rather of audience and perspective;
instead of an in-group or imagined audience that belongs to one national
community, this narrative is instead centered on a global consciousness, one
in which the shared object is not British culture but culture itself.
This brief look at how protagonism is bound up with setting and structure
reveals that the two narratives in the poem are ideologically—because
formally—incompatible. One progressive and one cyclical, their forms pro-
duce different orientations toward time, community, and exceptionalism.
They are not merely dual, but dueling.12 And as I w ill now show, t hese dis-
tinct structures lead to different conclusions about the possibility of British
authority in the New World.
Telos
I turn now to how protagonism and setting interact with the sequential forms
of historical narrative, beginning with telos. Endings are crucial to establish-
ing narrative perspective, or as White puts it: “The demand for closure in a
historical story is a demand . . . for moral meaning, a demand that sequences
of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements of a moral
drama.”13 Conclusions, then, provide a moral in keeping with the ideological
perspective of a given history’s “narrative center” or protagonist. At first glance,
the two narratives of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven seem to end the same way:
cultural hegemony passes to a newly independent New World. And although
the first narrative ends with the rise of the United States and the second with
Latin America, several critics have been tempted to read them as fulfilling the
same function.14 A fter all, during Barbauld’s lifetime they both represented
revolution and postcoloniality in the New World. At the time Barbauld was
composing Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, the end of the American Revolu-
tionary War was only thirty years in the past. In fact, the entire American
Revolution took place a fter Barbauld published her first volume of poetry. The
United States was a closely watched experiment in postcolonial nation-
building, and Latin America seemed to be following in the same path.
And yet Barbauld’s choice to end the first narrative in the United States and
the second one in South America suggests that we need to think more deeply
about how they afford distinct kinds of narrative closure. In the British na-
tionalist narrative, the passage of civilization to the United States permits “a
defeated and degenerate English culture” to “find respite and renewal”15 in a
nation they can claim as an extension of themselves. The patriotic narrator as-
sures her country that although it is destined to founder, it w ill never be-
come obsolete. The lines “Thy stores of knowledge the new states shall
know / And think thy thoughts, and with thy fancy glow” (ll. 87–88) conjure
the United States as a kind of empty body animated by a British mind and
soul. Nor w ill the origin of such culture be forgotten, as the name of the Brit-
ish nation “Shall live in light and gather all its fame” in t hese “transatlantic
realms” (ll. 111–112). The closing image of US Americans making a pilgrim-
age to the ruins of London suggests that to the extent that the United States
represents the future, it is precisely b ecause its past is British. This, as Nicho-
las Birns and Francesco Crocco both point out, is a kind of cultural imperi-
alism that “remakes the p eoples of the Western hemisphere in the image of
middle-class Britons.” The “moral meaning” of this narrative’s conclusion,
16
then, posits the exceptionality of British culture by imagining its continuing

ability to colonize, even in decline.
This is where South America appearing as the predicted inheritor of civi-
lization in the second narrative grows significant. Latin America differs from
the United States in the crucial, simple fact of its cultural, ancestral, and co-
lonial ties to Spain rather than to E ngland. This is not the deeply networked
anglophone transatlantic of the northern hemisphere; this is the hispanophone
global south. A fter its imagined future rise to power, therefore, Latin Amer
ica is not likely to “glow” with the “fancy” of English culture, which is sepa-
rated from it by language and history. And indeed, the second narrative of
Eighteen Hundred and Eleven registers precisely this radical break. Consider
the closing lines of the second narrative, which bring the poem to a dramatic
finish atop the windswept Andes at the moment of revolution:
For see,—to other climes the Genius soars,

He turns from Europe’s desolated shores;
And lo, even now, midst mountains wrapt in storm,
On Andes’ heights he shrouds his awful form;
On Chimborazo’s summits treads sublime,
Measuring in lofty thought the march of Time;
Sudden he calls:—“ ’Tis now the hour!” he cries,
Spreads his broad hand, and bids the nations rise.

La Plata hears amidst her torrents’ roar;
Potosi hears it, as she digs the ore:
Ardent, the Genius fans the noble strife,
And pours through feeble souls a higher life,
Shouts to the mingled tribes from sea to sea,
And swears—Thy world, Columbus, shall be free.
(ll. 321–334)
The geographic particularity,17 sublime rhetoric, and sense of historic moment

in these final lines indicate Barbauld’s awareness of, and her interest in, South
America’s specific character at this juncture. And importantly for the impli-
cations of historical narrative form, this history, in which Britain has no ex-
ceptional status to speak of, makes no return to London. No Peruvian or Ar-
gentine pilgrims visit England to gaze on Egyptian stones or Alexander’s
ashes. No Anglo-Saxon descendants continue to read Milton, Locke, or Paley,
and no one glorifies British legal institutions. The global protagonist of this
narrative, alternately referred to as the “Spirit” or the “Genius,” shows no re-
morse as he leaves Britain behind altogether. And so it is not British ancestry
that animates this new civilizational center, as it was in the poem’s first his-
tory, but rather the neutral Genius. His investment in liberation inspires the
plural, heterogenous populations of South America—“tribes,” descendants of
“Columbus,” and the founders of new “nations”—to author their own radi-
cal break from Europe. While the first narrative’s conclusion in North Amer
ica offered a way for British power to live on, South American ascendancy
places a final stone over Britain’s forgotten tomb. The telos here is true Amer-
ican independence.
So what exactly is the significance of t hese distinct narrative forms? As I
will now show, they have profound implications for the conceptual possibil-
ity of British informal empire in Latin America in the early 1810s. There was
at this time little to no cultural overlap between London and South America.
Barbauld’s poem exposes this gap, but many of her contemporaries sought
precisely to close it. Figures on both sides of the Atlantic like James Mill,
George Canning, and Simón Bolívar saw Latin American revolution as a
chance to replace Spanish influence in the region with British—to make Latin
America more “British.” (See previous chapter for more on this.) Authors even
began representing the British as ancestrally kindred to the South American
indigenous.18 In other words, Bolívar’s revolution dangled the possibility that

Latin America might, in fact, function just as Barbauld presents the United
States: as a kind of “descendant” of British culture and innovation, which
might be made not only financially subordinate but also culturally cognate.
By imagining this possibility in the United States but rejecting it in Latin
America, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven communicates the value of Latin Amer
ic a’s distinct identity and the preservation of its sovereignty. In terms of
closure, then, both the second narrative and the poem as a whole end on a
startling moral lesson: that British imperialism is a nationalist idea that be-
longs to a nationalist narrative but has no place in a wider global ethics of
freedom.
Sequence and Paradox

Both narratives of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven question progressive history.
The first implied historical structure is progressive but predicts a reversal due
to the hubris of exceptionalism embedded within it. And the mere existence
of the second narrative reveals that a nation’s “progress” is a subjective idea,
a nationalist and singular outlook on world events. The poem suggests that
when you look at multiple perspectives—not only Britain’s, but Rome’s or
Latin America’s—it becomes unmistakable that one empire’s progress means
the decline of others. Empires do not share success with each other, nor with
their colonies. This understanding seems to demand a vision of world history
as cyclical, a narrative in which global powers take turns pursuing their own
progress. But once again, the poem’s first narrative is not simply nested within
the second. To see the world as taking turns at the helm of power is to change
perspectives altogether, to reject exceptionalism and the exceptional afterlife
of any imperial culture. And so while both historical narratives in Eighteen
Hundred and Eleven contain elements of progressive historical form, they also
each reject it in distinct ways. And crucially, each one also points out the fun-
damental conflict between historical sequencing and informal empire. Brit-
ain’s exceptionalist progressive history has no cultural connection to Latin
America, and the insistence on linear sequence in both narratives deters the
possibility of simultaneous British power and American sovereignty. While the
poem questions progress, therefore, it also insists that one of progress’s key
forms—its relentless linearity—directly impedes the possibility of informal
empire.
In her recent book Forms, Caroline Levine argues that forms—such as hi-
erarchy, network, and rhythm—operate at the level of both the literary and
the social.19 Performing what she has elsewhere termed “strategic formalism,”
Levine understands discourses and institutions as having recognizable pat-
terns that structure social life but that can also be challenged by other social
or literary forms that compete for the power to organize us.20 Every form, she
argues, affords certain possible outcomes. Hierarchies can afford exploitation.
Rhyme schemes can afford memorization. In terms of Barbauld’s poem, we
can see how a London setting helps to afford nationalism, and how cycles can
afford neutrality. Levine also shows that affordances are limited; for instance,
tongs may afford grabbing, but they do not afford slicing. It seems to me, how-
ever, that forms can also actively deter. If an army squadron formation af-
fords safety, it also deters improvisation: one finds it hard to begin skipping
syncopatically while surrounded by other bodies moving in a left-right march.
This deterrence is not an incidental result of the form’s limited set of affor-
dances; it is a design feature that specifically limits h uman behavior. The
concept of “unpleasant design” similarly uses deterrence to actively manage
our use of cities; railings, knobs, and spikes are routinely placed in public
spaces to deter sitting, sleeping, or skateboarding. And in the case of Eighteen
Hundred and Eleven, sequential forms like linearity operate as a deterrent to
the paradoxes of informal empire.
As I have shown, proponents of the policies that we now identify as the
basis of informal empire rested their claims on a paradox. Simón Bolívar ar-
gued that Spanish America could find “freedom” in “England’s shadow,” and
George Canning suggested it might be both “free, and . . . English.” In these
nearly identical formulations, informal empire depends on the paradoxical
idea that Latin Americ a is to become both free and dependent—simulta
neously. It is to have its sovereignty and have its sovereignty limited by Brit-
ish interests. In the first narrative of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, Barbauld’s
compact phrase “dependant kings” describes the paradox of two opposed con-
ditions operating at the same time. Simultaneity, as this two-word phrase
shows, is crucial to paradox. What makes a paradox a paradox is that two
conflicting ideas try to exist at the same time. Narrative sequence, on the other
hand, affords the separation of events, states, or ideas across time. One effec-
tive way to defuse a paradox, therefore, is to pull apart its two halves and place
them in sequential order. Socrates’s famous paradox “I know that I know
nothing” ceases to be paradoxical with a single change in verb tense: “I
know that I knew nothing.” Because the two ideas are no longer simultane-
ous, the paradox is emptied of its central contradiction. Sequence, in other
words, deters paradox.
The second narrative of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven displays this fact by
insisting on a rigid linearity that forcibly keeps world events separate. The un-
folding of history never returns to a prior state, not even in its cyclical form,
because a new nation seizes power with each turn of the wheel. The embodi-
ment of this rigid linearity is the catalyst for civilization, the Spirit whose “prog
ress” across the earth means that hegemonic power quite literally cannot be
in two places at once. His geographic enactment of sequential time renders
such simultaneity impossible. The end of the poem reminds us of this specifi-
cally, noting that the Spirit can only arrive in Latin America a fter leaving
“Europe’s desolated shores” (l. 322). As Suvir Kaul notes, Barbauld’s “histori-
cal schema . . . makes inescapable the understanding that the rise of the Amer-
ican nations spells the doom of Britain; their freedom presumes its decline.”21
The insistence on the sequential rises and falls of different regions in turn
keeps American and European power separate across the bounds of ocean and
time,22 a formal choice that radically undermines the emergent discourses of
informal empire. When Mill says that Latin America will be “free” “under the
protection of G reat Britain,” he suggests that it can simultaneously be (1) sov-
ereign and (2) dependent on Britain. The inexorably linear sequence of the
second narrative of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven prevents t hese two ideas from
occurring simultaneously (and thus creating a paradox) by separating them
across time, making Latin American liberty structurally subsequent to Brit-
ish empire. Empire and sovereignty cannot coexist in this timeline any more
than past and future can. Therefore, Britain’s imperial nature becomes part
of the past, a story of corruption and decline, while its emancipatory politics
become part of a future in which it relinquishes its own power. Sequence dis-
articulates the two opposed halves of the paradox of informal empire, for-
mally precluding British imperialism—political, cultural, or financial—in
free Latin America.
In light of this reading, the famous final line of the poem resonates with
new force: “Thy world, Columbus, shall be free” (l. 334). This line as-
cribes ownership of Latin Americ a to the peninsular empire—“Thy world,
Columbus”—while simultaneously asserting its liberty from said empire—
“shall be free.” The words “thy” and “free,” bookending the phrase, figure the
duality of Latin America as both a possession of, and a rejection of, Europe.
At a glance the line seems to hold two contradictory claims: that Latin Amer
ica both belongs to Columbus and belongs to no one. This reading would
reproduce the paradox of informal empire that envisioned Latin America as
free but not free of European control. But just as in the example of Socrates’s
paradox, verb tense converts simultaneity into sequence. The line does not
read “Thy world, Columbus, is free.” That syntax would place Columbus’s
ownership and Latin America’s freedom in the same plane of time. Instead,
the future tense (“shall be free”) reasserts the poem’s overall argument that his-
tory moves sequentially from empire to liberty. The movement from “thy” to
“free” therefore indicates a transition from an imperial to an anti-imperial per-
spective. In that sense, this cyclical history ends on a vision of progress, con-
cluding with an open-ended vision of Latin America’s rise to sovereignty and
power. Of course, it is the Spirit, a kind of anthropomorphic incarnation of
European Enlightenment thought, who seems to bring this progress to trail-
ing Americans. But while Latin America may rise via the inheritance of west-
ern culture and historical progress narratives, it will rise at their expense, not
as their subordinate. The sequential forms of this history make progress for
Latin America incompatible with the ongoing British power that would be
simultaneously necessary for informal empire.
Lest the formal argument against informal empire appear too subtle, Eigh
teen Hundred and Eleven includes a pointed reminder of what exactly it is
that the now-defunct British Empire will not be able to take from Latin Amer
ica. As the Spirit arrives in South America, he directs his message of libera-
tion to two audiences in particular:
La Plata hears amidst her torrents’ roar;

Potosi hears it, as she digs the ore.
(ll. 329–330)
This couplet references two extremely important sites of British imperial de-
sire in South America. “La Plata” is the river that opens up the Montevideo–
Buenos Aires region, which was the main point of ingress to the continent and
had been the site not only of contentious Spanish blockades and British smug-
gling, but also the British military invasions of 1806 and 1807. It was the
foothold required to rule the region from e ither a commercial or military
standpoint. And “Potosi” refers to an infamous Andean silver mine that had
become a symbol of the vast wealth G reat Britain was eagerly eyeing in the
continent’s interior. The two references in fact echo each other, as the Rio de
La Plata translates to Silver River. The image of a river of silver, then, doubly
conjures a passage into South America and the flow of precious metals that
might pass out of it from mines like Potosi—a dual flow Joseph Conrad
would capture well some ninety-t wo years later in Nostromo, his novel of
British imperial silver mining in South America. The “torrents’ roar”23 and
the digging of the “ore” are therefore sharp reminders, linked by rhyme, of
the commercial and resource networks that the British desperately wanted to
control, but that this version of history places out of reach. London cannot
be enriched by the rise of La Plata and Potosí because its time has already
passed.
Rebecca Cole Heinowitz argues that Eighteen Hundred and Eleven expresses
“the ideological limit” of Britain’s emancipatory politics, since it could not
support Spain’s defense against Napoleon and also support Latin Americ a’s
revolt against Spain.24 Evan Gottlieb also sees a subversive logic in the poem,
arguing that it provoked critics b ecause it “[took] the Whig narrative of prog
ress . . . to its logical extreme” by foretelling Britain’s collapse.25 This squares
with Uday Mehta’s persuasive claim that the imperial progress narrative rested
on an inherent contradiction to begin with, because it envisioned universal
ascent and growth while willfully denying the inevitable conclusion that col-
onies would someday outgrow the empire.26 It is also consistent with Eran
Shalev’s claim that the British tolerated their own imperial nature because of
their exceptionalist belief that the British Empire offered more liberty than
others—a view made possible because of their marriage of “Whig notions of
liberty . . . and Tory notions of territorial expansion.”27 To all these points, I
say yes. But it helps to acknowledge that these paradoxes are not merely po
litic al but also formal. They occur at the sites at which politics borrow the
forms—protagonist, linear sequence, telos—of narrative storytelling. The En-
lightenment progress narrative offered ideological support for both empire
and emancipation but not typically at the same time. The new discourse of
informal empire proposed to view Latin America as both a postcolonial na-
tion and a colonial possession simultaneously, a paradox that defied expres-
sion within progressive historical forms—and, as Eighteen Hundred and Eleven
seems to suggest, cyclical ones as well. If Britain fancied itself an exceptional
empire that could both expand its own wealth and increase the liberty of its
subjects, Barbauld’s controversial poem rejected that fiction. It separated Brit-
ish power and the liberty of o thers across the uncollapsible expanses of time
and space, exposing the contradictions of informal empire.
Some scholars of informal empire would disagree with my description of

it as a paradox in the first place. In their view, Britain’s espousal of both co-
lonial and emancipatory views is not a troubled discourse but a canny one.
British expressions of solidarity, kinship, and respect for Latin America were
never sincere in the first place, they would say, only serving to help the impe-
rial goals of assimilation and domination to hide b ehind noble motives.28 This
may well have been true for some. But this critical orientation also raises a
paradox of its own: if open support for Latin American freedom can be co-
opted for the project of subordinating Latin America—if increasing freedom
only means increasing dependence within the free market—then how can one
speak out effectively on behalf of Latin American sovereignty? What does an
effective critique of informal empire look like?
Narrative as Metahistory
Barbauld’s poem, I argue, produces effective critique by using narrative form
to expose informal empire’s ill fit within master narratives of geopolitic al
change. This is possible because Eighteen Hundred and Eleven is fundamen-
tally metahistorical. By presenting two versions of world historical narrative
form—one exceptionalist and one cyclical—the poem denaturalizes history
itself, revealing that it is a story written from and mediated by interested par-
ties. The Romantic period has been called “the stage at which history became
self-conscious,”29 and as early as the mid-eighteenth century this awareness of
historical narrative as a rhetorical act separate from history itself was accom-
panied by an anxiety that the presence of an author might preclude unmedi-
ated transparency.30 Barbauld’s poem plainly picks up this idea when it reveals
that t here is an outside to the British narrative of national exceptionalism, and
that from a global perspective such a narrative loses meaning. Both Reinhart
Koselleck and Hayden White claim that t here is a difference between “events”
that can be narrated and “structures” that can only be described. Monique
Morgan’s related argument—t hat long narrative poems of the nineteenth
century often use meta-awareness of their structure to provide a timeless lyri-
cal perspective over and above their narrative form—helps us to read the
multiple disjointed event narratives of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven as achiev-
ing a structural description of historical writing.31
In a kind of collateral impact, the constructed nature of history in Eigh
teen Hundred and Eleven coincides with the constructed nature of nation. The
poem’s vision of the world is best described as globalized, with fluid and im-
permanent boundaries. Even in the first narrative the British nationalist
speaker describes maps as being drawn with “dotted boundaries and penciled
shores” (l. 36), depicting the nation as a mutable, constructed element whose
borders have no inherent essentiality or legitimacy unto themselves. And the
United States and Britain are much less often hailed by name than they are
implied synecdochally through the use of landmark, topography, and subna-
tional political units such as states and cities, all of which places the poem’s
emphasis on the local rather than the national. Moreover, there are two local
survivors who inhabit the wasted landscape of fallen England, and it is pre-
cisely their relative mastery of history that seems to determine whether they
retain national belonging to their bygone country. When the American pil-
grims meet a man who recalls the detailed national history of E ngland (and
in particular the history of battles in which E
ngland’s nationalism would have
been at fever pitch), he is described as a “Briton.” But the other local inhabit-
ant is “unconscious of the mighty dead” and is described with no national la-
bel; he is simply a “peasant.” It is thus the death or survival of British histori-
cal narrative that erases or preserves the nation as a unit to which one may
belong. All of this suggests that “nation” exists only inasmuch as its story can
be told. Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, therefore, performs the surprisingly
radical work of denaturalizing nineteenth-century master narratives that le-
gitimize the nation and universalize history. It asks w hether history is univer-
sal and generalizable, or subjective, mediated, and plural. It questions whether
nations are essential and exceptional or constructed and mutable. And ulti-
mately, looming freedom in Latin America—and the question of how Britain
will involve itself t here—is the event that provides the most radical chal-
lenge to received wisdom about imperial power.
Through its own metahistorical form, Barbauld’s poem exposes the fact
that informal empire does not fit into existing forms of historical narrative.
It succeeds in refusing British informal empire in Latin America by showing
that it cannot be coherently represented by historical narrative—neither a prog
ress narrative that depends on cultural continuity with the United States,
nor a cyclical one that assumed Britain’s final collapse. This poem thus gets
outside of the bind that scholars have left us in—the bind in which, b ecause
informal empire depends on arguments for independence, both logistically
and rhetorically, anti-imperial sentiment turns out not to be an effective coun-
terargument against informal empire. Eighteen Hundred and Eleven refuses
this paradox by exposing it; it escapes the blackmail of informal empire by

critiquing the forms that blackmail takes.
Conclusion
The first two chapters of this book have overlapped in ways that might sur-
prise some readers. Neither historians nor literary scholars have ever put Anna
Laetitia Barbauld and Simón Bolívar into serious conversation with each other.
It’s easy to see why, not only because they seem to come from such different
worlds, but also because of the disciplinary and linguistic boundaries separat-
ing scholars in British studies and Latin American studies. And yet the con-
vergence between Barbauld and Bolívar is remarkable. I don’t mean histori-
cally. To be sure, Bolívar’s 1810 visit to London was discussed in the British
press, the British public was aware of the Latin American uprisings, British
newspapers and texts made their way into revolutionary Venezuela, and Bar-
bauld and Bolívar were both remarkably well versed in international politics.
So it is tempting to infer that at some point they knew of each other. They
may have; we d on’t know.32 But proof of a historical overlap would only mar-
ginally augment the more important ways their work helps us track the trans-
atlantic emergence of the discourses of informal empire. Both authors w ere
steeped in the European Enlightenment in all its complexity and contradic-
tion;33 both w ere skeptical of it in different ways; both professed liberal and
anti-imperial sentiments; and both had an acute awareness of continental and
Atlantic politics.
As my readings have shown, they took very different views on the relation-
ship G reat Britain would have with Latin America a fter its independence.
Bolívar encouraged the kind of involvement that would become informal em-
pire while Barbauld refused to draft it into history. And yet, despite their
opposed positions, both authors thought about the question in formal, nar-
rative terms. Both understood British–L atin American relations as forcing
them to confront the contradictions of empire and progress. Their writing
shows that Latin American independence momentarily disturbed the clarity
of the historical narratives that would underwrite the coming century. David
Carr argues that national narratives are often forged in the face of potential
disintegration—this is something Britons and Latin Americans both faced at
the dawn of the nineteenth c entury when war seemed likely to determine their
future. These crises were bringing about new forms of empire, and they
necessitated rethinking the narrative forms that describe the movement of

history. The Atlantic Ocean became not merely a shifting space for trade
and travel but the arena in which the mechanisms of past and future would
make themselves known. Would the Atlantic unite the forces of a new global
array of shared power? Or would it be the conduit through which European
power slipped away into new horizons? Was the world advancing together?
Or was Americ a advancing at the expense of the old empires? Might some
or all of t hese possibilities go by the name of progress? Visions of an unpre
cedented future invited onlookers to rethink the past and what its explana-
tory operations might be.
These are also questions about whose story the f uture w ill be. Who w
ill be
the protagonist, and what events w ill they emphasize in the unfolding of his-
tory? It comes as no surprise that both Bolívar and Barbauld, when they write
about the impact of Latin American independence on Atlantic politics, turn
to the figure of translatio imperii. Both Eighteen Hundred and Eleven and the
Jamaica Letter (1815) close with the image of civilization, a fter its passage
through “the Orient” and Europe, coming to rest in South America.34 And
yet the two texts describe this similar future very differently. In Eighteen Hun
dred and Eleven, power is a zero-sum game: each time a new nation rises, its
predecessor must fall. By contrast, Bolívar rejects the zero-sum model of his-
tory, turning instead to what he calls “Universal Equilibrium,” in which the
ascendance of South America w ill benefit the w
hole civilized world instead of
leaving ruin in its wake. Consider how he phrases this in a letter to Sir Rich-
ard Wellesley (also 1815): “Sciences, arts, industry, culture, everything that cur-
rently constitutes the glory of the European continent and arouses the admi-
ration of its people will find swift passage to Americ a. England, almost
exclusively, w ill see prosperity flow back to her shores from that hemisphere
which must depend, almost exclusively, on her as benefactress.”35 The first sen-
tence could be a gloss of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, describing the “sci-
ences, arts, industry [and] culture” of Europe—the very components of Bar-
bauld’s “Spirit” of civilization—flying to America. But crucially for Bolívar,
prosperity w ill then also flow back to England. In Barbauld’s zero-sum his-
torical forms, all that flows back to E ngland are pilgrims who come to see the
ruins of a once-great empire. Bolívar instead imagines that power moves in-
creasingly in networked fashion across the Atlantic, and progress is best de-
fined as the strengthening of this network among free nations.
By invoking translatio imperii, both authors think beyond the nation-state

as historical protagonist,36 but Barbauld’s protagonist is a neutral agent who
nonetheless continues to emphasize competition among the nations, while
Bolívar’s is an increasingly unified global community. Barbauld’s historical
protagonist suggests that nations compete for rather than share power, while
Bolívar’s drives a progressive story toward increased unity and power for all.
And yet while Barbauld’s narrative seems on its face to be more cynical, hers
is the one that rejects the paradox of informal empire by refusing to permit
the old empires to continue draining resources from the Americ as. It is
Bolívar’s idealistic vision of a unified global economy that ends up looking
more like today’s f ree market and enabling the dependency of sovereign na-
tions. Though he doesn’t have our term “informal empire,” his vision of inter-
connected nations is just that: he promises England an “almost exclusive”—an
important enough phrase to repeat within the same sentence—monopoly
on the resources of a free Americ a who will necessarily be in a position of
“depend[ence].” Barbauld places liberty and dependency into two different
phases of history, while Bolívar links both under the banner of global free
trade and opens the space for informal empire. Both authors, however, despite
their opposed visions, find that the form of world history is disturbed by, in-
admissible of, or in need of revision to account for informal empire.
Chapters 1 and 2 have spanned the years of the Latin American wars of in
dependence, from 1810 u ntil the mid-1820s. During this period the piracy
and smuggling that defined e arlier centuries was giving way to freer trade in
Buenos Aires, and British travelers w ere beginning to explore the possibilities
of farming and industry in the interior. T oward the end of the war years, many
new Latin American nations sought loans from London to stabilize their pre-
carious economies, which would lead (in some cases through default) to even
greater British control over their national policies. However, widespread Brit-
ish ownership of local industry and development would not occur u ntil
closer to midcentury. In the next chapter we w ill move forward into that pe-
riod to see how, even once British informal empire became more powerful and
well defined, it still remained a problem of imperial and historical narrative
coherence. But in the revolutionary era, British economic influence in Latin
America was tentative and highly unsystematic. Therefore, at the time that
Barbauld and Bolívar wrote, their discussions of a British imperial presence
reflect less a response to on-the-ground material reality than a forward-looking
awareness of the imperial potential of the British economy more generally.

They illuminate a moment in which Britain and Latin America gazed intently
upon each other, but their work also suggests that this mutual gaze called
attention to and disrupted existing conceptions of history, narrative, and
imagined community. This convulsion in Atlantic power structures churned
the w
aters of Enlightenment thinking, forcing certain contradictions to the
surface, such as the uncertain compatibility of empire and liberty that infor-
mal empire was beginning to demand.
chapter thr ee
Anthony Trollope and the

Collapse of Historical Telos
A single page turn from the last chapter carries us forward several dec ades.
From Simón Bolívar and Anna Barbauld’s revolutionary 1810s and 1820s, we
move now to Anthony Trollope and the mid-Victorian 1860s and 1870s. I w ill
say a few words about the transformative intervening years in just a moment,
and part II begins with a chapter on the 1830s and 1840s that will help fill in
the historical space—readers interested in chronological continuity may wish
to turn t here now. But in my pursuit of form, I have dedicated the three chap-
ters of part I to the formal entanglements between informal empire and the
progress narrative, and therefore Trollope serves as a kind of bookend, a point
of comparison between Romantic and Victorian elaborations of t hese dis-
courses. The juxtaposition will illuminate, on the one hand, how progress
and informal empire developed new significance within new Victorian con-
texts (such as explosive industrial and financial innovation) and newly popu
lar genres (travel writing and the realist novel). On the other hand, I w ill use
Trollope to show that despite these changed contexts, the forms of informal
empire and progress continued to trouble one another in much the same way
they had five decades e arlier, carrying out their struggle for narrative domi-
nance in serialized fiction as opposed to couplets, and in debates about rail-
roads instead of war. This leap forward, then, is part of my aim in each half
of the book to show the persistence of informal empire’s formal problems
across genres, contexts, and time.
And persist they did. Barbauld and Bolívar used their writing to reveal two
competing narratives at work in the idea of informal empire in Latin Amer
ica: that Britain might increase its commercial supremacy over the new na-
tions, and that these same nations might become increasingly independent
of outside control. This dual appeal to subjugation and liberation, as we saw,
was not only ethically hypocritical but formally paradoxical; it implied two
different narratives of the future, e ither of which might take the form of prog
ress but not in unison. Remarkably, a half century later, Trollope was still
highlighting the same duality. The Way We Live Now (1875) and The Prime
Minister (1876) (written with so little pause in between that they are almost
two halves of the same thought) both feature a villain who brings economic
and social ruin to London by peddling fraudulent investment schemes in Latin
America: respectively, Augustus Melmotte and a Mexican railroad, and Fer-
dinand Lopez and South American guano.
In The Prime Minister, when Lopez’s guano scheme collapses, he tries to
escape the humiliation by convincing wealthy widow Lizzie Eustace to run off
with him and back yet another informal empire project, this time a mine in
Guatemala. In his unavailing pitch, Lopez offers Lizzie two arguments: first,
that she can depend on the “certainty of [a] 20 per cent” profit, and second,
that their voyage w ill be a romantic echo of the liberation movement fifty
years e arlier: “Here our hero took advantage of his name. Don Diego di Lo-
pez had been the first to raise the banner of freedom in Guatemala when the
kings of Spain became tyrants to their American subjects” (416).1 Both visions
are false (one an unrealistic speculation about the future, the other a histori-
cal invention), but they are nonetheless rhetorically familiar. It is now fifty
years into British informal empire in Latin America, and Lopez is recounting
the same old double narrative—progress of one kind (liberty) for Latin Amer
ica and progress of a different sort (profit) for the British. This scene quickly
reminds us that the narrative still d oesn’t cohere. When Lizzie proves skepti-
cal, Lopez intensifies the profit narrative, but this forces him to abandon the
liberation narrative, as he promises that to be wealthy in Guatemala “is to be
a king there, or to be but very common amongst commoners here” (418). As
he fills Lizzie’s imagination with immense wealth, Lopez naturally turns to the
rhetoric not of liberation but conquest; his pursuit of the 20 percent profit w ill
make him “king,” thus not simply precluding his commitment to liberty but
reversing it and reinstalling a European as ruler of Guatemala.2 Once again
we see the problem with the old dual narrative of simultaneously increasing
British profit and Latin American freedom—when pressed even lightly, one
or the other has to give way.
We might well wonder why Lopez references the Guatemalan indepen
dence movement at all. Why, fifty years after its successful conclusion, when
the romance of revolution has long since cooled into the realism of trade deals,
would a pure cynic like Lopez even bother to dredge up the old image of colo-
Anthony Trollope and the Collapse of Historical Telos 93
nial liberation? What do the revolutions of the past have to do with the ex-
ploitation of the present? The answer, as always, is narrative. First, because
in the case of Latin America, freedom continues to be a necessary co-condition
of exploitation. What seems like Lopez’s empty rhetoric upholds a logistical
necessity: informal empire works only if the Spanish colonies are no longer
Spanish, so while he d oesn’t need a genuine ideological commitment to the
sovereignty of Guatemala, he does need Guatemala to have been made
free. Second, for Lopez to jump so quickly to the image of Guatemalan in
dependence shows that even three generations later, the British still closely as-
sociate Latin America with its millenarian break from Spain. The event re-
tains the power it first had in the 1810s to signal the directional, teleological
drive of civilization—to forcefully evidence the progressive view of history.
The image of Guatemala’s independence, then, serves the sequence of the nar-
rative of empire (movement from liberty to oppression) as well as the se-
quence of the narrative of progress (movement from oppression to liberty),
making it an indispensable historical plot point in both cases. But of course
the two sequences, as mirror images of each other, are formally incompatible;
Lopez reveals that his desires in one direction—to echo the liberation
movement—will be swallowed up by his desires in the other direction—to be
king. In the 1810s, Britain’s interest in the image of a f ree Latin America had
often been ambivalent and could convey genuine interest in the fall of tyr-
anny; for Trollope in 1876, the continuing paean to liberty has become so
patently hypocritical that he puts it in the mouth of one of his slickest con art-
ists. By 1904 Joseph Conrad will be so cynical about it that he will write
Nostromo, in which European investors and developers take up the cause of
liberating South America from itself and literally recolonize it.
But although we can see continuity in how the narratives of informal em-
pire clashed with the progress narrative throughout the century, Trollope
also wrote from a future that Bolívar and Barbauld might have found hard to
imagine. By the mid-Victorian period, their age of unending revolution had
quieted into relative politic al stability, and the idea of informal empire had
materialized as an institutional reality, thanks to the formal independence of
most of Latin America, explosions in industrial and technological innovation,
and the rapid rise of speculation, which supported investment in international
development. By 1822, most of Latin America was independent. In 1823, the
London Stock Exchange began trading in foreign securities, and by 1824, “an
estimated 624 joint-stock companies, ranging from domestic canal and rail-
way projects to foreign metal-mining companies, had joined the Exchange’s
domestic and foreign securities (representing principally Colombian, Chilean,

Peruvian, Mexican, and Brazilian loans).”3 The following year, 1825, Parlia-
ment repealed the Bubble Act, allowing for more and riskier speculations.
This rapid internationalization and intensification of financial risk helped in-
stitutionalize informal empire and bring about the age of “regular, constant
crisis”4 that was the mid-nineteenth c entury. The British “witnessed two
cycles of fraudulent railway promotion and manic speculation” in the 1840s and
1860s,5 and by the time Trollope wrote The Way We Live Now, which features
one such fraudulent railway scheme in Mexico, the speculator had become a
symbol of “what many English p eople feared as the chief economic disease of
their time.” In other words, the end of political upheavals was only the be-
6
ginning of economic ones. But despite plenty of financial turbulence and in-
dividual bankruptcy, the second half of the nineteenth c entury also saw an
overall trend toward British control over Latin American industries; to take
one example, by 1890 British investors in Costa Rica “controlled the ports,
mines, electric lighting, major public works, and foreign commerce as well as
the principal domestic marketplaces.”7 When Trollope visited Central Amer
ica in 1859, he would have been well aware of these two forces in mutual rela-
tion: the volatility of British investment capital and its rapidly tightening
control over Latin America.
To look upon all of this through mid-Victorian eyes was to see familiar so-
cial narratives in flux. The age of revolution had come to an end, but narra-
tives explaining the links between past, present, and future remained deeply
unsettled. Trollope had a particu lar interest in master narratives, and as he
would l ater explain in his Autobiography, he had these very questions in mind
when writing The Way We Live Now:
W hether the world does or does not become more wicked as years go on, is a ques-
tion which probably has disturbed the minds of thinkers since the world began
to think. That men have become less cruel, less violent, less selfish, less brutal,
t here can be no doubt;—but have they become less honest? If so, can a world,
retrograding from day to day in honesty, be considered to be in a state of prog
ress? . . . Instigated, I say, by some such reflections as these, I sat down in my
new house to write The Way We Live Now. (353–355)
The novel is animated, therefore, by a very large question: w hether the prog
ress narrative still applies to human society. J. Hillis Miller suggests that its
abiding concern is that “society as a w hole . . . is no longer moving in a grad-

ual curve of change,” instead threatening to make “a radical break with the
past.”8 Trollope’s novel certainly gives a sweeping indictment of speculation
bubbles and the financiers who exploit them, but he also uses that satire to fo-
calize the question of social change, asking how such systems introduce al-
ternate and aberrant social narratives—how they convert progress into “ret-
rograde,” for instance. According to Timothy Alborn, Victorian economists
tended to interpret financial crises as “little more than [outliers] on the rising
curve of commercial prosperity,” while novelists often saw in them “an early
augury of institutional decay.”9 This nicely highlights the question that runs
through The Way We Live Now, and the question I w ill explore in this chapter:
Under the conditions of financial speculation and informal empire, how was
the form of Britain’s shared social narrative changing? Was it best described
as progressive or retrogressive, curved or jagged, continuous or broken?
This chapter w ill offer brief readings of The West Indies and the Spanish
Main (Trollope’s travelogue about Central America) and an extended reading
of The Way We Live Now. As I will show, The Way We Live Now is incessantly
concerned with temporality—evident in character names like Slow, Hurtle,
and Bideawhile—and its particular concern is how the temporal dynamics of
speculation and accumulation may not merely adjust society’s “curve of
change,” but send it into perpetual stall or radical disjuncture, thereby rob-
bing progressive history of its teleological and diachronic forms. Moreover,
Trollope’s choice of Mexico as the site for his fictional railroad—as opposed
to anywhere in Britain he might have selected—connects the novel’s concerns
with temporality to the specific context of informal empire in Latin America.
In fact, all three texts discussed in this chapter—The Way We Live Now, The
Prime Minister, and The West Indies and the Spanish Main—explore the im-
plications of British projects in Latin Americ a, and all three figure them as
formally troubling to a progressive view of history. In his travelogue, Trollope
worries that they forestall or reverse the teleological drive toward freedom, and
in his novels their embroilment with speculation fraud means that they lack
content altogether; they bubble up with no connections to the past and offer
no future (a lack of narrative continuity he also links to the figure of the root-
less Jew). For Trollope, then, both the reality of informal empire in Latin
Americ a and the instability of speculation present formal challenges to the
progressive view of history; when combined, these projects actually resist nar-
ration altogether; they cannot be told as stories but only described as structures
that corrode and corrupt. These structures have become the structure of the
age—“the way we live now”—a nd through their temporal stasis and absent
teleology (what we might call ateleological form), they contribute to the un-
forming of humanity’s progressive history.
So although t hese texts show us that Bolívar’s and Barbauld’s concerns
about the problematic conjoining of liberation and dominance narratives con-
tinued through the century, they also expose new formal misalignments be-
tween informal empire and the progress narrative. In trying to formally rec-
oncile informal empire with progress, Barbauld and Bolívar revealed how the
strange sequence of Latin America’s re-subjection to Britain and the ambigu-
ous protagonists of history u nder informal empire disrupted Britain’s image
of itself as civilizational telos. But while they wrote alternative narratives of
history that reconciled that disrupted telos within a broader global story of
progress, Trollope’s work lingers over the disruption itself, describing it, expos-
ing it, and refusing to resolve it. In this chapter, I will leverage Trollope’s
unease about collective social narrative to ask what forms an interrupted or
absent telos might take. What does a nonteleological history look like to Vic-
torians, and how do we describe it in formal terms? Drawing on Trollope’s
thinking and theories of capital, I will have occasion to refer to disjuncture,
stasis, synchrony, ateleology, and the treadmill, and to ask: To what extent are
these forms? To what extent do they disrupt the forms of progress, and how
does informal empire contribute to that disruption?
My argument w ill perhaps be surprising b ecause Trollope generally sup-
ported the empire. He frequently espoused that brand of Victorian anglo-
centrism defined by landed-class sensibilities, social conservativism, and sup-
port for the civilizing mission that pushed such values in the colonies. His
body of work displays a consistent underlying belief in the superiority of the
English and their mandate to civilize the world, and his travel writing in par
ticular is heavily laden with scientific racism and ethnocentric bigotry. And
yet as some critics have noted, he is also a “partial skeptic” about particular
methods and sites of imperial expansion.10 In his Australian travels in 1871, for
instance, he finds some of the British colonies there ineffective, unpromising,
and better abandoned.11 And elsewhere in the empire he e ither celebrates or
anticipates the independence of British colonies once t hey’ve reached a suffi-
cient state of civilization.12 In other words, Trollope is not persuaded that
empire is always effective, and he is content to imagine that due to failure or
success it may end. The picture is further complicated by Trollope’s views on
the informal empire, or “so-called colonies,” which J. H. Davidson argues that

Trollope rejected: “Certainly he did not believe in the informal empire of in-
vestment beyond or in advance of colonial boundaries.”13 What my reading
of Trollope’s texts reveals is a certain fault line between the formal and infor-
mal empire that might have soured even imperial apologists on the latter. That
fault line is progressive historical form.
Character and Narrative

In The Way We Live Now, Trollope explores coherent versus ruptured narra-
tives in two registers: individual characters and social institutions. I w
ill dis-
cuss each in turn before moving to Latin America to show how informal
empire contributes to the problem of nonteleological historical form. First,
character. Two characters in The Way We Live Now are obvious foils, residing
at opposite poles of the novel: Augustus Melmotte is the fast-dealing foreigner
who promotes a fraudulent railway project designed to fleece gullible inves-
tors, and Roger Carbury is the stable English gentleman who only wants to
win the heart of his respectable cousin and live in quiet retirement away from
the fray of the nouveau riche. Melmotte sets in motion the financial plot that
will wreak devastation, and Carbury kicks off the marriage plot that will bring
peace to the novel’s end (though no wife for himself). Melmotte is a force for
entropy and dissolution, while Carbury meticulously stitches together com-
munity and resolution. I begin with t hese two men b ecause they represent a
dichotomy constitutive to the novel on almost e very level of its construction:
what can be narrated and what cannot.
Carbury, unsurprisingly, is the former; I would argue that as a character,
his role in the novel is to signify narrative itself—he is an embodiment of con-
nected events across time. He is first introduced to the reader in volume I,
chapter 6, which both begins and ends with his full name, “Roger Carbury,”
and which in between is entirely devoted to his deep family history and his
more recent personal history. As beginning, middle, and end, Carbury is the
chapter, and thus seems to have a natural alignment with the very forms of
realist prose. Consider these opening lines:
Roger Carbury, of Carbury Hall, the owner of a small property in Suffolk, was
the head of the Carbury family. The Carburys had been in Suffolk a great many
years—certainly from the time of the War of the Roses—a nd had always held
up their heads. But they had never held them very high. It was not known that
any had risen ever to the honour of knighthood before Sir Patrick, g oing higher
than that, had been made a baronet. They had, however, been true to their acres
and their acres true to them through the perils of civil wars, Reformation, Com-
monwealth, and Revolution, and the head Carbury of the day had always owned,
and had always lived at, Carbury Hall. (v.I, 47)14
Carbury’s f amily history is distinguished most by its diachronic continuity—it

may not be full of drama, but its unbroken links make it replete with four hun-
dred years of tellable details, including a list of the house staff in the year 1800
and the precise current income of the estate. Trollope expresses the scale of this
history with temporal markers like “the War of the Roses” and “Reformation,
Commonwealth, and Revolution,” entwining the family’s longue durée with
the nation’s and making Carbury part of the most common shared narrative in
England. As Lauren Goodlad argues, Trollope saw England’s sovereignty as
manifest in the “rootedness” of its elite class,15 and in this way Carbury and
England are mutually constituted through the form of historical narrative.
And despite upheaval in the nation’s history, Carbury’s family, having “al-
ways owned, and . . . a lways lived at, Carbury Hall” and “been true to their
acres,” are a through line amid crisis.16 Their history can be told in narrative
form, therefore, b ecause generation a fter generation remain chained together
by the linkages of land ownership and primogeniture, itself a narrative force
that sorts the noise of a sprawling family into the signal of a single line. In fact,
by the time we meet Roger Carbury here in chapter I.6, we have already met
Lady Carbury (his sister-in-law) and the hapless Sir Felix Carbury (his rake
of a nephew), either of whom might have inspired a family history, but the
novel withholds it u ntil we meet Roger, the current inheritor of the Carbury
line, who has “lived on his own land among his own people, as all the Car-
burys before him had done” (v.I, 48). His life’s goal is to see this legacy pre-
served through the creation of a new generation of Carburys. And so Roger
is invested with the attributes of narrative itself: origin, diachronicity, linear
continuity, and telos. In fact, and this is highlighted by his alignment with the
nation, Roger embodies the progress narrative in particu lar, as his family’s
status has begun to increase from knighthood to baronetcy. This increase,
however, is specifically ploddingly paced, and we will see that although Trol-
lope fervently adheres to a progressive vision of history, he is skeptical of the
pace of acceleration.
If Roger Carbury represents diachronic narrative, Augustus Melmotte is his

foil, in that he has status only in the here and now and is utterly untethered
to e ither past or future. Compare the first sentence of Carbury’s introduction
to the first sentence of Melmotte’s:
Roger Carbury, of Carbury Hall, the owner of a small property in Suffolk, was
the head of the Carbury family. (v.I, 47)
The giver of the ball was Augustus Melmotte, Esq., the father of the girl whom
Sir Felix Carbury desired to marry, and the husband of the lady who was said to
have been a Bohemian Jewess. (v.I, 30)
Carbury’s introduction begins with his name and his connection to the land
that bears it, followed by a strong verb of identity—“was”—t hat assertively
gives him a lineage. Melmotte’s introduction inverts this structure, beginning
not with his name but with a cataphoric absence of it, presenting him to us
as “the giver of the ball.” Hardly a stable identity, this establishes him as some-
one whose primary characteristic is not who he is but what he does in the h ere
and now. His name appears after the verb of identity—the very same “was”—
and while that verb places Carbury within a four-hundred-year family line, it
places Melmotte only within a four-hour soiree. As the sentence continues,
his identity is doubly and triply subordinated to present contingencies, as the
father of Felix’s current love object and the husband of a subject for current gos-
sip. He and his family have no identity older than the wants, thoughts, and
social habits of the current London season; they are defined by what people
say now, who they want to marry now, and where they dance now.
I won’t put each sentence of the two men’s introductions side by side
(though such analysis would be fruitful), but simply observe how Melmotte’s
continues in the unrelenting style of deferral and omission:
The giver of the ball was Augustus Melmotte, Esq., the father of the girl whom
Sir Felix Carbury desired to marry, and the husband of the lady who was said to
have been a Bohemian Jewess. It was thus that the gentleman chose to have him-
self designated, though within the last two years he had arrived in London from
Paris, and had at first been known as M. Melmotte. But he had declared of him-
self that he had been born in E
ngland, and that he was an Englishman. He ad-
mitted that his wife was a foreigner—an admission that was necessary as she
spoke very little English. Melmotte himself spoke his “native” language fluently,
but with an accent that betrayed at least a long expatriation. Miss Melmotte—
who a very short time since had been known as Mademoiselle Marie—spoke
English well, but as a foreigner. In regard to her it was acknowledged that she had
been born out of England—some said in New York; but Madame Melmotte, who
must have known, had declared the great event had taken place in Paris. (v.I, 30)
In a stark contrast to Carbury’s presentation as embodied narrative, this pas-

sage incessantly performs the Melmottes’ lack of f amily narrative altogether.
Melmotte “declares of himself” that he is English and “[chooses] to have him-
self designated as “Esq.,” but these are mere performances belied by his ves-
tigial French address and foreign family. The “Esq.” title is another parallel
to Carbury, but of course where the latter derives it from his lineage, Mel
motte has simply applied it to himself in place of a history that does not ex-
ist. Through its mediations and deferrals—or as Anna Kornbluh puts it, a
“proliferation of ungrounded representations”17— this passage introduces
Melmotte as someone with no narrative behind him; he may come from any
nation, Mrs. Melmotte may or may not be a Jewess (and by implication root-
less), and as we later learn, Marie may or may not be their child. In other
words, while Carbury’s family chain goes back centuries, the Melmottes lack
a single link to the past or even to the child who lives with them. And while
Carbury sees himself as a link in a chain—a steward of diachronicity—
whose goal is to hand the past off to the future, Melmotte only wants to
amass wealth and influence in the moment. The Melmottes are, in short,
radically rootless, seeming to exist only in the present.
All this might imply only that the Melmottes are unknowable, not that
they are untellable, since a lack of information is not necessarily the same as
a lack of narrative. But The Way We Live Now figures the problem as precisely
that. For instance, when Marie Melmotte laments to Felix that “nobody ever
told me anything about myself,” he replies, “I should like to tell you every
thing about yourself, from the beginning to the end.” Information, in other
words, is narrative. To know something about the Melmottes would make it
possible to tell a story with a “beginning” and an “end.” In response to Felix,
Marie simply says, “Ah—but you don’t know” (v.I, 38), reminding him and
the reader that such a story cannot be told. And Georgiana Longestaffe per-
fectly captures the Melmottes’ resistance to narrative when she says, “No
one knows who they are, or where they came from, or what they’ll turn to”
(v.I, 119), expressing their missing data as a kind of inverse narrative, a dura-
tional absence of content.18 The problem with the Melmottes, then, is that
they cannot be told across time.19 The novel itself, which particularly in Trol-
lope’s hands is a form indebted to diachronic continuity, seems less so when
the Melmottes appear: Roger Carbury’s chapters, such as “The Carbury
Family,” “Roger Carbury and Paul Montague,” and “Carbury Manor,” situate
him within a stable history, community, and space, while Melmotte family
chapters like “Madam Melmotte’s Ball,” “Mr. Melmotte is Pressed for Time,”
and “Mr. Melmotte on the Day of the Election,” place them within fleet-
ing moments that exist only in the present and give them no links to the
past or future.
This unnarratability is, of course, inextricable from the Melmottes’ am-
biguous Jewish racialization—a feature of Ferdinand Lopez in The Prime
Minister as well. As Lauren Goodlad notes, Trollope’s novels conceptualize the
English as locally “rooted” through the financial and generational inheritance
of the landed gentry, while they isolate “the pernicious effects of capitalist glo-
balization” as a problem negatively associated with cosmopolitanism and
“the shadowy attributes of Jews.”20 As much as they are about absent facts or
features, such “shadowy attributes” are, I would argue, also about an absence
of story. In contrast to the narrative continuity implied by primogeniture and
the genealogical pedigree of the English gentleman, The Way We Live Now
traffics in stereot ypes of Jewish rootlessness to craft the Melmottes as anti-
thetical to narrative itself.
I do not mean that the Melmottes are opposed to the form of the novel;
indeed, their lack of identity and stability creates structurally necessary con-
flict. As with the other chapters in this book, I am less interested in the form
of Trollope’s narrative than I am in the forms his text presumes social narra-
tives to have. The Way We Live Now is rather traditionally formed—containing
several marriage plots and plenty of financial intrigue, consisting in dozens of
regular chapters split into two volumes, and producing increasing conflict
until its climax and resolution—but these familiar forms combine to repre-
sent social narratives—history, progress—that are all out of whack. Carbury’s
family history is compatible with the progress narrative, given its linked events
across time that make it possible to track change and growth, and especially
given its overlap with the actual history of the nation’s progress. Meanwhile,
the Melmotte family is narratively aberrant, or rather, absent. Because while
Trollope worries in his Autobiography that retrogression is the opposite of prog
ress, and Uday Mehta argues that imperial powers work “to align a deviant
and recalcitrant history with the appropriate f uture,”21 Melmotte’s narrative
is neither retrogressive nor deviant; it c an’t be realigned because it simply

doesn’t exist. While Carbury has a narrative that connects him across time,
the Melmottes are less narrative than they are morphological structure, their
corrosive influence spreading not durationally across time but spatially across
London’s present.22 They exhibit being-in-space, rather than becoming-in-
time. So the difference between Carbury and Melmotte is formal, but not in
terms of the novel’s form; rather, they are each figures for certain kinds of so-
cial form. One represents origin, diachronicity, linearity, and telos, and the
other represents groundlessness, synchronicity, disruption, and ateleology.23
One makes it possible to see British society as a series of linked events, and
the other raises the specter of a denationalized society that is no longer held
together by such links and therefore cannot be narrated across time.24
Capitalism, Diachronicity, Telos

hese individual characters evoke larger forms (social narratives and social
T
structures), but institutions, being themselves social, render these forms even
more immediately. Carbury, as we have seen, is tied to institutions of inheri-
tance and property that tell a national and aristocratic story. Conversely, Mel-
motte, as the chairman of the South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway
Company, is tied to the new institutions of financial speculation that are both
risky and intangible. And t hese institutions appear in the same terms as Mel-
motte does: through a lack of information that equates to a lack of narrative.
It is frequently “said” that Melmotte’s rail company is prospering and likely
to make the fortunes of its investors, but—a gain like Melmotte—rumor is
never supplemented by fact, not even among the board members themselves.
Paul Montague, our moral center on the board, can never get any informa-
tion about the actual state of the venture, concluding exasperatedly at one
point, “I doubt if t here be any one t here who does understand this m atter”
(v.I, 378). Paul, however, isn’t after just any information at all; he is specifi-
cally in search of information that has links across time. Venting his frustration
at a board meeting, he demands: “We ought to know where the shares really
are. I for one do not even know what scrip has been issued. . . . I am deter-
mined to know what is being done with the shares” (v.I, 346). Paul asks about
the shares in multiple tenses b ecause he wants their diachronic history—not
only where they “are” now and what “is being done” with them in the present,
but also what “has been” done with them already. But Melmotte and his
associates are particularly uninterested in discussing the past, preferring to

talk about the present in the vaguest terms: “I am able to tell you that we are
prospering,” Melmotte tells the board in this same meeting, summarizing
the company’s affairs in comically insufficient fashion (v.I, 345). The present-
tense gerund “are prospering” suggests less the durational narrative Paul
seeks than a suspended animation of the ongoing present.
This subversion of the past in favor of an ongoing present speaks to the
specific temporality of capitalism itself. As a force for constant crisis and
change, capitalism reduces the predictive value of the past as compared to
other, more stable systems and looks instead to a constantly emerging and new
future.25 As William H. Sewell Jr. argues, capitalism is fundamentally “event-
ful,” in that “new business ventures are launched daily; firms go bankrupt;
stock exchanges and f utures markets oscillate dizzily, develop bubbles or crash;
[and] hedge fund managers become instant billionaires.”26 The development
of capitalism therefore helped produce an experience of “time as progressive
and open-ended.”27 This, of course, shows the overlap between capitalist tem-
porality and the progress narrative. We might then expect Trollope’s novel to
celebrate capitalism as a conducive temporal framework for the unfolding of
civilizational progress he wished to see. And yet, while we wouldn’t call The
Way We Live Now anti-capitalist per se, it presents this very “propulsive futu-
rity,”28 the headlong rush of change, as corrosive to progress. How could that
be—how could Trollope desire civilizational progress while critiquing a finan-
cial system that produces progressive temporalities?
It helps to understand that capitalism has more than one tempo. In addi-
tion to its headlong rush into the future, capitalism also manifests a “strange
stillness—what one might call a ‘stillness-in-motion.’ . . . There is constant
movement, but the movement is constantly repetitive. For capital at its most
abstract, the movement is like running on a treadmill.”29 That is to say,
while capitalism produces the constant change we associate with progress—
technological innovation, new social arrangements, changing value—such
change is merely the byproduct of capital’s principal dynamic of endless ac-
cumulation.30 And the temporal expression of endless accumulation is not fu-
turity but an uncanny kind of stasis. For instance, because the nature of
capitalism is to produce surplus value, it is constantly developing innovations
to increase productivity, which in turn increases the value-per-hour of labor.
But new levels of productivity become the new normal, which restabilizes
value at its previous level.31 Moishe Postone calls this the “treadmill effect,”
nder which he says that “value is an expression of time as the present.”32 So capi-
u
talism has a paradoxical “temporal duality—an ongoing, accelerating flow
of history, on the one hand, and an ongoing conversion of this movement of
time into a constant present, on the other.”33 The endless accumulation of capi-
tal consumes diachronic history, past and future disappearing into a sus-
pended and eternal synchronous present with an ateleological temporal form.34
Accumulation is endless in the sense that it will never cease, but also in the
sense that it has no grounded “end” or aim outside of itself—accumulation for
accumulation’s sake is a “directionless,” “contentless,” and “self-valorizing . . .
pure process”35 with no telos.36 Far from serving the narrative demands of
progress, then, capitalism in this sense “has no history at all.”37 Time is no
longer duration; it is setting—it is the endless “now” in which we live.
Progress, for Trollope, makes coherent diachronic links across past, present,
and future, is linear and increasing (though at a steady, not accelerating pace),
and unfolds teleologically. Accumulation does not take t hese forms, and so the
experience of time accumulation produces is less narrative than stasis. The Way
We Live Now draws this contrast through Paul’s search for a coherent dura-
tional narrative of the railroad company and his adversaries’ subversion of that
narrative into an ongoing present. And he explicitly connects this to the op-
erations of capital through untrustworthy board members like Felix Carbury,
who are precisely interested in riding the treadmill of endless accumulation:
“[Felix’s] object in this commercial transaction was to make money immedi-
ately by reselling the shares,—a nd to go on continually making money by
buying at a low price and selling at a high price. He no doubt did believe that,
being a Director, if he could once raise the means of beginning this game, he
could go on with it for an unlimited period;—buy and sell, buy and sell” (v.I,
268). As far as Felix understands it, the tempo of accumulation is both “con-
tinual” and “unlimited,” neither varying nor reaching toward any other “ob-
ject” than accumulation itself. Though Trollope doesn’t use the figure of the
treadmill, his language nonetheless evokes it in this passage, as it does else-
where in the novel’s frequent return to the verb “to float.” When the narrator
tells us that “the object of Fisker, Montague, and Montague was not to make
a railway to Vera Cruz, but to float a company” (v.I, 77), the contrast between
the two verbs “to make” and “to float” conjures a difference of an ontological
order. To “make” a railroad implies an action that must begin, develop, and
be completed—in other words, a durational narrative act. By contrast, “to
float” evokes only a static suspension, as Fisker, Melmotte’s American coun-
terpart, explains: “In a t hing of this kind, when it has once been set agoing,
t here is nothing else to do” (v.I, 85). An initial action may be required, but
everything else is subsumed into an ongoing “agoing”—a constant present—
after which “nothing” need happen. One can, like Felix, simply “buy and
sell, buy and sell” and “continually” accumulate capital “for an unlimited pe-
riod.” So the railway company, like Melmotte himself, fails to account for
itself in the past or claim any external telos beyond its own meaningless self-
perpetuation through capital. Put another way, it refuses both the diachron-
icity that would give it narrative form and the teleology demanded by a spe-
cifically progressive narrative form. Instead it lapses into an undifferentiated
and inescapably synchronic present, a pure structure.
But the temporal rhythms of the railway company are only partly governed
by accumulation. They are also influenced by the logic of speculation, which
produces its own various and contradictory temporal forms. On the one hand,
while accumulation may be said to subsume time into the present, specula-
tion vaults over the present altogether. The concept of “f utures” literalizes
what Anna Kornbluh calls the proleptic nature of all financial transactions,
in which both parties act as though future values are real and grounded in the
present. Finance, she says, “operates in the f uture anterior tense,” leaping over
a present that can be given meaning only by an as yet unrealized f uture; this
is the “logico-temporal leap” that undergirds speculation and capital itself.38
Or as Paul Montague puts it, the railroad “is one of t hose hazardous t hings
in which a man can never tell w hether he be r eally prosperous till he is out of
it” (v.I, 247). Kornbluh points out that Melmotte and company speak in tau-
tologies, paradoxes, and metaleptic promises, all of which are forms that echo
speculation’s temporal overleap and which, I would add, preclude narrative
linearity.
On the other hand, speculation has a tightly dependent relationship with
narrative, since companies court investment precisely by telling persuasive sto-
ries about how the f uture w ill unfold.39 And while speculation is inherently
risky b ecause these narratives tell the story of an as yet unknown f uture, in-
vestors run a lower risk when such stories are grounded in the past, in prior
outcomes and trends that can’t ever guarantee a particular f uture but may in-
crease its likelihood. So it’s little surprise that Roger Carbury, the man dia-
chronically connected to the past, is also able to predict the future accurately
from quite early in the novel: “Sorrowfully looking forward through the vista
of future years, he thought he saw that Henrietta would become Paul’s wife”
(v.I, 74). Not only does he predict the story’s end, but he also brings it about
by placing Paul and Henrietta next in line for the Carbury h ouse and titles,
thus rendering even their f uture beyond the text nearly inevitable. Meanwhile,
Roger’s constantly speculating nephew Felix “never could see the end of any-
thing” (v.I, 22), and much like all the novel’s speculators he gets no final con-
clusion. Just as Melmotte’s body is “carried away, no one knew whither”
(v.II, 357), we only learn that Felix has been successfully kept out of E ngland
“up to this time”—forever suspending his narrative in the present-tense mo-
ment of the final page. In other words, w hether it comes to speculation or in-
heritance, a grounding in the past—or a narrative that connects the past to
the present—renders the future much more legible. Consider how the effect
of such grounding scales up in the case of the progress narrative, where trac-
ing change in the past is what makes it possible to interpret historical unfold-
ing as teleological. That is to say, when it comes to our largest narrative of
all, understanding the past reduces uncertainty about the future so completely
that it appears inevitable. So it’s no wonder that in order to assuage his anxi-
ety about the railway company’s f uture, Paul is constantly looking to its past,
though he is just as constantly rebuked: “When he asked some questions as
to the manner in which the shares had been allocated, he was told that all that
would be arranged in accordance with the capital invested” (v.I, 206; empha-
sis mine). Lacking grounding in what “had been,” the company’s assurances
about what “would be” are much less persuasive.
But as Trollope is fond of pushing satire into absurdity, the company is not
only unable to articulate links between past, present, and future; they cannot
even create links between two sentences. Toasting the company at a dinner,
Melmotte can only “blurt out” disconnected and halting platitudes, which,
“not varying much one from the other, he jerked out like so many separate
interjections” (v.I, 88–89). And one farcical board meeting is even worse:
Miles read the short record out of the book,—stumbling over every other word,
and g oing through the performance so badly that had t here been anything to
understand no one could have understood it. . . . “Gentlemen,” said Mr. Mel
motte, “it may perhaps be as well if I take this occasion of saying a few words to
you about the affairs of the company.” Then, instead of g oing on with his state-
ment, he sat down again, and began to turn over sundry voluminous papers
very slowly. . . . Montague sat profoundly listening,—or ready to listen when
anything should be said. . . . “I understood that we w

ere to have a statement,”
said Montague. “You’ve had a statement,” said Mr. Cohenlupe. (v.I, 342–345)
The “record” presumably contains company history, but narrative disjuncture

is now occurring at such microscopic intervals that Miles cannot even con-
nect two words together, “stumbling over every other” one. This increasing
frequency of non-communication reaches its logical conclusion when, instead
of giving an account of the company’s affairs, Melmotte simply d oesn’t speak
at all, a silence that Cohenlupe absurdly declares has in fact been a statement.
The reader is always aware that there is no content to the company, but since
the business of business is to spin a lot of nothing into coherent tales of future
progress, the real satire is not their lack of substance—it’s their comprehen-
sive inability to do the work of narrative, to make diachronic connections at
any level at all. The temporal rhythms in which they operate are “blurting,”
“jerking,” and “stumbling,” which in formal terms produce only breaks, gaps,
and endless caesuras. If some of the constitutive forms of narrative are dia-
chronicity and connectivity, Melmotte’s company expresses itself in their
opposite.
To summarize, capitalism operates in multiple and conflicting tempos, and
The Way We Live Now is concerned with how these are formally out of joint
with the progress narrative. In the ongoing present of accumulation, the pro-
leptic leap of speculation, and the broken links between past and future, the
novel explores the ways that modern financial institutions have corrupted the
temporal experience of history as diachronic, linear, and teleological. The nar-
rator expresses precisely this when he tells us that Melmotte’s successes have
tended to arrive in “jumps” that defy predictability and leave too many people,
including his family and even himself, unsure of “what ledge in the world the
great man was perched at the moment” (v.I, 330). Reading the novel’s interest
in temporal rhythm highlights the fraught relationship between the new forms
of finance and the formal features of narrative.40 To borrow the names of three
characters associated with the railway scheme, time shouldn’t be Slow, it
shouldn’t Hurtle, and it shouldn’t stand still and Bideawhile. If capitalism
shapes the social experience of historical unfolding, speculation and accu-
mulation disrupt the temporality of progress by altering its constitutive
forms. They suspend its forward drive, interrupt its linear continuity, and
revoke its external telos, leaving b ehind alternate, dystopian “forms” like
stasis, discontinuity, and synchrony. And if these are threatening to the home-
land, they will be fatal to the mission of the empire.
Telos in the Informal Empire

It would be easy to assume that The Way We Live Now is uninterested in em-
pire, as Bernard Porter has argued.41 A fter all, the South Central Pacific and
Mexican Railway project is designed to connect two nations outside of offi-
cial British purview—the United States and Mexico—and, indeed, all of Mel-
motte’s rumored projects lie in free nations like Russia, Moldavia, and Aus-
tria. Lord De Griffin even makes a point to explicitly refute a rumor that
Melmotte has a project in India (v.II, 40–41). But the fact that Melmotte’s
schemes are not part of any territorial colonies does not suggest that the novel
is “absent-minded” about empire; rather, it shows Trollope’s very specific in-
terest in Europe’s informal influence beyond the bounds of its colonies, an in-
fluence he codes as imperial in nature. The Mob, for instance—aptly named
for a newspaper that supports the wildly popular yet ill-understood railway
project—suggests that the Mexico scheme is noble because “a Napoleon” like
Melmotte, “though he may exterminate tribes in carrying out his projects, can-
not be judged by the same law as a young lieutenant who may be punished for
cruelty to a few negroes” (v.II, 171). Comparing unconventional business prac-
tices to “cruelty” and “extermination” during the pursuit of overseas military
projects suggests that the British public sees the Mexican railway as continuous
with the formal empire. The Mob’s reference to colonialism is a metaphor, of
course, but American adventuress Mrs. Hurtle is much more literal when she
pleads with Paul to join the project, saying: “The railway will make Mexico a
new country, and then you would be the man who had done it. . . . Emperors
and kings have tried their hands at Mexico and have been able to do nothing.
Emperors and kings never can do anything. Think what it would be to be the
regenerator of Mexico!” (v.I, 391). Using the civilizing mission—the goal of
“regenerating” Mexico—as a link, Mrs. Hurtle’s rhetoric draws a straight line
between the territorial colonialism of “emperors and kings” and the influence
of this development project, even suggesting that capitalism might be the
more effective means of achieving the same end.42 Adding that the railway
developers “will rule the Mexicans” (v.I, 394), she fully literalizes the notion
that development projects can lead to overseas rule and thereby unequivo-
cally places the railway project under the umbrella of British imperialism.
The novel is, therefore, interested in the specific dynamics that connect
overseas development with overseas rule, but Mexico as the proposed railway
site makes a yet more specific connection to informal empire in Latin Amer
ica. It would certainly have been a familiar idea to Trollope’s readers; one year
after publication of The Way We Live Now, Alexander Innes Shand reflected
that English-led rail projects had boomed all over the world at midcentury,
and we may find Trollope’s inspiration in an a ctual proposed rail line between
Mexico City and Veracruz, promoted by a company whose name—the Brit-
ish Imperial Railway Company—made evident their self-perception as impe-
rialists.43 While that line was eventually completed, many w eren’t, and
Shand noted that railroad projects in Latin America had been prone to spec-
tacular bust: “We know how freely [the British investor] honoured the drafts
that Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and St. Domingo drew on his credu-
lity.”44 Trollope certainly chose Mexico for narrative reasons, as the distance
from London increases its unknowability, and he was also likely tapping into
readers’ idea that a Latin American railroad was less than a sure thing. But he
was also unquestionably interested in the particular nature of European in-
formal empire in the newly formed nations of Central America. The Way We
Live Now cannot be fully understood without considering its connections to
Trollope’s travel and political beliefs.
To get a sense of how Trollope understands informal empire as a distinct
phenomenon, it helps to consider his views on the formal empire, and—as
with the home front—progress is paramount. His belief in the progress nar-
rative as it applied to the empire buttressed his racist belief in the civilizing
mission as a benevolent force for elevating nonwhite p eoples around the world.
But he was somewhat unusual in how strictly he interpreted progress’s specific
formal features. Many Victorians used the progress narrative to justify the ac-
quisition of territory while refusing to imagine that the colonies’ progress
would ever lead to their independence.45 Or as Trollope himself put it in his
1859 travelogue, The West Indies and the Spanish Main: “There are they who . . .
will have it as an axiom, that when an Englishman has been master once, he
should be master always: that his dominion should not give way to strange
hands, or his ascendency yield itself to strange races.” To put this in formal
terms, the problem with this view is that it d
oesn’t respect the teleological form
of the progress narrative. This passage, which is about Jamaica, continues: “A
certain work has been ours to do t here, a certain amount of remaining work
it is probably our lot to complete. But when that is done; when civilization,
commerce, and education s hall have been spread; when sufficient of our blood
shall have been infused into the veins of t hese children of the sun; then, I
think, we may be ready, without stain on our patriotism, to take off our hats
and bid farewell to the West Indies.”46 Others merely use the civilizing mis-
sion as a rhetorical cover for perpetual exploitation—an ongoing “always.” For
Trollope, however, progress is not about creating perpetual states but achiev-
ing ends, and these ends are not only good, but in his own word, inevitable.
Arguing that the independence of the United States should make the British
proud, he says he looks forward to “the inevitable, happily inevitable day, when
Australia shall follow in the same path” (83; 138).47 Progress doesn’t have the
status of a natural law for Trollope; he believes that it requires diligent work
or p
eople will retrograde. But his pursuit of progress is driven by his specific
vision of its ideal form, which must not be static but teleological and must lead
not to the ascendancy of Britain but to the universal elevation of man. In other
words, empire cannot aim to create a suspended state. It must aim to write a
narrative. It should not “float” but “make.”
It is only logical, then, that Trollope views development projects in the free
world u nder the same governing logic: they, too, should be undertaken in the
name of progress. He saw many such projects firsthand during his travels in
Central America, and when he wrote about them in The West Indies and the
Spanish Main he focused in particular on t hose related to transit, especially
the g reat pre-c anal problem of crossing the isthmus. In this potent passage
about mankind’s increasing ability to move across the globe, which begins the
chapter called “Central America—R ailways, Canals, and Transit,” Trollope
reveals his general support for industrial development:
The child when born is first suckled, then fed with a spoon; in his next stage, his
food is cut up for him, and he begins to help himself; for some years a fter that it
is still carved u
nder parental authority; and then at last he sits down to the full
enjoyment of his own leg of mutton, u
nder his own auspices. Our development
in travelling has been much of the same sort, and we are now perhaps beginning
to use our own knife and fork, though we hardly yet understand the science of
carving; or at any rate, can hardly bring our hands to the duly dexterous use of
the necessary tools. (316)
Drawing on the classic childhood-to-adult metaphor for civilizational

advancement—the very same that Simón Bolívar used to project Latin Amer
ic a’s post-independence development—Trollope affirmatively links new
distance-shattering travel technologies like the railway to the progress narra-

tive, naturalizing both processes as being as universal and inevitable as ado-
lescence. Throughout The West Indies and the Spanish Main, he lends support
to transit projects that will form part of a “public world-road” and claims that
British efforts to connect the globe are done on everyone’s behalf: “Is it not
true that we would fain make all ways open to all men? that we would have
them open to ourselves, certainly; but not closed against any human being?
If that, and such like, be not what our diplomatists are doing, then I, for one,
misunderstand their trade” (324). In passages like this, we see that Trollope
supports industrial development as a linchpin of progress and that he also—
just like Bolívar—imagines this progress might have a global protagonist, a
universal “we” who will reap the rewards of man’s maturation. Trollope’s vi-
sion of progress is both formally specific and universally applicable, to both
imperial and extra-imperial projects.
But too often, for Trollope, development projects in the f ree world are not
about progress; they are about profit. That is, they are motivated by capital-
ism’s static accumulation drive rather than the telos of civilizational progress,
and—crucially—the two are not only distinct but opposed. Writing again in
The West Indies and the Spanish Main, he warns the British away from such
corrupt motives. Citing Britain’s treaty of decolonization with Honduras, he
says that the British are obligated to help the country prosper through tech-
nology like the railroad, but that they should do it for the benefit of Hondu-
ras and the world, never seeking to monopolize any such lines (323–324). As
Ferdinand Lopez’s mercenary motives in The Prime Minister likewise convey,
the danger of pursuing profit is that it will negatively affect Latin American
sovereignty. And so, although he writes in The West Indies that he supports
increased transit and trade in Central Americ a, he also is disturbed that a
French canal project will cause Nicaragua and Costa Rica to “sign away their
lands and w aters” (333) and (by permitting French war ships in Lake Nicara-
gua) amount to “a military occupation of the country” (331). Calling this an
“occupation” and a cession of territory, Trollope frames it as a colonial maneu-
ver inside nations that have already won their freedom from Europe. If the
motive for European development in Central America is progress—to open
borders, share profits, and elevate all men—then development serves the telos
of history. But if the motive is profit—to claim territory, consolidate owner
ship, and subjugate others—then development will only reverse the progress
narrative, sending the free nations of Central America backward into states
of reduced sovereignty and hierarchical submission. Development, in other

words, is progress; imperial development—informal empire—is regress.
The problem with t hese projects in Latin America is that they purport to
be motivated by progress, but this is only a pretense. Returning to The Way
We Live Now, Mrs. Hurtle says that the railroad will “regenerate” Mexico, and
Fisker speaks of the “world-wide commercial love and harmony” it will pro-
vide (v.I, 89). T
hese could well be Trollope’s own words of support for colo-
nial and industrial projects. Such rhetoric certainly serves his commitment to
progressing civilization around the world, and even his specific interest in a
global protagonist of that progress. The problem is not with the rhetoric it-
self, but rather that it is only rhetoric, that the company has no actual inter-
est in pursuing those ends: “There was not one of them then present who had
not a fter some fashion been given to understand that his fortune was to be
made, not by the construction of the railway, but by the floating of the rail-
way shares. They had all whispered to each other their convictions on this
head. . . . That was to be their work, and they all knew it. But now, as there
were eight of them collected together, they talked of humanity at large and
of the coming harmony of nations” (v.I, 89–90). The notion of working t oward
“the coming harmony of nations” captures the measurable diachronic change,
global protagonist, and ultimate telos that define Trollope’s progress narra-
tive, but the company w ill of course construct nothing and civilize no one;
they will only “float” shares. In other words, Melmotte’s rail company prom-
ises to support the historical narrative of progress, but underneath that cover
it operates through the anti-progressive temporalities of capitalism.48
As we saw with the treadmill logic of accumulation, as well as in his sup-
port for colonial independence, Trollope is averse to states of stall or perpe-
tuity that do not pursue teleological progress. In The West Indies and The
Spanish Main, he articulates this same worry about development projects in
Central Americ a. Discussing the railway that Americans have built across
Panama, he celebrates its contributions to global mobility and the potential
regeneration of a backsliding Panamanian people. Empire brings progress, of
which Trollope approves. But while the US Americans, in his view, rightly
own the railway now, he also worries that they will want to own it forever:
The w
hole line shall become the absolute property of the New Granadian gov-
ernment when it shall have been opened for forty-nine years. But who can tell
what government w
ill prevail in New Granada in forty-nine years? It is not
impossible that the whole district may then be an outlying territory belonging to
the United States. At any rate, I should imagine that it is very far from the inten-
tion of the American company to adhere with rigid strictness to this part of the
bargain. Who knows what may occur between this and the end of the c entury?
(237–238)
The project is good so long as it is being done for the benefit of human prog
ress. But if progress is the motive, then the American presence will necessar-
ily be temporary as Panama grows stronger and takes control of its own re-
sources. The danger Trollope foresees is that, motivated not by progress but
by profit, the Americans will seek a perpetual state of ownership that is tem-
porally antithetical to the progress it promised in the first place.
Also at issue in this passage is the familiar problem of uncertain futures.
Speculation renders the past and present subordinate to a f uture that may not
come to pass, and Trollope sees in Latin America heightened uncertainty. So
not only may the Americans seek a perpetual state of imperial control, but
they are counting on the unknowability of Latin America’s future to do so.
For Trollope, the empire depends on working t oward a particular f uture that
fulfills the telos of progress, but the agents of informal empire in Latin Amer
ica are leveraging the proliferation of many possible futures in order to con-
vert the progress narrative into a self-serving stasis. So by setting the railway
project in The Way We Live Now in Mexico, Trollope has not only placed it
outside of the formal empire, but also suggested that it stands outside of the
very narratives that he believes do—or at least should—govern the shared ex-
perience of history.
It may once again strike us as strange that Trollope would not see and sup-
port capitalism as an engine of the progress he wanted—especially given his
interest in development projects like railroads and canals. But as Ellen
Meiskins Wood describes it, progress isn’t one singular idea. “The idea of prog
ress commonly associated with the Enlightenment was made up of two
distinct but related strands. On the one hand, t here w ere variations on the
theme of human improvement as an essentially cultural and political phenom-
enon, the rise of reason and freedom. On the other, there was a kind of ma-
terialism which represented history as stages in the evolution of ‘modes of sub-
sistence’, and specifically the maturation of ‘commercial society’, the last and
most perfect stage.”49 Wood’s distinction between progress as cultural im-
provement and progress as commercial intensification helps illuminate how
the two ideas might be separate for Trollope, rather than necessarily conjoined
the way we so often take them to be. But he sees their separation as even more
fundamental than Wood’s formulation, since in his view the triumph of
capitalism is not a version of progress but its antithesis and a threat to its
existence—it evacuates history of its progressive narrative form. We can then
see this divide as the same one along which Trollope places the two kinds of
empire: the territorial colonies are part of the teleological narrative of “human
improvement” and even the “rise of . . . freedom” that inevitable decoloniza-
tion promises, while the informal empire abdicates this or any narrative form
in favor of the evacuated temporality of profit and accumulation. While the
formal empire expands to serve the cause of advancing civilization, the infor-
mal empire expands only because of capital’s desire to mitigate risk by increas-
ing its reach. While the formal empire w ill only rule in the name of progress,
the informal empire w ill happily stall progress in the name of unending com-
mercial and political rule.50
We may also be struck by the fact that in all of this, Trollope sees two dis-
tinctions that history does not support. We know that: (1) both the formal
and informal empire w ere pursued primarily for profit, and (2) international
development and imperialism cannot be separated. We might even be tempted
to say that by erecting such false boundaries Trollope articulates an incoher-
ent politics. But my argument is not primarily about what he believed; rather,
it is about what his beliefs show us about the difficult rhetorical tightrope in-
formal empire had to walk. What we learn from the first of these—Trollope’s
belief that territorial colonialism was about progress and informal empire was
not—is that the formal empire wore the civilizing mission more successfully
as a cover, while informal empire could appear even to imperialists as hypo-
critical (or narratively paradoxical) on its surface. And in the second case, Trol-
lope’s belief that development might be anti-imperial shows that from the
British perspective, informal empire was not always a goal, an inevitability, or
a natural expansion of imperial power, though it can be tempting to assume
from our perspective in the present that it was all three.
A Network of Failed Narratives

Trollope often spoke of the progress narrative as both the explanatory mech-
anism for social hierarchy and the normative mechanism for leveling it. From
our perspective today, he does not cut the most “progressive” figure; indeed,
he used the idea of social progress to justify empire and scientific racism. But
what’s useful about his views from a formalist perspective is that his vision of
progress is consistently and strictly formal: it has a universal protagonist, dia-
chronic continuity, a structure of increase, and a telos. T hese are the forms
that history has taken and should continue to take. In fact, much of Trollope’s
complex politics (supporting both empire and decolonization, for instance)
may stem from his investment in the precise normative claim that man should
work to align history with its ideal narrative forms.
Together, The West Indies and the Spanish Main and The Way We Live Now
depict a network of informal empire’s component parts, all failing to uphold
the particular forms of the progress narrative. While in theory development
can be done in the name of global progress, these projects depend on specu-
lation and accumulation, which produce synchronic and disjointed historical
time. They reverse the independence of f ree nations like Nicaragua and Mex-
ico, re-subjecting them to the “rule” of French engineers or British railroad
builders like Paul Montague. They are susceptible to the temptations of in-
dividual profit over universal benefit, and they seek “ongoing” states of mo-
nopolistic control that perpetually stall Latin America’s independent develop-
ment. In short, when aspects of informal empire—its funding structures, its
long-term goals, its geopolitical interventions—appear in Trollope’s writing,
they tend to produce anti-progressive forms of history.
These anti-progressive (ergo, failed) narrative forms return to England as
unassimilable. In The Way We Live Now, individual and institutional narra-
tives are always indicative of or implicated in the national narrative, such as
Roger Carbury’s double condition of being highly narratable and inextrica-
ble from English history. Likewise, Melmotte is not only unnarratable, but he
is also so estranged from the national narrative that he d oesn’t even know it:
he knows “nothing whatever of the political history which had made E ngland
what it was at the beginning of that half c entury. Of such names as Hamp-
den, Somers, and Pitt he had hardly ever heard. He had probably never read
a book in his life” (v.II, 34). Of course, the problem is precisely that he wants
to insert himself into that history, both by becoming an MP himself and by
remaking the London financial world. When both ventures fail, we might say
that financial speculation in the informal empire has indeed failed to become
part of the nation’s story, so much so that, as Miller points out, in suicide Mel-
motte “takes his secrets to the grave and remains a mystery to the end.”51 Be-
fore taking his life, he literally consumes the existing evidence of his history,
“chewing the paper into a pulp till he swallowed it” (v.II, 119). That is to say,
Melmotte’s bankruptcy and suicide bring the novel’s form to its climax and
conclusion, but he remains diagetically extrinsic to England’s national nar-
rative even in death.
The English, just as they wanted desperately to know Melmotte’s narrative
during his life, try desperately to write its conclusion after his death, but you
cannot narrate a man who has never had a narrative. A trial might have al-
lowed the public to collect and organize facts into a story, but the loss of both
the man and his documents—a long with Miles Grendall’s decision to “pass
his autumn at some pleasant, but economical German retreat” rather than
testify in court (v.II, 400)—prevents that story being told. The public worries
about him in narrative terms, wondering: “How would the story be told here-
after[?] . . . How would it tell in all the foreign newspapers, in New York, in
Paris, and Vienna that this man . . . had been selected as the g reat and hon-
ourable type of British Commerce?” (v.II, 76). In response, the London papers
suddenly claim that Melmotte’s ventures did pertain to the official colonies,
as if they could only wrestle him into the national narrative by writing infor-
mal empire out of the story. But that assimilation still remains out of reach.
The narrator tells us that “various biographies of the g reat man w ere, as a
matter of course, published within a fortnight of his death,” showing the fierce
desire to explain the man in narrative form, but that “as to his birth, parent-
age, and early history,” none of the accounts could agree (v.II, 449).
So while Trollope can use Melmotte as a structurally integral part of his
own narrative, the novel’s diagetic London cannot absorb Melmotte’s corrupt
forms into theirs. It is fitting, then, that the remainders of both Melmotte’s
family (Marie and Mrs. Melmotte) and the Mexican railway (Fisker) are left
in the United States. In so much nineteenth-century thought, Americ a is a
projection of the future, and in The Way We Live Now, it is also the source of
“futures,” since the Mexican railway project was launched there by Mr. Fisker.
As Annette Van nicely puts it, America is itself a temporal paradox where “his-
tory is not what has happened already (since nothing has) but what will hap-
pen in a millennial future. The thrust of inquiry is predictive, not retrospec-
tive. America has altered time.”52 Given Trollope’s investment in connecting
past, present, and future, and his seeming discomfort with the temporal im-
plications of both financial futures and development projects in the Ameri
cas, it is perhaps no wonder that he sends the corrupt elements of his story
there to end in obscurity. If informal empire pulls both English resources and
English narratives overseas to become corrupted, Trollope is willing to sim-

ply let go of the threads that tie t hese projects to England and send the Fiskers
of the world across the ocean to continue their business, leaving E ngland’s
hands clean of such projects—and such stories.
Conclusion
Of all the progress narrative’s forms, Trollope seems least able to reconcile in-
formal empire with its telos. The stalled temporality of both accumulation
and monopoly, the reversal of Latin America’s independence, and the pursuit
of profit all flout the idea that humanity is moving steadily toward universal
enlightenment. In the first two chapters of this book, I showed that Anna Bar-
bauld and Simón Bolívar had the same concern a half century earlier in the
throes of the independence wars. But each of t hose writers sought formal so-
lutions to their formal problem: in order to reestablish progressive teleology,
Barbauld wrote E ngland out of history altogether so that the f ree world could
advance unfettered, and Bolívar penned E ngland as only one part of a global
historical protagonist that would naturally seek its own universal liberation.
Trollope, meanwhile, does not look for new narrative forms that might rec-
oncile informal empire with teleological progress; rather, he simply lingers over
the multifarious ways that telos has been disrupted. Struggling, as he admits
himself to be, with “whether the world does or does not become more wicked
as years go on,” whether “a world, retrograding from day to day in honesty,
[can] be considered to be in a state of progress,” he simply exposes the forces
that are actively re-forming progress into antithetical states of regress or stall.
A particularly corrosive cluster of those forces are the ones that make up in-
formal empire.
This chapter, then, in addition to offering a reading of Trollope’s texts and
several claims about informal empire in the context of Victorian finance, also
enables, by comparison with the first two chapters, several conclusions about
the century as a whole, conclusions that give us our own sense of how histori-
cal time moves. In one way, we have seen continuity: informal empire
emerged in the 1810s as a paradoxical set of claims about simultaneously ad-
vancing liberty and increasing imperialism that challenged the coherence of
the progress narrative, and that set of problems persisted in highly similar
terms through Trollope’s time. In another way, we see evolution, in that the
practices of informal empire gained legal and institutional scaffolding and
adapted newly pliable forms of finance. And in a third way, a typical narra-
tive of the nineteenth c entury has been challenged. For we may well have ex-
pected an inverted story: that it would have been our revolutionary writers
who saw in the cataclysm of war a vacated or exploded historical telos, and a
Victorian realist novelist would have been the one to craft subtle new narra-
tive forms to placate and absorb historical change. That the reverse was true
only reinforces what I hope is now a persuasive claim—that informal empire
did not run with but against the master narratives that nineteenth-century
Britons used to explain history and that nineteenth-century scholars today
often still give credence to.
While these three chapters have been focused on progress as a particular
master narrative that was always inevitably entangled in informal empire’s at-
tempts at self-presentation, there w ere other narratives too. And Trollope’s
writing shows that progress is never far from a related master narrative: the
family of man. We saw in the glorification of Roger Carbury’s family line that
the narrative of E ngland’s progress is mutually constitutive with its genealogi-
cal self-identification as a family. And Trollope’s investment in the empire’s
civilizing mission links progress to the rhetoric of the imperial f amily that has
England at its head. In part II of this book, I leave progress b ehind and in-
vestigate how informal empire intersected—discordantly—with this second,
cognate master narrative. In turning to the f amily of man, I w ill likewise be
reorienting from narratives of the future to narratives of the past. By consid-
ering where revolution might lead and what progress would continue to look
like, Barbauld and Bolívar looked exclusively to the f uture, and while Trol-
lope considered links to the past and the problem of a stalled present, he did
so b ecause he shared their concern about what form the f uture might take.
These authors’ varying contexts—revolution and intensifying capitalism—led
them to train their gaze on what was to come. But while progress invites nar-
ratives of our future, f amily invites narratives of our roots. So in part II, as we
track the collision between informal empire and the f amily of man, the forms
in question will be genealogical, and the narratives will look not into unknown
futures but alternate pasts.
pa r t t wo
Fa m i ly a n d I n for m a l E m pi r e ,
1840 –1926
Origin, Generation, Relation, Hybridity
When Anthony Trollope traces the generational history of the Carbury f amily
through England’s national history in The Way We Live Now (1875), he exposes
the thick entanglement of two Victorian master narratives: family and prog
ress. Both those narratives—iterations of the powerful historical and genea-
logical consciousness of the nineteenth century—arose and thrived alongside
the development of the nation, evolutionary science, capitalism, and the novel.
Both had seismic implications for thinking about time, morality, governance,
race, and empire in the nineteenth c entury and beyond. And like two vines
that emerge from the same root system and grow in tandem, each helped de-
fine and buttress the other’s form. Progress is most concerned with dia-
chronic change, though it is easily deployed in the service of creating struc-
tural hierarchies; f amily more immediately conjures the synchronic, structural
relations of h
uman grouping, though it also traces t hese genealogically. In a
certain respect formal mirrors of each other, the two ideas are both inextri-
cable and constitutive of some of the most deep-seated Enlightenment as-
sumptions about how humans ought to organize and relate. This book hon-
ors the mutual development of progress and family by not forcing them into
a quarantined and artificial chronological sequence; part I (progress) covers
texts that span the years 1805 to 1876, and part II (family) ranges from 1840
to 1926. The overlap in the m iddle of the nineteenth c entury reflects the shared
epistemological terrain of these master narratives, which was especially fertile
around the midcentury debates about Darwinism and h uman origins. But in
my pursuit of their knotty relations with informal empire, I have also endeav-
ored to show how each uniquely reveals distinct concerns at either end of the
century. Progress was especially connected to the rupture of revolution and the
emergence of informal empire in the early nineteenth century, while the dual
120 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
rise of evolutionary theory and British expansionism made family a focaliz-

ing trope for formal and informal empire at the fin de siècle. It is now upon
us to explore this second idea.
Despite its surge in the second half of the nineteenth century, the idea of
the nation as a f amily was hardly new. In fact, the word “nation” has its roots
in the Latin natio, or “birth,” which points up the overlapping ideologemes—
filiation, nativeness, community, belonging—that animate both the family
and the modern nation-state.1 Such conceptual intimacy may explain why, for
Derrida, the expression of the nation in familial terms is nearly universal: “The
concept of politics rarely announces itself without some sort of adherence of
the State to the family, without what we will call a schematic of filiation.”2 Cer-
tainly by the turn of the nineteenth c entury this was commonplace, as a few
conspicuous examples show. A c entury e arlier John Locke, for instance, had
extolled the f amily as “the very model for civic governance.”3 European mon-
archy had long been a patriarchal, genealogical model of social power when the
French Revolutionaries rather prominently turned instead to fraternity, spur-
ring a new discourse of the domestic in European foreign affairs.4 And the idea
of liberty as a generational inheritance, most famously promoted by Edmund
Burke, became foundational to English national exceptionalism and what
Hannah Arendt calls its “race-feeling.”5 As Arendt makes clear, the nation-as-
family trope used birth and race to delimit community in ways that always al-
ready had implications for international relations—certainly Romantic writing
about foreign countries was already using the rhetoric of paternalism.6 Indeed,
Rebecca Cole Heinowitz argues that Romantic writers helped advance the
cause of informal empire in Latin America by imagining kinship relations be-
tween the English and the indigenous peoples of the Americas.7 In short, by
the beginning of the nineteenth century, the family was already a well-worn
trope in the imagining of both national and international communities.
In the Victorian period, however, f amily acquired the status of master nar-
rative. At midcentury and beyond, the increasingly dominant ideology of
separate spheres helped establish the family as a virtuous sanctuary in a po-
tentially unstable or corrupt society—and therefore a model for what that so-
ciety could be. The nuclear family became a social and moral obsession for
the Victorians, representing a stable combination of unified community and
hierarchically determined roles.8 A number of recent studies have suggested
that the image of the family was not entirely monolithic,9 but writing from
the Victorian period nevertheless evinces a frequent preoccupation with how
Origin, Generation, Relation, Hybridity 121
heteronormative, nuclear, patriarchal families might be the substrate for—and

formal model of—a stable nation. This was, of course, also highly exportable
to the ever more urgent question of international relations as the c entury pro-
gressed. The 1851 Great Exhibition popularized the notion of the global
“Great Family of Man,” and the phrase “family of nations” took on currency
as way to describe interstate European politics.10 And even before the late-
century imperial boom, Victorians used family to solve the “problem of liv-
ing together”11 created by increased international mobility and the abolition
of slavery. A fter the question “Am I not a man and a b rother?” had been an-
swered affirmatively, the discourse of fraternity and f amily more generally
helped shift British efforts from ending slavery to civilizing the “children” of
the world. The midcentury debate between polygenism and monogenism was
fundamentally about the possibility of imagining the world as genealogically
related, and when Darwinian theory helped confirm a single human origin,
this only abetted fin-de-siècle imperial paternalism. Throughout the Victorian
period, the domestic and the international f amily scales worked together, in
fact, as the need to protect E ngland’s moral familial core (gendered female)
was often used to justify the violent (masculine) work of disciplining the global
family overseas.12 So by the late nineteenth century, the family had become
not merely a familiar bit of rhetoric but an entire epistemology (what I refer
to as genealogical consciousness), a master trope for organizing and explain-
ing political community at home and abroad.13
Like the progress narrative, f amily was especially devastating in its partner-
ship with empire. Anne McClintock argues that after 1859, social Darwin-
ism, scientific racism, and the progress narrative combined to enable the
hierarchization of mankind into an evolutionary family tree with white
Europea ns in the most advanced position. Already under the sway of what
McClintock calls the Victorian “cult of domesticity”—and aided by the ety-
mological slippage through which “domestic” becomes “domesticate” or
“civilize”—late nineteenth-century imperial rhetoric coded the English as
fathers charged with the development of their childlike colonial o thers. This
schema, the “Family of Man,” as McClintock calls it, became “the organizing
trope for marshaling a bewildering array of cultures into a single, global nar-
rative ordered and managed by Europeans.”14 The soon inescapable synthesis
between domestic and imperial discourse had ramifications beyond the cast-
ing of racial others as children: colonial expansion was often justified as the
rightful recovery of lands or peoples belonging to Britain’s genealogical past;
the idea of Greater Britain helped unify the empire through the image of a di
asporic Anglo-Saxon family;15 colonial authority was achieved by policing
actual families to discourage miscegenation or contain female and non-
normative sexuality;16 and as part of the “intricate dialectic” between family
and empire, domestic deviants at home in England were othered through the
racialized discourse of savagery and primitivism.17 The use of familial meta
phors to describe imperial relations was not new—the relationship between
Britain and its American colonies, for instance, had long been described as
parental—but the late Victorian period yoked geopolitic al family to racial
hierarchy in a newly comprehensive way.
The F amily of Man was so foundational to Victorian imperial ideology in
large part because of its intimate collusion with the progress narrative. The
western preoccupation with linearity and causality has entirely naturalized our
experience of being in diachronic time as genealogical. We perceive each mo-
ment as begetting or birthing the next, and we understand ourselves to have
ancestral continuity with the past; this is what Eric Hobsbawm calls “the past
as genealogy” and Patricia Tobin calls “the genealogical imperative.”18 So while
progress might seem to be a diachronic narrative form and f amily a synchronic
structural form, in fact the formal features of progress—protagonism, linear-
ity, and so forth—a lso can be, and often are, expressed as genealogical rela-
tions between past and present. If the phrase “mother country” captures how
deeply family is embedded in our sense of community, the figure of “Father
Time” shows just how neatly it overlaps with our experience of temporality.
Another way to say this is that western epistemology since the nineteenth
century has been shaped by both historical consciousness and genealogical
consciousness in tandem. And b ecause of their close partnership, f amily and
progress w ere jointly foundational to the ideologies of British imperialism. On
one side, what the Victorians understood to be progressive, evolutionary time
helped explain why the Family of Man divided colonizer and colonized into
the unequal developmental roles of parent and child. And in the reverse, the
family offered an “alibi” to the imperial work of the progress narrative by lend-
ing it the apparent naturalness of generational change. F amily, then, became
an equally powerful explanatory framework for “both social hierarchy (syn-
chronic hierarchy) and historical change (diachronic hierarchy).” 19 Where
these two forms intersected, paternalism emerged as the hegemonic expression
of not only individual families but all Victorian social relations, including and
especially empire.
Yet despite their etymological nearness, shared relation to the progress nar-
rative, and pervasive historical co-use, f amily and empire w ere not seamlessly
overlaid. For some Victorians, like Anthony Trollope, the Family of Man
legitimized Britain acting as the parent to its global children, but it also pre-
dicted the colonies’ eventual maturation toward adulthood and independence.
The Family of Man, that is, called for both the beginning and the end of im-
perial rule. F amily was an unruly metaphor that both hewed to traditional
patriarchal authority and inspired visions of fraternal equality, that might be
used to enforce hierarchies or plead for respect, that could be wielded by com-
batants on either side of the colonial encounter.20 It was simultaneously so
central to western imperial rhetoric and so readily repurposed that authors in
colonial and postcolonial spaces have frequently expressed resistance to em-
pire by rewriting the boundaries and relations of national f amily on their own
terms.21
It is with this potential for slippage in mind that I once again turn away
from the history of imperial discourses to focus instead on their forms. As with
the progress narrative, I am interested in the historical conditions that helped
family become a dominant discourse and an accomplice of imperial thought,
and I am interested in the work it did within Victorian literature. But such
historicization has been done extensively already. What I propose to show in-
stead is how the master narrative of political family was composed of specific
formal features, and how t hese variously enabled and troubled its imperial
operations, particularly in the theater of informal empire in Latin America.
Because while family could have wayward effects in the traditional empire—
as in Trollope’s support for decolonization—I will show that its forms were a
particularly recalcitrant fit with the rhetorical demands of informal empire.
One way to think formally about the family as a political discourse is to
say that it is a metaphor, or an analogy, or an allegory. The nations in
question—say, E ngland and Jamaica—are the tenor, and the familial
relations—parent and child—are the vehicle. I am not especially interested
in this kind of formal analysis because it strikes me as too static; moreover,
real families and the ways they were policed and configured were part and
parcel of empire—t hey made up the actual stuff of community and impe-
rial governance—and the formal arrangements of these families both
aided and evaded metaphor. As we w ill see in the chapters that follow,
nineteenth-century fiction was especially good at thinking about Britain
and Latin America in familial terms. Since the characters that populate a novel
can both belong to a specific web of family relations and also metaphorically
stand for a nation, they neatly capture how international “relations” are in-
evitably, and messily, both specific and abstract at the same time. In Jane
Austen’s Mansfield Park, for example, Sir Thomas Bertram is both a father
and a national and imperial authority figure. T hese roles overlap not only
thematically and historically but also formally through repeated structures of
relation. It is not, then, the metaphor of family relations for international
relations that I am concerned with, but rather the specific forms each set of
relations takes—the specific and particu lar alignments that orient Bertram
within his families, both biological and politic al. W hether we are talking
about an individual family or the family as a trope for international politics,
the relations among members have formal properties, and these formal prop-
erties help open the channels through which the levels of the real and the
allegorical are traversed. They shape a f amily at the level of tenor and vehicle
simultaneously.
In discussing the progress narrative in the first half of the book, I labeled
its highly specific forms. That is b ecause progress was the version of histori-
cal consciousness—as opposed to cyclicality or equilibrium, for example—
upon which British international relations were so singularly dependent.
When it comes to genealogical consciousness, however, no single familial form
dominated nineteenth-century international discourse. One, to be sure, was
the paternalistic, hierarchical F amily of Man. But while this was a master
trope of territorial empire, fraternity was often the model for peer or ally re-
lations, and as I will show, Latin American relations frequently inspired dis-
courses of marriage. T hese various images of international f amily all differ in
form, particularly the way they configure ancestry (origin), lineage (genera-
tion), connection (relation), and identity (hybridity). I will, therefore, discuss
these four formal categories, showing how in various iteration and combina-
tion, they create distinct images of family. So instead of describing a partic
ular form of genealogical consciousness and how it clashed with the demands
of informal empire, I will rather show how family became a locus for compet-
ing ideas about informal empire, a site where arguments about international
relations could be fought through competing configurations of family form.
Battles over the familial form that informal empire in Latin America should
take ultimately expose the inconsistent and paradoxical ground upon which
it stood to begin with.
amily is both a network and a narrative. Of the four formal categories I

F
have identified, relation and hybridity describe synchronic, networked forms
(those that align f amily members structurally in the present), while origin and
generation describe diachronic, narrative forms (those that organize a history
of how such structures came to be). Taking the diachronic narrative forms of
family first, we begin, appropriately, with the category of “origin.” This may
seem like a difficult property to trace: Where, after all, in the endlessly recur-
sive ancestry of a family line, is its beginning? But when family and politics
overlap, t here is often an imagined origin: the phrase “founding father” gets
at the way nations-as-families conceive of an originary paternity, and in con-
ceptions of international family, there is often an imagined origin at the mo-
ment of “discovery” or first contact. Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean,
for example, is often framed as the establishing event that made it possible to
speak of Europe and the New World in familial relation and that also facili-
tated the sexual violence and intermarriage that produced mixed families in
the Americas. “Discovery” is a fiction, of course, but that is the point; as
McClintock argues, the fantasy of colonial discovery is the man’s fantasy of
penetrating a virginal feminized land and establishing himself as the f ather,
of choosing an artificial origin from which any issue will be his.22 Because
real family origins are impossible to locate and political ones are purely
mythical, the category of origin affords wide room for competing visions.
Depending on who recounts the story, available frameworks for establishing
the beginning of an international familial tie include (for example): rediscov-
ery of an ancient connection, Edenic blankness first punctured, brutal viola-
tion, or love at first sight. Each of these places familial ancestors into unique,
specific relations with one another and gives an ideological cast to the gen-
erations that follow.
“Generation” is the formal category describing the narrative of descent that
succeeds an originary encounter. It is what is commonly understood as a chain
of causal, linear connections that tie a person to a homeland, give them a
name, entitle them to land, provide them with a racial identity, explain their
health or character, and/or place them into a social caste. It is the narrative we
tell ourselves about where we come from and to whom we are connected, and
its links can take many forms: biological, adoptive, linear, interrupted, patri-
lineal, matrilineal, exogamous, endogamous, and so on. In the west we have
often chosen to tell this as a sequential story of iterative, biological paternity.
Stories of generation matter tremendously in imperial contact zones, where

generations tend (not accidentally) to reproduce the racial hierarchies that op-
press the phenotypically nonwhite, helping arbitrary authority come to seem
as natural over time as birth. Family is a potent site through which power po-
lices the relation between past, present, and future, which is why the specific
formal presentation of generational concerns like inheritance or racial iden-
tity is of such political consequence. We w
ill see how informal empire in Latin
Americ a inspired competing visions of both familial origin and the genera-
tions that follow it.
Origin and generation shape the story of how families came to be—and,
importantly for empire, imply their trajectory into the future—but the syn-
chronic structures of a family network as it exists in the members’ present are
just as crucial, if not more so, to dynamics of power, autonomy, and constraint.
I use the broad category of “relation” to encompass the various formalized
ways that two members of a family can exist in tensile connection, perceiving
themselves as bound together by law, blood, love, and/or social norms.23 “Fili-
ation” is of course the traditional term for relations that are specifically famil-
ial, but unlike the more capacious “relation” it heavily implies parent-child re-
lations in particular, a narrow framework I wish to escape. In this I follow
Édouard Glissant, who theorizes filiation or “root identity” as the specifically
linear, genealogical narrative that underpins the western imperial will to land
and legitimacy, while “relation” describes a more inclusive, rhizomatic array of
contingent, cross-cultural connections.24 For our purposes, relation may de-
scribe the relative position of two members in a family as spousal, parental,
sibling, or avuncular, to name a few. And it may also encompass the nature of
these ties as hierarchical, equitable, coerced, voluntary, sanctioned, extralegal,
loving, pragmatic, antagonistic, sexual, platonic, heterosexual, queer, and so
on. When all these possibilities are considered together, relation as a formal
category runs the risk of proliferating into a meaningless array that erodes the
very meaning of “form.” But I would argue that the sheer variety of ways that
two p eople can be related and still unmistakably be family makes the impor
tant case that family relations have the capacity to be both exceptionally flexi-
ble and markedly resilient at the same time—to be, in other words, recogniz-
ably formal. And the plasticity of this category makes it powerfully susceptible
to the contestations of empire.
Consider the many ways that forms of familial relation intersect with pol-
itics. The imperial Family of Man relies on relations that are parental, hier-
archical, and based on assumptions of unity and structure. Politic al allies,

meanwhile, as in the “mid-Victorian ideal of Europe as a ‘family of nations,’”25
might rely on sibling relations that permit a greater play of autonomy and em-
phasize synchronic over diachronic linkages.26 Within Britain, according to
Talia Schaffer, spousal relations could be conceived of as e ither romantic or
companionate, each of which held different implications for how a w oman
might achieve autonomy. As t hese examples show, the formalized relations
between people, and formalized family relations in particular, are crucial to
the distribution of power. In the case of nineteenth-century empire, the es-
tablishment of power typically relied on the eradication of any relations out-
side of the heteronormative, racially endogamous nuclear family, and in the
mid-t wentieth century, Hannah Arendt warned that tyranny and terror de-
pend on the absolute rupture of human relations altogether.27 Perhaps seek-
ing to chart a course between the dual imperialisms of familial relations and
no relations at all, recent critics have theorized colonial resistance as the strong
articulation of specifically non-familial ties. Jacques Derrida and Leela Gan-
dhi both argue that friendship relations make a more powerful and less hier-
archical politic al model than f amily, and Donna Haraway urges us, in our
contemporary moment of supreme environmental and capitalist precarity, to
break out of “genealogical and biogenetic f amily” kinship structures and in-
stead embrace alternate, “tentacular,” “oddkin” relations within and beyond
the human.28 In short, imperial power since the Victorian period has been
tightly bound up with the specific forms of h uman relations, particularly as
they are conceived of as familial.
The fourth and final category of familial form this half of the book will
consider is “hybridity.” This is one permutation of the larger category of “iden-
tity,” but I focus on hybridity in particular b ecause it is always at stake in the
formation of intercultural f amily—whether at the metaphorical or literal level.
The collision and negotiation of cultures, races, and languages constantly
force the question of how f amily relations w ill produce hybridity. It is the elu-
sive set of shadows cast by relations, the dynamic result of spousal, parental,
or fraternal couplings that shape each individual family member’s sense of self
and nationality. In colonial contexts hybridity may be a source of anxiety for
the colonizer, a passport for individual mobility, the rallying cry of colonial
resistance, or, as Leela Gandhi warns, the calling card of a capitalist, privi-
leged, and therefore quietist capitulation to globalization.29 It may be policed,
celebrated, exploited, or feared, but its implications are always immediately
germane to the creation of formalized familial relations in the context of in-

ternational politics.
Origin, generation, relation, and hybridity, then, are the four formal cat-
egories I w ill use to interrogate the conceptualization of British–Latin Amer-
ican informal empire as a f amily affair. T hese are not specific formal attributes
themselves but categories of form, within which the stakeholders of informal
empire configured the political family in competing arrangements. One the-
sis of this book is that British informal empire in Latin America was concep-
tually, and therefore formally, paradoxical, depending on visions of liberty and
empire at the same time. The f amily trope makes this particularly visible. On
the one hand, the obviously imperial nature of informal empire correlated
with the image so widely deployed in the territorial empire, the Family of
Man. Using these four categories of family form, we can describe the Family
of Man as constituting: an imagined white origin that gives the colonizer
rights to the land; patrilineal generations; rigidly hierarchical, paternalistic re-
lations between colonizer and colonized; and codified resistance to hybrid-
ity. But the discourse of informal empire also relied heavily on the image of
Latin America as an independent and sovereign partner, so that the familial
image of its relationship to Britain was often one of marriage. And t hese mar-
ital arrangements had irreconcilably opposite forms: a cooperative originary
encounter; uncertain and contingent lines of generation; elective, loving, eq-
uitable relations between partners; and the embrace of hybridity as both in-
evitable and just. These alternately paternalistic and spousal families show
how contestable f amily forms w ere, since they produced belonging in oppo-
site ways—one as possession and the other as community.30 At stake in this
conversation, then, was the question of whether Latin America belonged to
Britain as an imperial possession and a familial dependent, or whether both
sides belonged to a new Atlantic f amily as equals. Both visions circulated in
Victorian literary depictions of British–Latin American relations, offering a
reminder that f amily relations on all scales are discursive, socially constructed
understandings of position and function, legible through iteration rather than
essentiality, both formally arranged and susceptible to reconfigurations within
historical contexts. For these reasons, Victorian writers saw family relations
as a powerful way to explore the contradictions and ramifications of informal
empire in Latin America.
The following chapters offer readings of letters, memoirs, and fiction,
though they focus centrally on the novel. But because I am less interested in
analyzing literary form than I am in assessing how literature conceives the so-
cial in formal terms, I have not set out to pursue the novel in particular, in-
stead seeking out literary conceptions of British–Latin American family and
finding them in the novel. This, however, is probably not a coincidence. Many
critics have noted that the nineteenth-century novel has a constitutive relation-
ship with genealogy and f amily form; as Barry McCrea puts it:
The ideas of narrative and f amily are so closely interwoven that it is hard to sepa-
rate them. Narrative and family both attempt to plot a relationship between
what came before and what comes a fter; both organize the unknowable jumble
of events and people who preceded us into a coherent array of precedence, se-
quence, and cause. They imagine continuity between different moments in
time, and they draw affinities—“ kinship”—between disparate or distant people
and events. The rites and rituals of genealogy—marriage and paternity—are the
basis for the classical frameworks of narrative.31
The nineteenth-century novel leveraged these inherent connections between

genealogy and narrative to emplot familial notions of nation and community,
leading critics to coin such generic terms as “family romance,” “genealogical
plot,” “national romance,” and “colonial f amily romance”32 to describe nov-
els of the period. So it makes sense that nineteenth-century visions of British–
Latin American family form can so frequently be found in the novel.
This was a transatlantic phenomenon. Like their counterparts in Europe
and the United States, Latin American revolutionaries figured their new na-
tions as re-formed families, breaking from the corrupt patriarchalism of the
Spanish crown in favor of an American brotherhood.33 And just as Victorian
writers hinged the nation and the novel together around the axis of the f amily,
so too did post-independence Latin American novelists use what Doris Som-
mer calls “national romance” to imagine their new national communities. As
Sommer shows, novelists during the era of postcolonial national consolidation
in Latin America told love stories that served as allegories for national unity
and the coming together of different social strata. Their aim was “literally to
engender new nations” by “project[ing] ideal histories backward (as a legiti-
mating ground) and forward (as a national goal).”34 Like British novels of the
same period, t hese stories took for granted a potent symbiosis among nation,
family, and narrative, and were likewise invested in linearity and progress.
And in fact, as both Benedict Anderson and Timothy Brennan argue, it was
New World—and especially Latin American—independence movements that
forged the modern concept of nationalism in the first place, yoked directly to
the emergence of print culture and the novel.35 But this strong view of Latin
Americ a’s progress and sovereignty only intensified the nineteenth-century
problematic of representing Britain’s imperial ambitions in the region. Family
models would have to account for the dualities of British–Latin American re-
lations, their Janus-faced desires for independence and dependence, progress
and regress, belonging and belonging all at once. It is the novel’s exploration
of this precise crux—how the contradictory impulses of informal empire could
be represented as a single coherent model of international family—t hat the
following chapters w ill pursue.
In chapter 4, I turn to mid-nineteenth-century Argentine historian and
novelist Vicente Fidel López, and in chapter 5, I look to British fin-de-siècle
novelist H. Rider Haggard. Both writers, though separated by an ocean and
several decades, produce strikingly similar responses to the question of how
Britain and Latin America might be conceived as members of the same f amily.
Both write historical novels set during the era of Spanish conquest and early
colonial rule, and both indulge the vision of a British-led resistance—not one
that ultimately defies history by defeating the Spaniards, but one that permits
a lengthy exploration of the alternate familial dynamics that might have struc-
tured a British, rather than Spanish, relationship with the Americas. In
doing so, they both use a sixteenth-century setting to work through nineteenth-
century geopolitical concerns, deploying familial form as the conceptual
link between the two. López and Haggard are thinking through possible ge-
nealogies of informal empire, seeking origins and lines of descent that might
explain British–Latin American relations in their present and near future.
In both chapters, the historical novels I discuss are organized around a ro-
mantic connection between a British man and a Latin American w oman
(indigenous or Creole), which models what international family might look
like between the two communities. López and Haggard stage t hese roman-
tic, spousal family relations as the kind of equitable, cooperative international
partnership that both Britain and Latin Americ a claim to want with each
other in the nineteenth c entury; they are love matches that blossom in the
shadow of Spanish cruelty. Importantly for nineteenth-century Atlantic pol-
itics, t hese marriages turn out to be incompatible with the exploitations of
empire, as British husbands’ real love for their American wives interrupts any
desire they might have for the kinds of profiteering that informal empire was
threatening. That kind of plunder is by contrast associated with paternalistic
familial relations like those the conquering Spanish are depicted as seeking.
Haggard is ultimately less convinced that Britons and indigenous Americans

can form a real connection across their cultural divide, while López’s greater
optimism on this score leads him to be less wary of the threat of British power.
But the similarity of the stories they tell permits us to draw some larger con-
clusions about the forms of informal empire. By erecting a contrast between
two different arrangements of international family, one imperial and one libera-
tory, López and Haggard split the dual drives of informal empire—liberation
and subjugation—into two different family forms. Informal empire, then,
emerges as a paradoxical idea that cannot be represented by a single coherent
model of family.
Chapter 6, the final chapter of the book, continues to interrogate the dy-
namics of international f amily, though it focuses less on relational arrange-
ments (spousal vs. paternal, for example) and turns instead to the question of
how British–L atin American contact does or does not produce hybrid sub-
jects. I read across the body of work by a late-nineteenth and early-t wentieth-
century author who was himself a hybrid subject of informal empire: William
Henry Hudson. Born to US American emigrants who settled in Argentina,
Hudson spent the first thirty-four years of his life among the gauchos of the
pampas before emigrating to Britain. Though best known for his naturalist
and ornithological work, Hudson returned again and again to the subject of
his native South Americ a, whose natural beauties he believed were already
nearly lost to the ravages of European industrial capitalism at the end of the
Victorian period. Drawing on his letters, memoirs, and primarily on his novel
The Purple Land, I explore the ways that Hudson imagined that the contact
zone could turn an Englishman Argentine and therefore, in his view, ward off
imperial attitudes and actions. He suggests that marriage to a local woman is
indeed one step t oward anti-colonial hybridity, but that in fact the pampas are
already doomed because true hybridity is impossible; English and Argentine
people can only gaze at one another across an unclosable cultural gap that he
figures as a fundamentally different understanding of both narrative and
family form. Paradoxically, then, the closer understanding an Englishman has
of South American culture, the clearer it becomes that he is irrevocably di-
vided from it. Hybridity produces its own impossibility, and it is through
this gap that the forces of informal empire have slipped, leaving South Amer
ica devastated by European greed.
All the novels in t hese chapters could be said to revolve around British–
Latin American marriages, though they are not marriage plots per se. Rather,
their abiding concern for how their marriages instantiate the grand scale of
international relations makes them more like what Doris Sommer calls “na-
tional romances.” This of course conjures Fredric Jameson’s famous declara-
tion that in all “third-world literature” the destinies of individual characters
allegorize the destinies of their nations.36 And in my readings, the form of the
novel, with its rich descriptions of individual characters’ relationships and feel-
ings, does allow t hese authors to think through the implications of the more
abstract discourses of international relations in ways that resonate with Jame-
son’s account of allegory. Yet as Sommer reminds us, the first / third world
distinction postdates the nineteenth c entury, when New and Old World w ere
the more salient categories. And more importantly, allegorical reading in
Jameson’s sense does not quite capture the complexity of the relationship be-
tween f amily form, international relations, and the novel. T hese texts know
that individual families are not merely metaphors for national and interna-
tional communities; they are this, but also, national and international com-
munities conceive of themselves as and through abstracted familial forms re-
moved from any particular instances, and also, national and international
communities construct themselves through the arrangement and policing of
actual families. The families at the center of t hese texts, then, are not simply
allegories for the nation. Rather, family is a form simultaneously social, liter-
ary, and geopolitical, one that describes relations among people and nations,
tacking dynamically between the literal and the abstract in a process that con-
structs both reciprocally.37 As such, these novels are also not straightfor-
wardly pro-or anti-imperial. Rather, by maneuvering within the connective
tissues that formalize family relations at both individual and international
scales, they reveal the ways that informal empire’s dual rhetoric of allegiance
and domination implicitly called for families with paradoxical and unsustain-
able form.
c h a p t e r f ou r
Vicente Fidel López

Re-members the Nation
To begin exploring the incongruity between informal empire and discourses

of family, I turn first to Argentina. A fter securing independence from Spain
in the 1820s, the new Latin American republics worked to establish financial
stability, national identity, and the institutions of statehood, but in Argentina
these efforts stalled in the face of internal friction. Throughout the 1830s and
40s, Argentina remained a loosely connected set of provinces plagued by civil
war and ruled by the violent totalitarian governor of Buenos Aires, Juan Man-
uel de Rosas. Frustrated by what they saw as Argentina’s failure to consoli-
date and modernize a fter independence, a group calling themselves the Gen-
eración del ’37—named for the year in which they opened their salon—emerged
as a liberal intellectual movement against Rosas’s dictatorship. The Gene
ración del ’37 included some of the most important writers in Argentine—
and Latin American—history, such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Bar-
tolomé Mitre, José Mármol, Juan Bautista Alberdi, and Esteban Echeverría.
Most of them w ere born during the wars of independence, and they saw them-
selves as sons and inheritors of the revolution. They sought to revive its
promise of progress and enlightenment by pushing for the formalization of a
constitutional state and the creation of a postcolonial national imaginary
through literature. In fact, “the ideology of progress in nineteenth-century
Latin America was nowhere better expressed than in Argentina by the vocal
Generation of 1837, an exceptionally articulate group of liberal intellectuals
who bequeathed a formidable literary and politic al legacy.” 1 As dual writers
and politicians, these men understood literature and governance as twinned
halves of their nationalist project. This chapter will discuss one novel to arise
out of this generation’s efforts, La novia del hereje (The Heretic’s Bride), writ-
ten in 1840 (but published in 1854) by Vicente Fidel López.2 Born in the middle
of the independence wars, López truly inherited the idea of a free Argentina:
his father wrote the Argentine national anthem and held some of the highest
politic al offices in Argentina before, during, and a fter Rosas’s rule. López,
therefore, belonged to “one of the most well-known families closely identified
with the birth and history of Argentina as an independent republic,”3 and La
novia was forged in the fires of intensive national self-fashioning.
Novelizing the nation was not solely an Argentine phenomenon. During
the post-independence era across Latin America, a “stunning” number of nov-
elists were also political figures, and according to Doris Sommer they used
stories of romantic love to figure the coming-together of their new nations as
families.4 These “national novels,” Sommer argues, defined a generation of
Latin American literature, becoming for later readers “as plainly identifiable
as national anthems.”5 They used family not only to figure national unity but
also to orient their nations in relation to history. Standing at the historical
turning point between centuries of colonial rule and an unknown but sover-
eign future, their aim was “to fill in a history that would help to establish the
legitimacy of the emerging nation and . . . to direct that history toward a
future ideal.”6 The discourses of progress and f amily—or historical and genea-
logical consciousness—were therefore deeply intertwined, not only in Eu
rope but in Latin America as well. The Generación del ’37 in Argentina was
no exception, and López was particularly invested in the role that history
could play in forging national identity: after Rosas’s defeat, he became one of
“the two major nineteenth-century historians of Argentina”7 (Mitre being the
other) and “one of the precursors of modern Argentinean historiography.”8 For
López, national culture emerged at the narrative intersection of history and
fiction,9 a convergence he tried to capture with La novia. While it is not t oday
considered a major work of Argentine literature, it has been called “one of the
best historical novels written in Spanish America in the nineteenth c entury,”
a “forerunner” of the Latin American historical novel, “one of the most inter
esting novels of Hispanic-A merican romanticism,” and “the [second-]most
important narrative effort in the anti-Rosas period.”10 So if it does not loom
large in the Argentine canon, La novia is nonetheless an important exemplar
of how the historical novel emerged amid Argentina’s effort to create national
identity.
Unlike many Latin American national novels, however, López’s vision of
national family was decidedly international. Set in 1578 in the new city of
Lima, La novia portrays the Spanish, who have recently defeated the Inca,
Vicente Fidel López Re-members the Nation 135
formalizing their colonial rule. The story gets its tension from the arrival of
English pirates, who become champions of all those oppressed by Spain’s in-
choate but tyrannical social order, and the novel closes happily on two mar-
riages between limeña women and the Englishmen who have rescued them.
It is no coincidence that the British are the heroes of López’s tale. The setting
of La novia—incipient, uncertain, colonial Lima—is a spatially and tempo-
rally displaced analogue for López’s own turbulent new society—incipient,
uncertain, postcolonial Argentina in the second quarter of the nineteenth
century—which he hoped might likewise embrace the English as a liberatory
force.
During those midcentury decades in Argentina, López and the Generación
del ’37 fought for and achieved three interlocking goals: the formation of a
constitutional republic, increased economic security, and a sense of national
identity. They saw t hese as fundamentally intertwined, in large part because
for each one they looked to the influence of France and especially Britain. Like
other liberals across Latin America, they sought to accelerate growth through
British and French immigration and investment (Alberdi even suggested that
Argentine w omen o ught to marry British immigrants to create a new, pros-
perous race in Argentina),11 and by the mid-to late-nineteenth c entury, Brit-
ish capital increasingly began to dictate the terms of Latin American indus-
trialization (much more on its influence on Argentine agriculture in chapter 6).
The Generación del ’37 also self-consciously looked to model both Argenti-
na’s formal institutions and national culture on the ideals of British and French
Romanticism, a movement they saw as marrying literary and political notions
of enlightenment liberty. Despite the apparent remove of sixteenth-century
Lima, therefore, La novia del hereje exemplifies both López’s and Sarmiento’s
belief that the historical novel could be “an instrument for progress” in their
efforts to establish a liberal national imaginary in the nineteenth c entury.12
Lima in 1578, like Argentina in the nineteenth century, was a new South
American polity struggling for stability amid local tyranny and global capi-
talism, and López used this flashpoint between present and past to suggest
that Britain could help orient Latin Americ a t oward a new enlightenment
future. The novel elevates the British as a more attractive European partner
than the Spanish, encoding this preference into the very national history that
López and his circle were shoring up. (It is perhaps easy to see why the Latin
American Boom novelists of the twentieth c entury would reject what they saw
as “the linear logic of economic developmentalism” exhibited in national
novels like López’s.)13 La novia, I w

ill show, precisely captures the ways that
national identity formation under the specter of informal empire invited re-
thinking of the formal contours of an international f amily.
In using the historical novel as a lever for national consolidation, both
López and Sarmiento also believed they w ere following a British model: that
of Walter Scott. Sarmiento believed that Scott’s historical novels had raised
Scotland out of barbarism, and he was proud when his own anti-Rosas work
of inventive non-fiction Facundo (1845) was compared to Scott’s writing.14 Sim-
ilarly, in the preface to La novia, López writes that Scott inspired him to
write historical novels as an act of “the purest patriotism”:
Parecíame entonces que una serie de novelas [historicas] . . . era una empresa
digna de tentar al más puro patriotismo; porque creía que los pueblos en donde
falte el conocimiento claro y la conciencia de sus tradiciones nacionales, son como
los hombres desprovistos de hogar y de familia, que consumen su vida en oscu-
ras y tristes aventuras sin que nadie quede ligado a ellos por el respeto, por el amor,
o por la gratitud. . . . Esta es quizás la causa de que Walter Scott y Cooper sean
únicos en el mundo moderno: es un hecho al menos, que los pueblos para quienes
escribieron son los únicos en donde se respetan las tradiciones nacionales como
una creencia inviolable. (11–12)15
In linking his literary effort to Scott’s, López argues that national history, as
provided by the historical novel, gives a people “home and family.” This al-
most Burkean philosophy, the notion that a shared past unites a p eople
through “respect, . . . love, . . . [and] gratitude,” is one that López also believed
operated in reverse, that strong family connections “would, in their turn, pro-
vide a foundation for the individual’s participation in public life in the com-
ing democratic age.”16 He goes on to say that his goal with La novia was “echar
una mirada al pasado desde las fragosidades de la revolución para concebir la
línea de generación que han llevado los sucesos, y orientarnos en cuanto al fin
de nuestra marcha” (12).17 When he says that he aspired to “conceive the line
of generation” of history, López’s use of the verb “concebir” (to conceive), a
word that means both to perceive something that already exists and to bring
something new into being, expresses his belief that history is not just found
but created. This is what Raúl Ianes refers to as López’s desire to emulate Scott
in creating “una prehistoria del presente nacional.”18 But the further conno-
tations of pregnancy and descendancy in the words “conceive” and “genera-
tion” also suggest that this “prehistory” was specifically a genealogy.
History, for López, establishes the bounds of the national family. It con-
structs the nation by giving it familial form. This further aligns with his be-
lief that the historical novel can bring back what’s lost to the historical rec
ord, which is “family life.” As he writes in the preface to the novel, “el novelista
hábil puede reproducir con su imaginación la parte perdida creando libremente
la vida familiar y sujetándose estrictamente á la vida histórica en las combi-
naciones que haga de una y otra para reproducir la verdad completa” (21).19
This combination of the major events of the historical record with the recre-
ation of lost family experience is, for him, “the whole truth” of history. So it
makes sense that in his novel about the clash between Americ a, Spain, and
England, López tropes international relations through family and marriage
plots. The novel’s full title, La novia del hereje: o, La inquisición de Lima (The
Heretic’s Bride: Or, The Inquisition of Lima) captures this scalar homology be-
tween individual and international relationships: the heretic British sailor’s
love for the Creole w oman in López’s story is both a marriage plot and an al-
legory for shifting Latin American ties from Spain to Britain. Fantasizing
that the British might historically have been more benevolent family members
than the Spanish, and that they might, analogously, be so in the nineteenth
century, the novel attempts to “re-member” the nation, to suggestively insert
the British into Latin American history as both political allies and loving an-
cestors. As I w ill show, López uses the historical setting of La novia to sug-
gest a contemporary Latin American identity that is both post-Spanish and
pro-British;20 he is, if you like, specifying the terms of a divorce and a new
marriage for nineteenth-century Argentina. His novel, therefore, articulates
new possible political relations by tapping into the convergence of historical
consciousness and genealogical consciousness that pervaded mid-nineteenth-
century understandings of the nation.
And yet ironically, perhaps troublingly, López finds that building Argen-
tine identity is best done by following British and US literary models,21 and
the plot of La novia enables a counterfactual fantasy in which the Latin Amer-
ican family tree grows out of British roots. So he turns to the historical novel
as a form that can stitch past and present into the fabric of national identity,
but this identity is also modeled a fter, financed by, and ancestrally descended
from the British. The object of my investigation in this chapter, and in part
II of this book generally, is the way literature expresses this very convergence—
Britain’s tightening informal empire after Latin American independence,
and the understanding of this relationship in genealogical terms. López, who
saw this convergence as central to Argentina’s earliest national self-fashioning,

participated in the construction of what I call geopolitical genealogy, or the
expression of (inter)national history as familial relation. This, I will argue, is
a set of forms that emerge clearly through their expression in literature. In
order to convey the simultaneous power and danger of European relations
with Latin America, López scales down common geopolitical family tropes
to the level of individual characters and explores the ways that their different
forms—in particular, origin, relation, and hybridity—may e ither be exploited
by oppressors or nurtured by allies. He describes the Spanish-A merican family
as having the paternalistic structure so commonly expressed in imperial dis-
course: its origins are pragmatic, its relations are forced, and its hybrid descen-
dants are treated as hierarchically inferior. By contrast, he imagines the pos-
sibility of an Anglo-A merican f amily that is not paternal but spousal, and
whose forms are therefore inverted: it has affective origins, freely chosen rela-
tions, and hybrid members who enjoy equality. La novia, then, suggests that
differently articulated forms of the geopolitic al family metaphor correlate
with, and can perhaps even bring about, anti-colonial forms of international
relations. But as I argue throughout this book, while British informal empire
in Latin America invited revision of geopolitical master narratives like progress
and f amily, the tension between its liberatory and oppressive drives consis-
tently elicited formal paradoxes—which López would be unable, finally, to
reconcile into a happy political family.
Origin
La novia del hereje is at once painstakingly intent on displaying its fidelity to
the past and fascinatingly counterfactual. The story is set one generation a fter
the major conquest of the Inca Empire and just a few years after the execu-
tion of Túpac Amaru definitively cemented Spanish rule in Peru. Lima is a
new city, soon to become a centerpiece of Spain’s American empire, and the
Spanish are rapidly building infrastructure, compelling the surviving indig-
enous people into labor, and consolidating religious and administrative power.
López focalizes his narrative particularly on the outsize role of the Spanish
priests and the Inquisition’s ability to command ideological order. But this set-
ting is also multinational and multiracial, and the spark of rebellion has not
entirely burned out. The narrative gets its tension from a simmering under-
current of resistance by European, indigenous, African, marginalized Creole,22
and mixed-race p eople opposed to Spanish rule; and the rumored arrival of
English pirates off the coast hints at the precarity of Spanish power. Mean-
while, López never lets us lose sight of the ruined Inca settlement Pachacamac
looming over the city, a reminder that this has recently been—and still is—a
contested space.
Early in the story, the English pirates, led by Francis Drake, arrive off the
coast of Lima and successfully sack the yearly shipment of colonial profit that
has just set sail for Spain—a reference to the historical Drake’s sacking of the
Spanish Cacafuego in the same year. But beyond this point, López begins to
take liberties with history. He invents for Drake a strapping, heroic young
second-in-command named Henderson, who falls in love with a high-ranking
limeña Creole named María, and their illicit affair sets off both romantic and
political hostilities. B
ecause María has already been promised by her f ather to
a Spanish aristocrat, her love for the Englishman gets her imprisoned by the
corrupt Spanish priests, who have worked hard to paint the English as hereti-
cal devils. Driven by his love for María and his abhorrence of Spanish tyr-
anny, Henderson joins the resistance coa lition, who uncover the hypocrisy of
the church and, with the help of a timely earthquake, break María f ree. In the
end, López is too constrained by history to imagine full defeat of the Span-
ish, but he leaves them to rebuild their collapsed city while Henderson and
María, and—in the novel’s most remarkable counterfactual invention—Drake
and his new wife, Juana (María’s indigenous servant), make happier lives in
England. López’s perhaps unsubtle thesis is that the Spanish have been the
cruel, devil-like “herejes” (heretics) all along, while the English are righteous
saviors who treat Creole and indigenous p eoples as equals.
This is a story deeply interested in origins—particularly the historical and
possible origins of European–New World relations. The Spanish Conquest is
a powerful origin story in this genre; it is the initial combustion that ignited
centuries of empire and made possible both the literal and figurative family
ties that would define modern Latin Americ a. And although it was over by
1578, the recent history of plunder and slaughter hangs thickly in the narra-
tive atmosphere of La novia, as in this description of Pachacamac lying ruined
in the outskirts of Lima:
La inmensa y opulenta ciudad yacía ahora derrumbada al derredor de la colina

en que antes había ostentado sus grandezas, mirando, por decirlo así, desde la
tristeza de su sepulcro, las coquetas gracias con que Lima se alzaba joven y flore-
ciente a unas pocas millas en el mismo valle. Pachacamac había sido para los pe-
ruanos lo que Jerusalén para los cristianos, lo que la Meca para los musulmanes,
el objeto de las peregrinaciones de los devotos. . . . El culto de Pachacamac y de
Viracocha había excitado toda la indignación y la codicia de los españoles. Her-
nando Pizarro vino el primero, derribó los ídolos, saqueó los templos y las casas,
e hizo abandonar la ciudad que en pocos años perdió sus techos y quedó en ruinas.
(546–547)23
This origin is defined by two principal attributes: it is imperial, and it is un-

dertaken in service of Spain’s self-interest. Latin American cities like Lima owe
their origins to the wanton destruction of a flourishing people who, just like
Jews, Christians, and Muslims, built beautiful sites of worship. Ruined Pacha-
camac now lies condemned like a troubled ghost to watch from the purga-
tory of its “tomb” while Lima rises up in its place as the centerpiece of a new
empire. The origin that La novia marks, then, is the moment when Spain vio-
lently subjugated the indigenous into the imperial hierarchy and familial
intermarriage upon which modern Latin Americ a would be built. The pal
impsestic geography in this scene, as the new city overwrites the old, depicts
the zero-sum nature of this imperial encounter—it is the beginning of a story
in which only one protagonist will reap benefits. La novia also specifically con-
veys that the affect of this origin was pragmatic in nature. The novel begins
with a lengthy historical account of the Conquest, emphasizing that it was
conducted primarily so that Spain could revive its flagging economy and
“oprimir” the rest of Europe (29).24 So whether it was the “greed” of the con-
quistadors or the ambition of the kings who sent them, the origin of Spain’s
American empire lies in its acquisitive, mercenary, pragmatic ambitions.
By contrast, Francis Drake’s presence in the novel offers a vision of what it
might have looked like had the British been the ones to “discover” Latin
America. A fter sacking the imperial Spanish galleon, Drake escapes to Pan-
ama, where he encounters and leagues with the Cimarrones. The Cimarrones
were primarily escaped slaves, not indigenous peoples, but here they evoke
European–New World first encounter, being rather pointedly referred to as “la
primera nación del mundo” (507).25 This scene, therefore, stages an alternate
origin, a meeting between the English and the “first” people of Panama. The
Cimarron cacique (chief) begins by demanding to know w hether Drake comes
“de paz ó de guerra” (508), to which Drake responds that as long as the Ci-
26
marrones are enemies of Spain, he not only comes in peace but will reward
their assistance with half the loot from his raids. An allegiance is quickly
formed. So although the parties elect peace instead of war, their mutual in-
terest in safety and profit could suggest that English-A merican encounter is,
like the Spanish-A merican one, primarily pragmatic.
But the utilitarian is not nearly as prominent as the affective. Upon meet-
ing, “en pocos momentos se comprendieron los dos jefes” (508),27 suggesting
a mutual, nearly instinctive understanding between two men who, despite
what we are reminded are Drake’s superior numbers and weapons, are dehi-
erarchized simply as “the two chiefs.” Henderson’s approach to the cacique is
even more pointedly presented as affective. He first tries to demonstrate his
merit by shooting a bird, whereupon the cacique g ently suggests that real lead-
ers do not fire arrows from their hands but from their souls. Chastised, Hen-
derson says that he would like to “ser tu amigo,” to which the chief responds:
“Veo que tenéis flechas para el corazón de tus amigos, y yo les abro mi pecho
para que entren” (524).28 This scene, set up as a foil to Spanish-A merican be-
ginnings, offers a pointed contrast by invoking weapons. Henderson fires
arrows at the heart of the Cimarron chief, but unlike the conquistadors’ real
use of violent weapons, these are only metaphorical arrows of friendship. This
encounter, in fact, is explicitly anti-imperial: we are told that Drake’s alliance
with the Cimarrones lasts for years b ecause he shares his spoils from the Span-
ish vessels with “brillante generosidad y honradez” (510)29 —a literal return
of ill-gotten Spanish wealth to the hands of the slaves who were used to ex-
tract it. Whereas the originary moment in the story of Spanish-A merican re-
lations was pragmatic, zero-sum, and colonial, this fantasy of an alternate
English-A merican origin is affective, mutually beneficial, and anti-colonial.
This same dynamic of affective, intuitive connection plays out a second
time when the English first encounter another group of Americans oppressed
by Spain: the Creoles. Henderson and Drake first meet the Spanish and Cre-
ole residents of Lima when they seize their ship, aboard which is Spaniard don
Felipe and his daughter María, whom we are later told is the quintessential
representative of the American Creole. Despite powerf ul Inquisition propa-
ganda depicting the English as literal horned devils, and despite the fact that
Henderson is there to loot her father’s vessel, María’s first impression is love
at first sight—she experiences immediate, instinctive kinship with the En
glishman: “Al verlo no pudo contener el ¡ay! de admiración que le arrancara
la belleza del joven que tenía por delante. Aquello le parecía un sueño; y sus
miradas inexpertas y candorosas revelaban de más en más el predominio que
estaban ejerciendo sobre su ánimo la hermosura y la gentileza de aquel

hombre.—¡Oh! ¡Dios mío! ¡este es cristiano como nosotros!” (97).30 It is not a
process of rational error-correction but rather an intuitively felt, “dream”-like
state of understanding that changes María’s perception and, in a single instant,
communicates to her that she and the Englishman share the bond of Chris
tianity. Although they both speak Spanish, Henderson and María fall in love
without words, sharing glances that are like “una fuerza inexplicable” and
move María through “una emoción interna más fuerte que su voluntad”
(124).31 María, of course, chooses this subrational love, this emotional under-
standing she shares with the Englishman, over the cold, tyrannical abuse of
her Spanish f ather. And like the Cimarron encounter, this one also suggests
not empire but its disruption, as the English rob Spain of the wealth they have
used indigenous and Creole labor to plunder. T hese scenes, therefore, echo the
thesis that Americans might be better off leagued with affective, anti-imperial
England rather than pragmatic, imperial Spain. The idea of a Creole breach
with Spain in favor of English support is the very origin story López was hop-
ing would play out in post-independence Argentina. La novia antedates the
seeds of its possibility.
Yet another example appears in the encounter between the English and the
diverse resistance coalition operating subversively in Lima. By the 1570s, Lima,
in the narrator’s words, “empezaba ya a ser entonces la famosa Babel ameri-
cana” (42),32 populated with indigenous, African, Spanish, Creole, European,
and mixed-race people.33 W hether they are marginalized by race, wealth, re-
ligion, or sexuality, all those oppressed in Lima share, as their leader and
Italian nationalist don Bautista says, “la misma causa!” (444)34 against Spain’s
rule. And without even meeting Drake, don Bautista claims him as a natural
ally in that cause, telling Henderson: “El pirata, el bandido, el ladrón, el aven-
turero, el indio, todo aquél en fin, que quiera levantar una arma contra el rey
de España, me contará entre sus aliados; por eso he servido a vuestro jefe
[Drake]; que a fe mía, ¡bien lo merece por sus méritos!” (652).35 All t hose sub-
jugated by Spain, then—whether slave, Creole, indigenous, mixed-race, or
even Italian—recognize the twinned traits of the English: their intuitive con-
nection with o thers and their anti-imperial politics.
And the novel fully drives home the contrast between Spanish-A merican
and English-A merican origin stories when, in the story’s climax, Henderson’s
rescue team meets their ally Mateo in the ruins of Pachacamac—the very site
the narrator has used to decry Spanish colonialism. The ruined city that sym-
bolized Spanish intolerance and conquest becomes a symbol of British-led

liberation from the Spanish regime: in a scene that plays the Conquest in re-
wind, the English march from ruined Pachacamac to Lima to rescue an Inca
and a Creole, by disguising themselves as African slaves being led to sale. The
novel’s fantasy of an English origin story in Latin America is therefore one of
shared feeling and politic al equality that directly inverts the narrative of
Spain’s own pragmatic, imperial New World encounter.
Relation
hese originary moments of contact between Europe and Latin America are
T
so important b ecause they lead, with the passage of time, to intermarriage and
the creation of American f amily structures. La novia is particularly interested
in the ways such f amily structures w ere linked to larger forms of social orga
nization. By 1578, t here w
ere many families in Lima formed through Spanish-
American contact. And in an aside in the middle of the novel, the narrator
argues that families headed by Spaniards, w hether royal, middle-class, or ob-
scure, w ere invariably organized in the same oppressive, patriarchal forms as
Spanish society itself:
El organismo de la casa reposaba todo sobre el despotismo y la arbitrariedad del

padre. El eje de la sociedad doméstica no era el amor, que es el único elemento
moralizante de la domesticidad; sus formas carecían de la ternura, que no es sino
la expresión educatriz y genuina de ese amor; y todos los resortes por fin se con-
centraban en el del miedo. . . . Apelamos a la historia para ratificar nuestras ob-
servaciones. Cualquiera que se tome el trabajo de inquirir el estado doméstico de
aquellos países y aquellas épocas donde han aparecido grandes y bárbaros tiranos,
donde la sociedad se ha visto sumida en mayor corrupción, hallará que el pri
mero de sus rasgos es el despotismo paterno introducido en las relaciones de la
casa. (317–318)36
The key phrase h ere is “paternal despotism,” a notion that links individual
fathers to oppressive monarchs by suggesting that paternalism is a relational
form common to both the family and the state. Families partake of the same
despotism as the political regime, and the political regime is just as paternal-
istic as the family. Domestic and national oppression occur in tandem,37 thus
not merely offering the f amily as a metaphor for the state but actually suggest-
ing a scalar continuity between the two forms. The policing of domestic life
was central to both the specific policies and figural language of European em-
pires; this complex mutuality is what Ann Stoler calls “the affective grid of
colonial politics.”38 And as Doris Sommer argues, this was precisely what Latin
American novelist–nation builders like López drew on as they penned stories
that placed romantic love and national belonging into “mutual allegory,” a
“contiguous, coextensive as opposed to merely analogous” relationship.39
What’s at stake in the central conflict of La novia, then, is the question of
which European power w ill shape the dual formal organization of American
social life and American families. This is clear in the fight the resistance coali
tion is waging against the Spanish authority, as each of the three central
conspirators—Henderson, don Bautista, and Mercedes—are motivated by
both a moral objection to Spanish oppression and the loss of close family
members to Spanish violence. Don Bautista tells Mercedes that their shared
cause is “venganza sobre los opresores de tu patria y de tu familia” (444).40
This fight against Spanish rule is therefore irreducibly dual in nature; because
families and nations are mutually producing, the anti-Spanish coalition is bat-
tling equally for domestic and social liberation. To shorthand this complex
overlap I will hereafter use the term “politico-family” to refer to the ways that
real families and the social organization of a polity are both formally homolo-
gous and mutually constitutive—that is, to the structural continuity between
domestic and social form. Politico-family is a categorical designation, of which
Anne McClintock’s “Family of Man” would be one example, but in La novia,
politico-families are formed in various ways, not only imperially. The rela-
tional organization of the characters in the novel offers an explanation for why
the Spanish-American origin story produced imperial politico-families while
the counterfactual British-American origin might have engendered a libera-
tory one. As I w ill show in this section, La novia presents three ways in which
Anglo- American and Spanish- American families have differ ent relational
structures. First, like their origins, Anglo-American family relations are affec-
tive while Spanish-American ones are primarily pragmatic; as the narrator says
in the passage above, what makes Spanish families “tyrannical” and devoid of
“free will”—in other words, imperial in form—is their basis in power rather
than “love” or “tenderness.” The second difference is that the key Spanish-
American relations are paternal while their Anglo counterparts are spousal;
and the third distinction is between Spanish-American family relations that
are imposed versus Anglo-American ones that are freely chosen.
Spanish-indigenous family Spanish-Creole family
Padre Andrés
marriage
Mamapanki Don Felipe
(Spanish) (Inca) (Spanish)
paternity
paternity
marriage
Juana Don Antonio María
(Spanish-Inca) (Spanish) (Creole)
Chart 2
In the novel t here are two principal Spanish-A merican family structures
(chart 2). The Spanish-indigenous family is formed when a young Padre
Andrés, the corrupt Inquisition priest who w ill l ater spearhead María’s per-
secution, kills a well-connected man in a fight and takes refuge in an Inca
community. The Inca welcome him with open arms and even agree to let
him to marry the beautiful young Mamapanki. Recalling all of this later,
Mamapanki’s sister Mercedes describes how their father took Padre An-
drés in:
Mi padre le acordó el recinto de su casa con una bondad infinita de corazón: fue
obra de un instante procurarlo un traje de indio; y guardarlo en la casa con un
sigilo inviolable, nos fue fácil porque estando aislada nuestra raza del trato íntimo
con la de los españoles se había establecido de suyo una asociación fraternal en-
tre todos sus miembros: el hecho del uno era el de todos; y no necesitaba de com-
promiso expreso para producir acuerdo. Fue así como nuestro huésped se vio
cubierto por todo el pueblo de los oprimidos, que aunque era débil era al menos
el que se arrastraba entre la tierra de sus antepasados y la planta de sus
opresores. (352)41
The Inca see f amily membership as an affective relation; the “infinite good-
ness of heart” of Mercedes and Mamapanki’s f ather makes Padre Andrés a
member of the f amily nearly instantly, with all the rights and protections of
the larger “fraternal” community. In fact, taking Padre Andrés into the do-
mestic life of “our home” becomes just a few words later a matter of “our race,”
because as a politico-family, Inca affective domesticity is coterminous with the
Inca’s ongoing struggle against Spanish rule. In two intertwined acts that ce-
ment his belonging, then, Padre Andrés promises to marry Mamapanki and
helps her father plot a rebellion against the Spanish.42
But just as the Spanish first contact with the indigenous was driven by
pragmatism and hence manifested as imperial hierarchy, Padre Andrés’s ap-
proach to Spanish-Inca family is similarly mercenary, deceptive, and imperial.
He joins this f amily not out of affection but fear for his own life. He offers to
marry Mamapanki only once it is discovered that he has already seduced her.
He fights in the Inca rebellion not out of true anti-imperial sentiment but only
so that he can play both sides and elevate himself at the expense of t hose he
claimed to league with. And when, years later, he discovers that the daughter
he fathered with Mamapanki is still living, he is willing to see her executed
so long as the colonial authorities never find out the extent to which he be-
trayed both Spain and his own religion during his time with the Inca.43 Once
again, therefore, the novel suggests that the Spanish approach relations with
indigenous Americans from a primarily pragmatic perspective, seeking only
their own gain, and that this is directly tied to their colonial treatment of
them. Whereas the Inca see family as a bond of love and are likewise politi
cally anti-imperial, Padre Andrés not only uses his mixed family purely for his
own gain, but that gain is also by definition an increase in colonial authority
over that very f amily.
Spanish-Creole families turn out to be no different. We see this through
the Creole heroine of the novel, María, who is trying to escape both don Fe-
lipe, her tyrannical Spanish f ather, and don Antonio, the mercenary Spanish
youth her father wishes her to marry against her will. Unsurprisingly, don
Antonio is less interested in María than in her f ather’s wealth, and likewise,
don Felipe is not merely a cold and tyrannical head of the household in the
mold of Spanish domestic despotism, but he is actually willing to sacri-
fice María to the Inquisition if it means preserving his fortune and reputation.
The Creole w oman has no rights—not even to her own life—because her
male family members prioritize their own material gain and govern through
discipline. When López’s narrator describes the rot common to both Spanish
familial and political forms, he points specifically to royal filicide as an ex-
ample of this overlap, suggesting that only when kings and fathers alike have
such exorbitant power can even the bonds between parent and child cease to
be sacred (318). This is pragmatic paternalism in its most extreme expression:
American wives, like Mamapanki and (potentially) María, are mere tools to
be used in their Spanish husbands’ pursuit of power, and American daughters,

like Juana and María, have their lives made forfeit by their Spanish fathers’
pursuit of power. Marianne Hirsch argues that the western novel denies the
“genealogy” and “verticality” of female characters in f avor of father/son rela-
tions and patriarchal figures.44 La novia figures genealogy and verticality pre-
cisely as the concerns of a patriarchally formed family, in which w omen are
not merely, as Hirsch describes it, absent or unimportant, but victims of an
imperial oppression mirrored in broader social forms. The politico-family
structure the Spanish offer to Americans, w hether indigenous or Creole, is
formed through relations that are interlockingly pragmatic, paternalistic, and
imposed against the Americans’ will, and which, by extension, build imperial
social relations at all levels.
So what kinds of families might have emerged instead, had the fantasy of
an Anglo-A merican origin story borne fruit? As the novel imagines it, nearly
opposite ones, emphasized by Englishmen who enter into and disrupt these
same two families: at the end of the novel, Henderson marries María, rescu-
ing her from both her Spanish father and her Spanish intended, and Drake
marries Juana, saving her from the Spanish f ather who would have killed her.
The novel thus invites us to imagine these Spanish-A merican families broken
apart and re-formed into Anglo-A merican ones, continuing the counterfac-
tual fantasy of a British-A merican political genealogy in Latin America.
As we have already seen in Henderson and María’s unspoken emotional
bond, the Anglo-A merican family relationship is originally formed by power
ful affective connection, rather than pragmatic or mercenary self-interest.
And affect continues to structure Anglo-A merican family relations when the
English face a choice between the love t hey’ve found in America and the loot
they came for in the first place. A fter sacking the Spanish galleon, the English
pirates have no reason to return to Lima, but Henderson and (the historically
real) John Oxenham want to rescue María and Juana, the w omen they have
fallen in love with. Although Drake w ill later marry Juana a fter Oxenham
dies,45 he does not yet love her and so he gives his smitten sailors a choice: de-
part the Americas with him and keep their share of the booty, or stay and try
to save the w omen they love, giving up their riches and risking death in the
process. As Drake presents it to them, love and material gain are mutually ex-
clusive for the English in Spanish America. To this choice, Henderson heat-
edly replies that he is irresistibly driven by love: “me mostrarías por precio de
mi infamia el trono mismo de Inglaterra, pero deberíais estar seguro que aún
así yo resistiría” (520).46 Henderson pointedly frames María as more desirable

than “the very throne of England,” scaling up the contrast into one between
love and imperial power. Drake seems to understand this, too, warning (an
unpersuaded) Oxenham that by choosing love for a woman, he is abandon-
ing duty to his “pabellón y . . . patria” (528).47 In other words, love and mer-
cenary pragmatism are not only incompatible on a personal level, but the
stakes are also international: an Englishman cannot pursue the liberation of
Americans from oppression and also be motivated by nationalist greed. The
English, of course, choose their love for María and Juana over material self-
interest. Throwing this choice into relief is the fact that don Felipe and Padre
Andrés face the same choice as well: they could instantly save María and
Juana—t heir d aughters—from the Inquisition simply by sacrificing money
and power. They, of course, choose material self-interest over their daughters.
This choice between love and profit had immense ramifications for López’s
mid-nineteenth-century context and the specter of British informal empire in
independent Latin America. As this book shows, liberation and colonialism,
family and plunder, love and oppression, were intertwined impulses in the
discourse of informal empire. Translated into f amily form, one half of t hese
pairings calls to mind the paternalistic, hierarchical structures like those Anne
McClintock, describing the formal empire, calls the Family of Man. The other
half suggests a much more equitable f amily. But if, as some leaders like Simón
Bolívar feared, and Rebecca Cole Heinowitz argues was historically the case,
love and empire were the surface and depth of one reservoir—that is, if the
British spoke of loving partnership only as a cover for financial exploitation—
what kind of family was that? La novia refuses the question, instead arguing
that love and profit—and the families they engender—are two sides of an
either-or choice. By confronting both the Spanish and the English with this
alternative between loving American women and securing their own fortunes,
López suggests that this is a decision inherent to establishing European-
American relations: form them in the service of mercenary profiteering,
thereby creating an imperial politico-family, or form them through sincere af-
fect, thereby creating a liberatory, anti-colonial politico-family. It can’t be
both. Drake may seem callous for presenting this choice to his sailors, but the
choice itself is a powerful argument that affective family in Latin America is
mutually exclusive with imperial plunder. When it comes to the English, then,
La novia is optimistic: so long as they r eally love the Americans, imperial sub-
jugation cannot occur. This claim (painfully sanguine as it may seem) sug-
gests that if informal empire draws on notions of both love and imperialism,
it is a paradox—each idea forms a different international family.
In addition to being connected by sincere affect—Drake’s sincere affection
for Juana is emphasized by the fact that although he “tiene débil por la no-
bleza” (699),48 he does not learn that she is an Inca noble until a fter he has
married her for love—t he English-A merican family structure is also anti-
colonial b ecause it converts paternal relationships with American w omen
into spousal ones. That is not to say that spousal relations cannot be hierar-
chical, oppressive, or imperial. But as McClintock argues, nineteenth-century
European imperial discourse often depicted colonies in the role of children,
a rhetorical move intimately connected to the denial of coevality that con-
signed colonial others to what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the “waiting room
of history.”49 Colonies, in other words, w ere commonly troped as a younger
generation in the F amily of Man—less mature, less evolved, more backward—
and thus subject to the paternalistic rule of the empire. The insidious nature
of this analogy is that a child can never “catch up” to his f ather b ecause of the
temporal distance separating them in the diachronic form of historical prog
ress. This colonial genealogical time is precisely what Simón Bolívar was re-
ferring to when, during the independence wars, he remarked that Spain had
kept its American colonies in “a kind of permanent infancy.”50 A fter indepen
dence, as Creole elites like Bolívar and López worked to invent national
identity, they rewrote the story of authority rooted in genealogy. Lacking a
genealogical claim to American land, and having recently rejected the filial
connection to Spain’s authority, they turned from familial pasts to familial
futures, “making a generative rather than a genealogical claim” as they styled
themselves founding fathers.51 So in La novia, when Drake and Henderson
rescue Juana and María from their abusive fathers and marry them, they are
not merely offering them a newly affective set of relations. They are also re-
placing Spanish f athers with English husbands, a shift that helps imagine how
Americans might escape the “waiting room” trap of diachronic, paternalistic
colonial time by founding new synchronic partnerships.
López is not the only thinker to imagine that alternate relational structures
might neutralize imperial subjection. For Édouard Glissant, western thought
is founded on a genealogical perception of temporality—an orientation he
calls “filiation”—t hat begins from an origin myth, proceeds through “the
fixed linearity of time,” and ultimately abets ethnocentrism, exclusion, and
the violence of imperial conquest.52 Using the same term, Edward Said likewise
theorizes “filiation” as a social structure of repetition and familial genealogy

that partakes of hierarchical sociality.53 For both Said and Glissant, the west-
ern vision of society as descent is colonial precisely b ecause of its investment
in the reproduction of hierarchical authority, which is of course specifically
male and patriarchal.54 Interrupting colonial social form, therefore, means re-
jecting structures of filiation in favor of alternate arrangements. Glissant
theorizes t hese as “the poetics of relation,” which describes a rhizomatic, “cha-
otic network” of possible social contacts, and Said c ounters filiation with
relations of “affiliation,” which are not hierarchical but adjacent, “re-assembling
the world in new non-familial ways.”55 Both critics, then, see a link between
imperialism and the social model of diachronic, patriarchal descent, which
can only be broken by de-hierarchized, synchronic, exogamous relations. La
novia del hereje makes a nearly identical claim about the oppressive nature of
the filial or paternalistic politico-family, but rather than the contingencies of
affiliation or rhizomatics, López, looking for a model to suit British–L atin
American partnership, turns specifically to marriage.
Of course, marriage can be exploitative. Glissant and Said would likely
both object to the notion that marriage (particularly in its western nineteenth-
century iterations) is rhizomatic or affiliative, or that it offers much of an
escape from oppressive filial social form. But La novia optimistically imagines
that the synchronic partnership of a marriage affords the possibility of much
greater equality than the diachronic and colonially non-coeval relation of pa-
ternity. Not only does Drake love Juana, but the marriage also offers them
equal benefit. Juana, despite her noble lineage, was a mere lady’s maid in Lima
but now finds herself enjoying status and renown in England, and Drake,
who, despite his fame, could not marry well under the prejudice of “un país
esencialmente aristócrata” like E ngland—“una injusticia,” according to Hen-
derson (698)56 —has now wed a beautiful Inca royal. As Antonio Benitez-
Rojo succinctly puts it, the two Anglo-A merican couples end up “ennobled,
enriched, and blessed with a healthy progeny.”57
In contrast to this mutual benefit conferred on members of the Anglo-
American family, Padre Andrés left his Inca family in “peor condición”
(358),58 and another Spaniard in the novel wants only to “hacer fortuna para
gozarla a mi modo cuando vuelva a España” (38).59 One concern about Brit-
ish involvement in nineteenth-century Latin America was that they might do
exactly this—come to make a fortune and take it back to E ngland, leaving
Latin Americ a worse off. But the novel assuages this concern by suggesting
that only imperial Europeans like the Spanish do this, while “the fertile and
happy u nions María/Henderson and Juanita/Drake allegorize the desired al-
liance of the modern Argentinian with Anglo-Saxon capitalism,”60 showing
it to offer mutual elevation within an equitable, anti-imperial politico-family
that rights the injustices of two continents. We know, of course, that marriage,
particularly in the nineteenth century, could precisely afford the transfer of
wealth from a bride to her husband. The choice of marriage as the form of
British–L atin American relations, therefore, could be deployed to serve the
project of informal empire through the figure of coverture. But La novia—
which advertises Anglo-A merican marriage in its title—specifically does not
permit this interpretation, insisting on not only the mutuality of love and ben-
efit in these relationships, but also the transfer of Spanish wealth to both the
bride and groom. The husband does not enrich himself through his wife; hus-
band and wife find mutual enrichment by triumphing over the defeated
father figure of Spain.
Anglo-A merican f amily relations also introduce the element of choice. The
paternal politico-family is imposed without consent; just as d aughters cannot
choose their fathers, the colonized is forced into its subordinate relation. Mar-
riages may be imposed as well, and in the Spanish-A merican families, they
are: Padre Andrés marries Mamapanki only in the face of social pressure, and
María is offered to the Spaniard don Antonio against her will. López and his
intellectual circle w ere strongly opposed to arranged marriages, especially
those arranged for financial or class interests,61 so it is no surprise that his novel
associates this kind of relation with the imperial Spanish. But marriage to En
glishmen, as López presents it to us, is an elective relation and therefore lacks
the imperial dimension of coercion. Writing about nineteenth-century Brit-
ish narrative form, Talia Schaffer and Barry McCrea both argue that f amily
structure is dynamized by the addition of a stranger, who, according to
McCrea, is absorbed and naturalized, and according to Schaffer, brings
mobility and disruption.62 López uses the stranger to his own particular pur-
pose in the context of British–Latin American relations, breaking apart the
compulsory relations of the Spanish- A merican family and reattaching
Americans to an English f amily through exogamous but elective marriage.
Once again, this resonates forcefully in the context of 1840s Latin Amer
ica, which after centuries of Spanish lineage had newly opened its borders to
other migrants—especially British ones—who might now marry into the
Latin American family. As Nina Gerassi-Navarro points out, Henderson and
María’s marriage “endors[es] Juan Bautista Alberdi’s project to incorporate the

English within Argentine society to secure a prosperous future—a task that
would be achieved, according to Alberdi, by uniting the Argentine women
with the English men”63 (an idea that makes the union between family and
national stability all too literal). López, moreover, spent the years 1840–1853
(the period during which he composed and began to publish La novia) living
in Chile, which was then undergoing a fierce public debate about w hether
to allow Eng lish Protestant “disidentes” (“dissidents” were “heretics” in
nineteenth-century terms) to marry Chilean Catholics. It is fair to assume
López was reading this controversy in the papers, several of which he edited,64
and members of both the English-language press and the Chilean press
strongly advocated for British-A merican intermarriage on the basis that it
would simultaneously increase the population and discourage the British from
simply making money and taking it back to England. British-A merican in-
termarriage in the mid-nineteenth century, in other words, was widely seen
by members of López’s circle as a way to grow Latin American economies
and discourage the exploitation of informal empire. What López, Alberdi,
Sarmiento, and o thers like them wanted was for t hese marriages to be freely
available and f ree for Americans to choose.
At the end of La novia, as Garrels argues, María’s dysfunctional Spanish
home life is replaced by a British family structure that is “progresista,” char-
acterized not by discipline and masculine self-interest but by “el cariño y la
ternura, la intimidad y un orden suave y armonioso.”65 But the specific forms
that familial relations take turn out to be crucial not only for domestic expe-
rience but also for the international relations such families both implicitly
trope and literally help construct. López and his fellows were inviting the Brit-
ish into both the Latin American economy and the Latin American family,
believing the combination to promise a more liberal, prosperous f uture. The
Anglo-A merican families in La novia, therefore, are in part symbols for how
British-A rgentine relations might be anti-colonial and mutually beneficial,
and in part a politico-familial argument about how domestic and international
relations are formally reciprocal and mutually constitutive. Henderson,
Oxenham, and Drake’s affective spousal relations with American w omen are
not merely a metaphor for what López hoped might be a non-imperial rela-
tionship between Latin America and G reat Britain in the nineteenth c entury;
affect, choice, and partnership are forms of relation that actually deter colonial
hierarchy. The English pirates, by virtue of their love for American women,
are quite literally prevented from exploiting them, induced instead to make
them equal partners in their prosperity. In the novel’s schema, paternalism af-
fords imperialism and deters equality, while partnership affords equality and
deters imperialism. So by exploring the specific forms that international fa-
milial relation might take, La novia del hereje argues that the two ideas that
often appeared together in the discourse of informal empire—t hat Britain
might be both a partner and a predator—in fact produce two distinct politico-
family forms that cannot coexist.
Because prevalent (inter)national family discourse in the nineteenth century
coincided with the rise of liberal free trade, it is not surprising that Latin
Americans w ere not the only ones to trope international finance as f amily. In
Britain, according to Ayşe Çelikkol, f ree trade was conceptually linked to the
idea of an international “brotherhood of men,” although it also fostered anx
ieties about the dissolution of national identity. In nineteenth-century Brit-
ish literature, therefore, “the dangers of individual liberty were mapped onto
the figure of the promiscuous woman just as the rewards of commerce be-
tween nations could be metaphorically translated into marital mutuality.”66
Historically, then, both lovers in the metaphor—Britain and Latin America—
were using marriage as a literary device to simultaneously invite interna-
tional free trade and obviate its threats to their own national sovereignty. And
it was more than a metaphor for the two parties, both of whom were invested
in British migration to the Southern Cone and the dual possibility of trade and
intermarriage it conditioned.
But La novia departs from Çelikkol’s account of British literature in three
key ways. First, although British and Latin American authors in the nine-
teenth century both chose “romance” as the genre best suited to represent
the forms of international capitalism, the British stories w ere romances of the
heroic adventurer variety, while Latin American novelists like López wrote
romances of heterosexual u nion.67 Second, La novia specifically contrasts
British–Latin American marriage not to the radical openness of promiscuity
or “sexual hedonism” that British authors imagined as the threats of global
capitalism,68 but rather to the even more restrictive f amily structure of Span-
ish imperial paternalism. And third, while marriage in the novel serves to pro-
tect Latin American sovereignty by neutralizing British imperialism, British
texts did not tend to share such anxiety for the partners their heroes encoun-
tered. So if the onset of widespread international f ree trade in the nineteenth
century inspired British texts concerned with preserving the integrity (and
power) of the autonomous British subject as he moved through the world, La

novia looked to unite with this same subject in order to neutralize his impe-
rial nature. “Romance” in López’s novel interrupts British material self-interest,
while for British authors “romance” preserved it. As a talisman against the
dangers of informal empire, therefore, marriage was an imperfect social form,
since the bride and groom were entering into it with no prenuptial agreement
as to its purpose. That it was nonetheless commonly deployed as a way to theo-
rize British–Latin American relations shows how discordant the constituent
threads of informal empire w ere to begin with.
Hybridity
From origins come new f amily relations, and from t hese families come descen-
dants, raising the issue of international hybridity as a familial form with
political implications. In addition to its Creole characters like María, who are
ancestrally Spanish but culturally American, La novia is replete with mixed-
race characters like Juana (Spanish-indigenous), or Mateo the zambo (African-
indigenous), whose existence is a result of Spanish colonialism and who are
scattered at the bottom of a social hierarchy that only “pure” Spaniards may
climb.69 Multicultural and multiracial Spanish families, in other words, pro-
duce colonial social structures that oppress the racially hybrid descendants of
t hose very families. The novel is too interested in historical plausibility to
imagine a comparable line of Anglo-A merican descent in Latin America—the
Anglo-A merican families end up in E ngland, so their descendants w ill not
populate Latin America—but López nonetheless explores the question of what
it might mean for “Americanness” to be at least partially English.
Creole identity was particularly important for the independence movement
and the establishment of postcolonial identity in nineteenth-century Latin
America, as it distinguished American from Spanish belonging. López wanted
his novel to participate in the development of this American identity, writing
in his preface that La novia was “esencialmente americano en su fondo, y despro-
visto . . . de los estilos exóticos, que tanto contribuyen a quitarnos el cono-
cimiento y la conciencia de las sociedades de que formamos parte” (8–9; em-
phasis mine).70 The 1578 setting pinpoints the historical moment when the
first few generations of American-born children of Spanish imperialists—
Creoles—began to appear, marking an American identity separate from a
Spanish one. And the Creole character María serves as an exemplar of appar-
ently quintessential or “ideal” Americanness: “La Limeña de raza, La María,

era el ideal de la mujer americana, como la inglesa de raza, la Esther, con sus
rulos de oro tendidos por su cuello de cisne, y con el lánguido mirar de sus
ojos color cielo, es, cuando se pasea por las ruinas de Roma o por los esplén-
didos monumentos del arte florentino, el ideal de la mujer europea” (581).71
What’s remarkable about this passage is that María is described almost entirely
by analogy with an Englishwoman named Esther—just as María is “the ideal
of the American woman,” so is Esther “the ideal of the European woman,”
phrases whose parallelism is heightened by their position as bookends of the
sentence. Americanness is therefore not only comparable to an English model,
but moreover rendered legible through their similitude. In fact, this passage
does not actually describe María at all; Esther’s eye color, hair color, neck
shape, and activities intrude and overtake the sentence, leaving María to be
discerned only by analogy with these things. The syntax even seems to blur
the two women into one, as the “her” (“sus”) that describes golden hair and
blue eyes is not clearly affixed to Esther u ntil the end of the sentence. More-
over, the specific Esther in question, the heroine of a novel by López’s con
temporary and fellow Argentine Miguel Cané,72 is a married Englishwoman
in “mutuo” love with an Argentine man.73 So La novia’s definition of the
“ideal” American identity is that which resembles an English identity, which
in its ideal form in turn loves Argentina. María defines Creole Americanness
in its earliest sixteenth-century emergence, evidently legible only through a
nineteenth-century Englishness with which it is already hybridly entwined.
The English would not develop a significant relationship with t hose claim-
ing Creole Americanness u ntil the independence movement of the nine-
teenth century, and yet by imagining Drake and his fellow sailors into this
1578 setting, López is able to suggest that the English were the first to recog-
nize the category of Creole as a distinctly American identity. Drake himself,
discussing María’s cousin Manuel, remarks that he “es un criollo pur-sang, por
su vivacidad, por su franqueza, por su desparpajo, y un cierto pulido de for-
mas y de alma, que no encuentro yo en el español puro, bien está que soy parte
interesada, pues tengo una costilla criolla” (693).74 Drake is the only diagetic
figure to articulate this distinction between Creole and Spanish identity, sug-
gesting that although the British do not genealogically create American iden-
tity, they are the first to identify it. And by referring to Juana, his American-
born, half-Spanish, half-indigenous wife, as his “Creole rib,” he makes
both a biblical allusion that places them in the roles of Adam and Eve to a
new Anglo-Creole f amily line and a biological metaphor that suggests their
marriage is akin to springing from one flesh. This Anglo-A merican family
is not only affective, equitable, and freely chosen, but its ties are strong
enough to link American identity in both soul and body to the English. As
the first to recognize and nurture American identity, then, the English have,
if not quite a literal presence, at least a ghostly one in a counterfactual Latin
American genealogy that promotes Anglo-A merican hybridization in López’s
own day.
This suggestion of Anglo-A merican hybridity further highlights a crux at
the center of informal empire: the distinction between belonging as posses-
sion and belonging as kinship. Those who wrote about British–Latin Ameri-
can relations in the nineteenth c entury had recourse to both, and it is emblem-
atic of the paradoxes of informal empire that two contradictory impulses
share a single term. La novia, however, presents t hese ideas as two distinct
family structures, one in which American women belong to their Spanish
fathers and husbands as both marital and imperial possessions, and another
in which both Americans and Englishmen belong equally to a mutually en-
riching f amily. The counterfactual suggestion of biological hybridity within
the Anglo-A merican family only intensifies and naturalizes kinship belong-
ing as its organizational structure, in contrast to the possessive colonial be-
longing quarantined within Spanish families.
Paradox
As I have shown, La novia wields f amily structures in an attempt to defuse the
paradoxes of informal empire, but it often finds them hard to avoid. This dif-
ficulty is indivisible from the novel’s foundational paradox of trying to both
faithfully record and fancifully rewrite national history. López draws heavily
on real events (such as the politic al uprising Padre Andrés participates in,
Drake’s sacking of the Cacafuego, and the British-Cimarron alliance), and real
people (such as Francis Drake, John Oxenham, and Gonzalo Pizarro), and he
conspicuously footnotes historical sources to show his fidelity to the past. But
within this framework, nonfiction slides quietly into fiction with the addition
of Henderson, the daring rescue of María, Drake’s marriage to Juana, and the
framing of all these events as acts of affect and love. T
hese are bold counter-
factuals, but the highly sourced historical narrative in which they appear sug-
gestively promotes their veracity. This slippage is neatly apparent at the end
of the story, when, a fter the climactic earthquake has allowed Henderson,
Oxenham, and the resistance coa lition to rescue María, the narrator journal-
istically remarks: “Entre las historias del terremoto, la inaudita audacia de
los herejes comenzó a ocupar la primera línea” (673).75 “Heretics” singles out
the British from their diverse co-conspirators as those grabbing the headlines,
and “historias” is best translated as “accounts,” a word that means both story
and history. La novia therefore implies that the English were not only the
main subject of the day’s conversation, but also part of the same historical rec
ord López wants to use to build a post-independence Latin American imagi-
nary. In other words, he writes his fictional characters into the very history on
which he, paradoxically, pins the veracity of the story t hose characters are in.
Given that, as Gerassi-Navarro observes, the novel’s footnoted sources are
almost entirely English,76 he seems to be suggesting that the history of Latin
America is already written by the English, and now—with his novel—written
to include them, too.
In addition to looping the diagetic and extradiagetic worlds together in a
paradox of historical temporality, La novia also defies the historical record al-
together. By imaginatively placing the British into Latin America’s political
genealogy and crafting an Anglo-A merican politico-family that suggests both
domestic and national liberation through affect and hybridity, López runs
afoul of the very history he seeks to secure. Because of course, by 1578, the En
glish w ere not only engaging in the pillage, opportunism, and violence of
piracy around the world, but also establishing the networks and outposts that
would become North American colonization. So what López portrays as a
battle between Spanish colonists and English liberators was really two impe-
rial nations competing for the resources that could be extracted from the
Americ as—Drake’s exploits were viewed back home primarily in terms of
England’s own expanding empire.77 And while he works to depict the relation-
ship between the English and Americans as natural or affective, historians
like Kris Lane remind us that it was precisely pragmatic: Drake’s historical
partnership with the Cimarrones, for instance, “should not be considered as
entirely natural, but rather the result of a timely exigency. The Cimarrones
knew all too well the slaving past of the French and English, but they realized
that t hese potential enslavers—armed and angry as they were—could be used
effectively against the Spaniards in the short term, a worthwhile compro-
mise.”78 So it was clear to Americans in 1578, as it has been to historians
since, that although the English claimed a more humane approach to the New
World than the Spanish, they were just as driven by self-interest and just as
likely to impose violent imperial hierarchies on those they encountered.
López was not alone in claiming the figure of the English pirate for the
cause of liberty, however. Partially reacting to Spain’s long demonization of
English pirates and partially participating in British Romantic literary tropes,
López and the post-independence generation that followed him idealized En
glish piracy as rebellious, anti-authoritarian, and extralegal—in other words,
as a liberatory force against the absolutism of Spain.79 In this way, “through
his transgression and defiance of the Spanish law, [the pirate] has in fact es-
tablished a new order and himself become the emblem of ‘civilization,’ ” com-
ing to symbolize “political and religious freedom merely by being English
and Protestant.”80 López emphasizes this point at the beginning of La novia,
writing that English pirates w ere beginning the work of curtailing Spanish
power that a future generation would finish, and later when he cites Sou
they’s Lives of the British Admirals to suggest that Drake had even been given a
moral permission slip by the church to sack the Spanish at will.81 The selfsame
Francis Drake dropped into an “undiscovered” Americ a would likely cut a
very different, starkly imperial character, but the prior presence of Spain in the
New World provides a morally acceptable outlet for English profit motives and
a cover u nder which to portray them as anti-colonial.
But the fact that the English combat Spain does not effectively defuse the
central paradox of informal empire because, as La novia clearly acknowledges,
this only redirects their power without diminishing its force. On the one hand,
the English in the novel are merely one piece of a diverse coa lition of minor-
ity figures resisting Spain’s imperial regime. Mateo has established “el hábito
de hacerse recibir y de imponerse en las casas principales,” a skill belonging
to all the Lima zambos (147);82 don Bautista’s work as an apothecary gives him
“una posición sin rival que ponía a su disposición toda la intimidad de las fa-
milias” (148);83 and Mercedes’s friends in the clandestine homosexual com-
munity are able to delay María’s trial b ecause they arrange extramarital affairs
for Lima’s most powerful people. In this way La novia shows diverse victims
of Spanish power already effectively reappropriating the very structures that
ensnare them, long before the English arrive. On the other hand, when the
pirates do appear, their impact is so enormous as to seem god-like. Even
though he himself is leading the resistance, don Bautista claims that Drake
“es el único que tiene hoy alzada la bandera de la guerra [contra la España]
después que todos han caído” (653),84 and indeed the English are the only ones
who can land a blow as heavy as the sacking of the galleon. Everyone suffer-
ing under Spanish oppression seems to recognize the English as saviors: early
in the novel, when Lima erupts into chaos at the arrival of the English ships,
the slaves who are able to escape their masters, even though they have heard
them described as devils, run to the port to greet Drake and his crew “como
a salvadores (72).”85 And don Bautista even says to Henderson, when the lat-
ter arrives in Lima at the climactic moment, “¡Dios le haya traído a usted,
Milord!” (649).86 That this arrival is immediately followed by a perfectly timed
earthquake suggests that the English-led plot is both in sync with American
nature and sanctioned by God’s will. The novel may be casting the English
not as heretics but saviors, not as colonists but liberators, but this heroic re-
casting does not reduce their outsize, apparently god-like power.
This is the paradox López faces: he seeks to free America from European
empire, but to do so, he finds he must rely on a powerful European empire.
It is the same paradox Simón Bolívar could not unwind thirty years e arlier as
his simultaneous need for and fear of British imperial power caused him to
make a tangle of the progress narrative. And it is the mirror image of the para-
dox of informal empire from the perspective of the nineteenth-century Brit-
ish, who had to somehow argue that they w ere interested both in Latin Amer
ica’s freedom and a monopoly on its resources. López is trying to ward off
informal empire, not advocate for it (as, in different ways, both Bolívar and
the British w ere d
oing), but it is impossible to discuss E ngland’s interest in
Latin American freedom without grappling with England’s interest in global
power. Moreover, he needs this power. Their mercenary, covetous presence in
the sixteenth-century Pacific is what makes the English good allies in La no
via, and their enormous economic might in the nineteenth c entury is what
makes them an attractive partner in the development of Argentina’s post-
independence economy. While López has Drake argue that love for America
and the removal of American wealth are mutually exclusive, the novel’s pro-
tagonists end up rewarded with both, b ecause it does not serve López’s goal
to replace Spanish imperialism with English poverty. So while he works hard
to split imperial and liberatory geopolitics into two structurally distinct kinds
of family, he is still forced to embrace the dually emancipatory and colonial
impulses at the heart of Britain’s interest in Latin America.
The final page of La novia suggests that López knows quite well what he
is risking in this bargain. Fifteen years after the climactic events of the story,
María’s cousin Manuel visits María and Henderson in England and finds
Mateo feeling dissatisfied and almost homeless in a country where he cannot

speak his native language—he is trapped in E ngland, he says, “entre estos bo
zales” (703).87 Expanding the American family across the Atlantic, then, has
also necessarily diluted the strength of American identity.88 For all the nov-
el’s optimism about the naturalness and equality of the Anglo-A merican
family, it closes on this image of Mateo with tears in his eyes, imprisoned in
a culture that made him f amily at the price of assimilation, a human remnant
of the unresolvable paradox of seeking liberation in the arms of power.
Progress, Redux
Although this half of the book is devoted to the ways that informal empire
was rendered in familial form, we have not left behind the question of prog
ress, nor its own specific formal implications. One key pillar of López’s argu-
ment for the formation of Anglo-A merican family is that the English bring
not only loving family structures to the Americ as but also progress. In his
preface to La novia, López argues that Spain oppressed both American people
and American progress, impeding “las novedades que agitaban al mundo cris-
tiano y preparaban los nuevos rasgos de la civilización actual,” and he says
that he included Drake in the story precisely to set Spain’s obstruction of prog
ress into relief (18).89 The fight between the Spanish and Drake therefore is
not merely a battle for resources; it is a “contraste de los dos polos ideológi-
cos, culturales y económicos . . . el atraso del rígido monopolio colonial espa-
ñol y el liberalismo librecambista como síntoma del progreso.”90 So it comes
as no surprise when the narrator devotes a long passage of the novel to eulo-
gizing the lasting progressive benefit of Drake’s New World expeditions, ex-
plaining that he saved millions from hunger and modernized agriculture by
bringing the potato to Europe and that it was Drake’s original idea to cross
the Central American isthmus, setting the dominoes in motion that would
later see this world-opening feat achieved. What’s more, when the narrator
insists that Drake’s deeds were “gigantescas hazañas . . . gloriosos pasos de la
humanidad en el camino de la civilización y del conocimiento del globo”
(499–500),91 he implies that the entire world, not just England, reaped the
benefits of t hese forward strides. Or to put this is in the formal terms I ex-
plored in part I of this book, Drake helps drive a narrative of teleological
progress in which all of humanity is the protagonist, a narrative that reassur-
ingly carries Latin America forward with the rest of the civilized world.92
This is also, to link historical narrative forms to the f amily metaphor, a way
for López to genealogize progress. In his depiction, Drake did not bring prog
ress to the Americas but rather discovered it there on his voyages; progress
itself is born out of the mutually enhancing relationship between the English
and the Americas and has been for hundreds of years. And Drake’s role in de-
veloping modern agriculture and the crossing of the isthmus makes him a
forefather of the very same projects that the British were undertaking in Latin
America in the nineteenth c entury—farming and transportation. López talks
specifically in the preface about these more contemporary projects, lauding the
European traders and developers who defied the late colonial Spanish monop
oly and traveled to the interior of South America, “desparramando el bien
estar y las riquezas por toda la vía” (15).93 Both Drake and these later travelers
are part of an English history in Latin America that, for López, spurred de-
velopment and progress to the benefit of places like Argentina. The English
in Latin Americ a are members of a progressive lineage—not an Anglo-
American family in a literal sense, but a descendancy of progress that has
lasted for centuries and heavily implies the virtue of the post-independence
British investments in mining, farming, railroads, and trade that w ere begin-
ning to accelerate as López was publishing his novel. La novia, then, works
to find Latin America’s future in its past, both by reorganizing the geopoliti
cal genealogy that connects Europe and America, and by suggesting that his-
torical progress is itself a descendant of these same familial relations.
Conclusion
As we have seen throughout this book, informal empire raised discursive con-
tradictions: w hether they promoted or critiqued it, thinkers as diverse as
James Mill, Simón Bolívar, George Canning, and Anna Barbauld all formu-
lated informal empire as Britain’s desire to simultaneously bolster and suppress
Latin American freedom. What López shows (as do the authors in the next
two chapters) is that this paradoxical duality was particularly visible within
the family metaphors that nineteenth-century onlookers applied to interna-
tional relations. Within Britain’s formal empire, the operative family form—
which Anne McClintock terms the imperial Family of Man—was explicitly
hierarchical and paternalistic. By contrast, critics like Rebecca Cole Heino
witz have argued that the informal empire deployed less stratified familial rela-
tions of kinship but that these were only a cover that legitimized Britain’s
resource extraction through the suggestion of ancestral entitlement.94 While

the imperial F amily of Man was overtly hierarchical, in other words, the kin-
ship relations of informal empire concealed the same imperial drive beneath
the feint of more equal relations. But as this book argues, the conflicted dis-
courses of informal empire should not be seen as divided across surface and
depth or sincere and feigned but rather as equally necessary to the formula-
tion of informal empire as such—and therefore irreducibly and paradoxically
simultaneous.
One important rhetorical effect of López’s novel, therefore, is to make this
dynamic plain. By rendering affect and empire, kinship and hierarchy, as two
distinct kinds of politico-family—and more than this, arguing that forms of
loving or benevolent international family serve precisely to contravene the
imperial drive—La novia del hereje suggests that the two discourses upon
which informal empire relied represent two distinct, incompatible social ar-
rangements that cannot be coherently joined. They w ere, of course, joined in
the service of informal empire, but by suggesting that they belong to distinct
geopolitical orders, López highlights informal empire’s struggle to easily en-
list nineteenth-century master narratives. In framing British–Latin American
relations as a f amily, he also appropriates a set of tropes commonly used in
European imperial discourse, bending them to an anti-colonial purpose. His
novel therefore shows how international f amily forms could be combined in
the service of promoting emancipatory social configurations.
In the end, however, the novel can only reveal the paradoxes of informal
empire; it cannot escape them. La novia suggests that British interests in Latin
America cannot be both emancipatory and acquisitive because these manifest
two entirely distinct social familial structures. But no matter how López or
anyone else might carefully configure the trope of British–L atin American
family, the British are still powerful capitalists, and capitalism makes profit,
not love. The British would and did seek advantageous loan, trade, and de-
velopment deals with l ittle concern for Latin Americans’ fair share. One could
easily argue, therefore, that López’s depiction of the British as loving husbands
was at best naive and at worst complicit in disarming opposition to informal
empire in Argentina. If we read his efforts as naive, Leela Gandhi helps explain
why: drawing on Derrida and Said, she argues that all familial social models
are inherently conservative, exclusionary, and replicative—in other words, co-
lonial. Friendship, she claims, is the only relational trope capable of signify-
ing “all t hose invisible affective gestures that refuse alignment along the se-
cure axes of filiation to seek expression outside, if not against, possessive
communities of belonging.”95 Under Gandhi’s reasoning, we could read López
as naive for attempting to escape the colonial trap of family form simply by
rearranging the f amily. But naivete might be too kind a judgment. Indeed,
López and his contemporaries lobbied for the very investments and migrations
that would form the scaffolding of British informal empire in Argentina. The
post-independence Latin American Creole elites have been justifiably accused
of turning colonizers in their own right, enriching themselves while selling out
the poor and indigenous when European capital came calling. The novelist-
politicians who built Latin American national identity, “privileged as they
were, selected what they would from liberalism. . . . They got rid of Spain’s
monopolies (sometimes to fall prey to England) yet held on to domestic car-
tels, land entailment, and coercive labor systems.”96 So it is also reasonable to
label his efforts complicity—to conclude, as Nina Gerassi-Navarro does, that
“rather than reconstructing the colonial past, Vicente Fidel López uses history
to advocate recolonizing the f uture of his country.”97
My argument, however, runs parallel to such debates. It may m atter a g reat
deal to the history of Argentina what motives López brought to his writing
and how he influenced his countrymen. But I have been seeking the answer
to a different question altogether: What forms did López understand Euro
pean imperialisms to take? His most famous novel is an anatomy of the forms
of imperial power, and both his attempt to figure the British as ideal allies and
his failure to do so forcefully recall the paradoxes of informal empire. In his
attempt to figure the English as anti-colonial, we see informal empire appear
through its own absence; the paired depiction of Spanish formal empire and
English colonial resistance seems to offer no space for informal empire, to
ward it off by virtue of its non-appearance in the catalog of possible relations.
And his failure even to imagine the English as perfect allies in a counterfac-
tual fantasy reminds us that although informal empire might have been con-
ceptually paradoxical, that paradox was nearly impossible to escape. Britain’s
outsized economic power meant that their allegiance, even in an idealized
form, would always be lopsided. When it came to their interest in Latin Amer
ica, their support for liberation was tinged with their imperial motives, and
their imperialism was predicated on Latin America’s independence. Therefore,
it was nearly impossible to argue against informal empire simply by appealing
to British liberatory politics—this did nothing to shake the foundation of

informal empire, which was so strong precisely because it contained both sides
of the argument. Its paradoxical nature helped it to absorb critique. La novia
del hereje, then, both effectively renders visible the formal incoherence of in-
formal empire and finds itself inevitably ensnared by the force of that very
paradox.
chapter five
H. Rider Haggard and the

Antagonism of Valid Fiancées
fter twenty years of living with the Aztec in Mexico and fighting with them
A
against the Spanish Conquest, Thomas Wingfield returns home to England.
So goes the basic plot of Montezuma’s Daughter (1893), a historical adventure
by British fin-de-siècle novelist H. Rider Haggard. Upon his return, Thomas
meets with Queen Elizabeth and presents her with a valuable Aztec gemstone.
This scene, which appears at the beginning of the novel as a frame for Thom-
as’s time in Mexico, could easily be interpreted as promoting the flow of
Latin American wealth to Britain—promoting, in other words, informal em-
pire. And that is precisely how it typically has been read. Robert Aguirre, in
his field-shaping book Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Vic
torian Culture, suggests that this scene “points to England as the rightful pos-
sessor of Mexico’s vast mineral wealth.”1 Nair María Anaya Ferreira argues
that the novel as a whole “emplea ingeniosamente la historia de la Conquista
de México para proclamar la grandeza del imperio británico.”2 And likewise,
Luz Elena Ramirez, while arguing that British literature about Latin Amer
ica is “ambivalent,” says that Montezuma’s Daughter “accords with nineteenth
century advertisements about mining Latin America’s riches.”3 Indeed, Brit-
ish investment in Mexican mines was heavily promoted on both sides of the
Atlantic during the 1880s, when Haggard was writing both Montezuma’s
Daughter and his second Mexico novel, Heart of the World.4 The fact that
Thomas returns to E ngland with not only a set of valuable gemstones but also
the secret location of Montezuma’s treasure—in essence, removing Aztec
wealth in its entirety to London—would only seem to bolster claims that Hag-
gard was doing his own promotion of British plunder in Mexico.
But let’s look a bit more closely at the encounter between Thomas and
Queen Elizabeth. In its broad contours it does seem to stage a celebratory ritual
transfer of Mexican mineral wealth into English hands. But the tone of the
scene dramatically undercuts such triumphalism. As he hands the gemstone
to Elizabeth, Thomas says: “At the sight of it her eyes glistened brightly as
the gem, for this Queen of ours loves such costly playthings. Indeed, had I so
desired, I think that I might then and t here have struck a bargain, and set the
stone against a title; but I, who for many years had been the prince of a g reat
tribe, had no wish to be a knight. So I kissed the royal hand, and so tightly
did it grip the gem within that the knuckle joints shone white.”5 Thomas
casts this wealth transfer as grotesque materialism, focusing on Elizabeth’s
tight, covetous grasp. “The royal hand,” a rather dismissive metonymy on
Thomas’s part, is not a figure for august power but petty avarice. In this de-
piction, the matriarch of England’s emergent oceanic empire does not appear
as the stately head of an imperial family but rather a child herself, filled with
immature, unseemly desire for a shiny “plaything.” Moreover, Thomas with-
holds much more from his queen. At the end of the novel, he tells us that he
gave Elizabeth only one stone—“the smallest save one”—from a “priceless”
necklace, and that he has decided to take the rest of it, along with the secret
of Montezuma’s treasure, to his grave (201). He may return to England with
a bottomless store of riches, but his choosing to give only the second-smallest
gemstone to Queen Elizabeth is clearly meant to placate rather than revel in
England’s imperial appetites.
This is perhaps surprising, since scholars have not understood Haggard’s
writing as particularly skeptical of empire, formal or otherwise. And with
good reason. His novels almost exclusively fall into the genre of the quest tale
that Edward Said established as inherently imperial.6 He is best known for
his adventures set in Africa, such as King Solomon’s Mines, which Anne
McClintock, in a landmark interpretation, revealed as enacting the ritual sub-
jugation of both female and native power on behalf of the colonial British
patriarchy.7 The British heroes of that novel, she argues, engender “three
orders—the male, reproductive order of matriarchal monogamy; the white eco
nomic order of mining capital; and the global, political order of empire. . . . In
this way, the adventure of mining capital reinvents the white patriarch—in the
specific class form of the English, upper-middle class gentleman—as the heir
to imperial ‘Progress’ at the head of the ‘Family of Man.’”8 Critics have tended
to follow this lead, arguing that King Solomon’s Mines and Haggard’s other
Africa novels, such as She and Allan Quatermain, are both structural and the-
matic advertisements for the moral and financial benefits of British empire. In
H. Rider Haggard and the Antagonism of Valid Fiancées 167
her 2010 Encyclopedia of the Literature of Empire, Mary Ellen Snodgrass

voices a general consensus9 when she names Haggard a canonical imperial
author: “Like Kipling and . . . Gogol, Haggard maintained firm beliefs in the
civilizing capabilities of imperial conquest. . . . His popular swashbuckling
novels s haped the attitudes of a generation of stay-at-homes concerning the
South African frontier and the subjugation of nonwhite peoples in a foreign
land.”10
I cite this consensus not to dispute it but to set into relief how Haggard’s
Mexico novels offer a different view of British power. Given his penchant for
the numbingly formulaic—regardless of setting, his novels typically contain:
framing devices that establish fictional authenticity; shipwrecks; improbably
escaped mortal peril; extremes of weather, exertion, and danger contrasted
with the decadence of home; the traveler’s being absurdly out of place in for-
eign environs; displays of masculine prowess in hunting and fighting; the
discovery of vast riches and lost races; the Englishman as a Christian savior
or leader among savage, heathen natives; the superiority of European military,
agricultural, and scientific knowledge; romantic intrigues with native w omen
of high rank; and the traversing of terrain previously untouched by white
men—it would be easy to assume that Haggard is more or less insensible to
different geographical settings, that Africa and Mexico simply provide some
backdrop variety for what is otherwise a paint-by-numbers execution of the
imperial adventure novel. The small body of critical work on his Mexico nov-
els has generally seen them this way; Ramirez calls Heart of the World only “a
slightly modified version” of King Solomon’s Mines, and Aguirre argues that
both Heart of the World and Montezuma’s Daughter “participate in a logic of
imperial possession that represented Mexico and Central Americ a as store
houses of wealth and knowledge awaiting plunder by enterprising British
subjects.”11 These readings shift the terms of the imperial encounter from ter-
ritorial conquest to financial “plunder” but otherwise echo McClintock’s di-
agnosis of colonial structure in the Africa novels.
But as I w ill argue in this chapter, Haggard’s Mexico novels are sensitive
to the distinct forms of social arrangement implied by informal empire, and
his familiar plot structures combine to a much less exuberantly imperial ef-
fect. Specifically, f amily form turns out to be the axle around which informal
empire gets wrapped in these stories. Consider the reason Thomas is reluctant
to share Aztec wealth with Queen Elizabeth in Montezuma’s Daughter. At the
end of the novel, his tale comes full circle, and in revisiting his audience with
the queen, he alludes to his motivations for withholding his treasure: “That
necklace I have yet, and it was a stone of it—the smallest save one—that I gave
to our gracious Queen Elizabeth. Otomie wore it for many years, and for this
reason it s hall be buried with me, though its value is priceless, so say those who
are skilled in gems. But priceless or no, it is doomed to lie in the mould of
Ditchingham churchyard, and may that same curse which is graved upon the
stone that hides the treasure of the Aztecs fall upon him who steals it from my
bones” (201).
Two hundred pages after learning that Thomas withheld this treasure from
England, we now know why; during the course of the novel we see Thomas
form a dense set of familial bonds with the Aztec. He marries an Aztec w oman,
Otomie, becomes blood brothers with an Aztec man, Guatemoc, and fathers
half-A ztec sons. He loves this family for twenty years, and in the end that love
leads him to protect their treasures from E ngland’s imperial reach. The neck-
lace belonged to his wife, and “for that reason” he will have it buried in the
ground. The secret of the remaining treasure was given to him by Guatemoc,
and for that reason he w ill honor his promise never to reveal it, not even after
the Aztec have been wiped out, not even to enrich his native country.
Family relations, in other words, are the barrier to what we might other
wise expect from Haggard—the promotion and celebration of informal em-
pire. Since Britons seeking profit from Latin America in the nineteenth c entury
so often won it through mining investments, we might anticipate that Hag-
gard’s Mexico novels would propagandize even more for what McClintock
calls “the white economic order of mining capital.” And yet, as I will show,
Montezuma’s Daughter is entirely organized around the tension between in-
ternational family relations and informal empire’s w ill to plunder. Through-
out the nineteenth century, Latin America inspired dual responses from the
British: support for sovereignty and imperial ambition. To figure t hese as kinds
of interpersonal relation, we could call them the partner drive and the preda-
tor drive; the concept of informal empire was uncomfortably dependent on
both. In Montezuma’s Daughter, t hese competing international desires take
interpersonal shape as competing marriages that Haggard’s hero must choose
between—an English or an Aztec bride—complete with the political loyal-
ties that each woman both figures and actually brings about. By representing
these dual political proposals as competing proposals of marriage, the novel
suggests that there is no honor in choosing both. Montezuma’s Daughter,
therefore, disentangles the interpersonal relational forms of partnership and
predation that figure informal empire’s dual drives, and it frames them, not
as a dynamic dialectic, but an irresolvable, unethical paradox.
Haggard in Mexico
Haggard visited Mexico in 1891, where he saw—like Trollope had thirty-t wo
years earlier in Central America—the operations of British informal empire
firsthand. Among the new nations of Latin America, Mexico was one of the
slowest to recover from the wars of independence and became one of the most
dependent on European capital.12 During Haggard’s lifetime, Mexico was
acutely influenced by foreign investment and development, especially by the
British, who arrived in e ager numbers to finance—and profit by—t wo indus-
tries in particular: the revival of mining operations devastated by the wars of
independence, and the rapid expansion of rail lines in the second half of the
century. This was done so extensively by the British and o thers that “by 1910,
foreigners owned about one-seventh of the total land area of Mexico.”13 In his
autobiography, The Days of My Life (published posthumously in 1926), Hag-
gard devotes a full chapter to his Mexico visit, recording his direct impressions
of what we today call the informal empire. The verdict was grim. For one
thing, he saw these ventures as terrible investments. He notes his own personal
financial loss that came from investing in “certain Mexican enterprises . . .
that in due course absorbed no small sum out of my hard earnings.”14 And the
fate of his good friend J. Gladwyn Jebb, who “devote[d] his life to the pursuit
of mining and commercial ventures,” seems to stand in for the likely fate of
all Englishmen who attempt to profit in this way: “he worked very hard in
many evil climates, broke down his health, dissipated his large private means
in supporting unremunerative enterprises, and died saddened and impover-
ished.”15 Despite the reality of British commercial power in Mexico, Haggard
depicts the kinds of projects that composed informal empire as bringing only
ruin and loss.
But while Haggard represents British “mining and commercial ventures”
in Mexico as unprofitable, he also suggests they are morally questionable. In
fact, he implies, Jebb’s failure to profit from Mexican soil and labor is precisely
what makes him an admirable man:
In the city of Mexico, where business men are—business men, he was re-
spected universally, and by the Indians he was adored. “He is a good man,
Jebb,” said an honourable old Jewish trader of that city to me—“a man among a
thousand, whom I would trust anywhere. See, I will prove it to you, amigo: he
has lived in this town doing business for years, yet, with all his opportunities, he
leaves it poorer than he came h ere. Did you ever hear the like of that, amigo?”
Would that t here existed more of such noble failures—the ignoble are suffi-
ciently abundant—for then the world might be cleaner than it is.16
Jebb, we learn, commands the respect of a plural community. The Jewish

trader sees him as “a good man,” worthy of the highest trust; the indigenous
“adore” him; and Haggard calls him “noble.” The evidence supporting all
three opinions? He has lost money in his projects. He earns the highest praise
for his moral character precisely because he fails as an agent of the informal
empire—because he has not successfully carried profit away after doing busi-
ness in a vulnerable community. Haggard, who Anne McClintock reports as
having an “antipathy to mining capitalists,”17 celebrates his friend’s poverty by
saying the world would be “cleaner” if more such businessmen failed.
A fter returning to E
ngland, Haggard turned his experiences into two nov-
els: the historical tale Montezuma’s Daughter (1893) and the contemporary
adventure Heart of the World (1895). This chapter w ill discuss both, though I
focus on Montezuma’s Daughter. Here is a more detailed gloss of its plot: The
story follows sixteenth-century Englishman Thomas Wingfield, who was born
to an English father and Spanish mother. Having set out to find the Spaniard
who killed his m other, Thomas winds up in Mexico during the final years of
the Conquest, where for survival he joins the Aztec community by marrying
Montezuma’s daughter, Otomie, and pledging himself to her people’s cause.
Thomas becomes brother to the Aztec prince Guatemoc, father to the Aztec
heirs, and military leader of the Aztec army as they fight to defeat the Span-
ish conquistadors led by Hernando Cortés. True to history, the Spanish are
victorious. And when Thomas’s wife and children perish in the climactic
battle scene, he finally returns to England after two decades’ absence—which
is when he meets Queen Elizabeth—and marries the fiancée of his youth, Lily.
They love each other, but their relationship is strained by the fact that Thomas
married and had children with another woman in the New World and that
Lily can now have no c hildren of her own. In writing this story, Haggard drew
directly on his visit to Mexico, which featured a planned but abandoned search
for Montezuma’s gold. He even used Thomas Wingfield’s sorrow at the loss
of his children to give voice to his own bottomless grief when he received word
in Mexico that his only son, Jock, had died in E ngland. (This f amily tragedy
preempted Haggard’s search for Aztec treasure.)
Perhaps reading the structures of nineteenth-century informal empire into
the sixteenth-century setting of Montezuma’s Daughter seems far-fetched. But
Haggard dedicated the novel to none other than his luckless friend Jebb, the
would-be informal imperialist who earned the respect of the indigenous
through his failure. And in his dedication, Haggard remarks on their aborted
search for Montezuma’s treasure. This paratext, then, links Haggard to Jebb
to Thomas as three Englishmen who do not extract Aztec wealth for their own
profit. Just as Thomas refuses to transfer his Aztec family’s riches to Queen
Elizabeth, and just as Jebb’s failed mines make him “adored” by the indige-
nous of Mexico, so Haggard himself accepts that he will not exhume Mont-
ezuma’s gold, remarking: “So be it! . . . I do not regret the loss” (v). Montezu
ma’s Daughter thus has two frames—an internal one that depicts Thomas
refusing to pass wealth to the English crown, and a paratext that expresses a
parallel satisfaction, three hundred years later, with the continued inability of
the English to extract this same wealth. By dedicating Montezuma’s Daughter
to Jebb, Haggard links the story to the nineteenth-century agents of informal
empire that he alludes to in his autobiographical account of Mexico. And like
the real-life Jebb, the fictional Thomas Wingfield in Montezuma’s Daughter,
as well as Jones and Strickland in Heart of the World, discover that intimacy
with the indigenous—especially in the form of f amily ties that also create po
litical allegiance—leads them to the moral conviction that Mexican wealth
belongs to Mexicans.18 The remainder of this chapter will show that the fa-
milial forms of marriage and fraternity produce a broad discomfort with the
ways that informal empire both figures and engenders the social. The dense
material and figurative web that connected politics to family in the late nine-
teenth century produced contradictions around informal empire in Latin
America, and for Haggard’s explorers, these made the spoils of mining capi-
tal look less like the clean domestic work of the Family of Man and more like
familial betrayal.
In this way, Haggard is strikingly similar to an unlikely counterpart:
Vicente Fidel López. Haggard wrote from the other side of the Atlantic and
a generation later; he saw firsthand the materialization of the British–L atin
American relationship López had pushed for; and as an imperial administra-
tor he participated in the kind of explicit British colonialism that López wished
to sidestep. But although the two men gazed on Britain’s relationship with
Latin America from opposite temporal and national perspectives, their fic-
tional explorations of it were conspicuously parallel. Both López’s La novia del
hereje and Haggard’s Montezuma’s Daughter turn to the sixteenth century to
imagine how an Englishman might have appeared on the scene of the Spanish
Conquest and fought for indigenous freedom, forming alternative, more equal,
and more liberatory relations with the natives of the New World. And both
novels figure the problematic of such relations through marriage, casting the
English hero as a loving husband to a w oman whose liberty he defends against
Spanish imperialism and whose wealth he does not try to extract on behalf of
England. Like La novia del hereje, then, Montezuma’s Daughter levels a formal
claim that certain family structures—particularly non-hierarchical ones like
marriage and fraternity that are implied by informal empire’s “partner” drive—
actually deter the imperial or “predator” drive. The two authors register an
awareness of informal empire’s paradoxical discursive form that was visible on
both sides of the Atlantic and that lingered across the span of the Victorian pe-
riod. But perhaps ironically, given the advancement of informal empire in his
own time, Haggard emerges as the greater pessimist about British–Latin Amer-
ican marriage. Suggesting that it was unlikely to redound to the benefit of
either party, his novels portray such partnerships, even if sincere, as doomed
to impoverishment and death.
Origin
Origins are, in a way, the nexus of the historical and genealogical conscious-
nesses that dominated the British nineteenth c entury, helping to define
(or rather to invent) a starting point for both history and family. And as
McClintock notes, “Haggard shared with his upper-middle-class Victorian
culture an unusually intense preoccupation with origins.”19 This is particu-
larly visible in his Africa novels, in which the imperial adventurers often dis-
cover an ancient genetic link with the “lost races” they encounter. Consider the
“Roman road” leading to Kukuanaland in King Solomon’s Mines, or the Zu-
Vendi people in Allan Quatermain, who are “white and live in stone houses”
and whose feudal social system c auses Quartermain to wonder at finding
“such an old friend far in the unknown heart of Africa.”20 These encounters
help justify the heroes’ eventual ascendancy over the p eople and their re-
sources, since they “are not appropriating a new culture but rather re-
appropriating their own genetic/evolutionary past, rediscovering their fabled
imperial origin.”21 Scholars of British informal empire in Latin America have

suggested a similar logic is at work—t hat nineteenth-century writers used
imagined kinship connections to the American indigenous to “legitimate Brit-
ain’s imperial intervention in the Spanish colonies as a mission of rightful
recovery rather than of violent conquest.”22 In other words, it would seem that
literature of both the formal and informal empire strategically narrativized
British ascendancy as connection with a genetic origin.
And yet Haggard does not stage anything like this self-discovery in his
Mexico novels. The setting cannot be a mirror in which the English see them-
selves reflected back, principally b ecause they arrive belatedly to an imperial
conquest already underway. In Montezuma’s Daughter, Thomas Wingfield
does not pursue a self-directed march across vast, “undiscovered” space to en-
counter curious natives sheltered from civilization; instead, he is dropped in
the m iddle of a turbulent, violent contact zone. This space is amenable nei-
ther to the discovery of his own genealogical beginnings nor to the imposi-
tion of English imperial authority, b ecause it is all too apparent that Thomas
has entered someone else’s history in medias res. The Aztec and the Spanish
are already locked in the gruesome struggle that defined New World history
for the British reading public.
For this reason, Thomas, far from finding traces of his English identity in
Mexico, in fact has to shed that very identity the moment he arrives. When
he washes ashore, shipwrecked and alone, the only Englishman amid two
enormous, warring populations, his native English language becomes in-
stantly useless. Among the Aztec he cannot even explain what it means to be
an Englishman b ecause “Spaniard” already occupies the place he is trying to
claim—that of a stranger from across the ocean. Montezuma’s nephew Gua-
temoc, who “had never so much as heard of any other white race,” cannot
make sense of Thomas’s claim to Englishness, musing, “If I have understood
aright . . . you say that you are no Spaniard, yet that you have Spanish blood
in you, and came hither in a Spanish ship, and I find this story strange” (109).
In order to win the trust of the Aztec and save his own life, Thomas must
prove that he is not Spanish, but he cannot do so by proving he is “English”
because it is a signifier with no signified. In fact, the Aztec call him “Teule”—
their word for Spaniard—for the next twenty years. Ross Forman points out
that critical work on the British Empire tends to focus on spaces of deep
isolation like the islands of The Tempest and Robinson Crusoe or unmapped
interiors like t hose of Haggard’s Africa novels.23 In places like t hese, native
populations are little more than a nuisance to overcome, and they do not
disrupt the fantasy of a genetic claim to empty, available land. But Conquest-
era Mexico is vibrantly, unmistakably not empty, and as an Englishman
Thomas is himself the island, rapidly sinking into dangerous foreign waters.
So while Quatermain and his companions discover ancient threads of their
own history in Africa, Thomas discovers that he must give up his nationality
in Mexico precisely because it has no history t here at all.
What he finds, therefore, is not his own ancient historical origins but the
necessity of founding a new origin that erases his history. Because Thomas
cannot be English in Mexico he must become Aztec. He elects to marry the
princess Otomie, fully understanding the ontological change it w ill work:
“One thing I understood, if I married Otomie it must be at her own price, for
then I must become an Indian” (180). And the ceremony is, indeed, a ritual
of symbolic death and rebirth, the priest declaring that “as this blood of yours
sinks into the earth, so may the memory of your past life sink and be forgot-
ten, for you are born again of the people of Anahuac” (188). Thomas—now
Teule—must himself swear to this rebirth:
I, Teule, swear to be faithful to the people of Anahuac and to their lawful gov-
ernors. I swear to wage war upon their foes and to compass their destruction, and
more especially upon the Teules till they are driven into the sea. I swear to offer
no affront to the gods of Anahuac. I swear myself in marriage to Otomie, prin-
cess of the Otomie, the d
aughter of Montezuma my lord, for so long as her life
shall endure. I swear to attempt no escape from t hese shores. I swear to renounce
my f ather and my mother, and the land where I was born, and to cling to this land
of my new birth; and this my oath s hall endure till the volcan Popo ceases to
vomit smoke and fire, till t here is no king in Tenoctitlan, till no priest serves the
altars of the gods, and the p
eople of Anahuac are no more a p
eople. (188)
Thomas swears to this “new birth,” he insists, “because I must, though there
was much in the oath that I liked little enough” (188). And it is no wonder that
he is reluctant; the ceremony makes clear that belonging is zero-sum. To “be-
come an Indian,” Thomas must renounce his parents, his nation, and his
entire past, and give up hope of ever returning to E ngland. T
hese oaths even
change his race: shortly after the ceremony, Montezuma’s brother remarks that
Thomas “till an hour ago was himself a white man” (189).
To put this oath in terms of the international relations it implies, to become
a partner with Mexico (literalized h ere as the partnership of marriage) means
renouncing any of the English self-interest that might lead to predation. The
Aztec are wise enough to make Thomas forswear any act which, by fulfilling
the interests of a foreign nation, might harm them; his promise defuses the
possibility of his acting on behalf of English imperialism. It is apparent, more-
over, that the familial and the national are different scalar levels of the same
familial form, as a single oath strips Thomas of f amily and nation simulta
neously, remaking him as an Aztec husband and a “brother in blood and
heart” (188), as well as a soldier of the Aztec cause. So, like the Englishmen in
Haggard’s Africa stories, Thomas ends up with a familial connection to the
native people, and this has narrative effect, changing his perceived origins. But
unlike the heroes in Africa, Thomas is assimilated into native history, not the
other way around. While Quatermain and company discover their own his-
torical origins in Africa, Thomas finds that Mexico erases his. His origin h ere
is a new beginning as someone else, both genealogically and politically.
Hybridity
But if Mexico doesn’t allow the fantasy of direct English rule through the dis-
covery of ancient kinship, perhaps it supports informal empire by the cre-
ation of contemporary family bonds. One prominent critical model of Brit-
ish informal empire in Latin America argues precisely this, that literary
depictions of familial ties to Latin American Creoles or indigenous people—like
Thomas’s with the Aztec—merely served as ideological cover for the British
pursuit of power and profit. In other words, Britain’s two drives—k inship
and imperial possession (what I have been shorthanding as partnership and
predation)—operated on a surface/depth model. Kinship relations were a kind
of feint, not countering but rather serving Britain’s aspirations to economic
dominance. Rebecca Cole Heinowitz, for instance, argues that Romantic writ-
ers imagined “a British ascendancy in the Spanish colonies as justified by moral
and cultural kinship with the indigenous population.”24 By this logic, Thom-
as’s rebirth, his shift in identity, is not real; it is a put-on masking his inevitably
imperial intent.
And when Thomas is still a young child in England, his father instills in
him a warning that would seem to echo this model: “You are half a Spaniard,
Thomas, your skin and eyes tell their own tale, but whatever skin and eyes
may tell, let your heart give them the lie. Keep your heart English, Thomas;
let no foreign devilments enter there” (11). Thomas’s f ather tries to teach him
that hybridity can be a surface condition beneath which one’s “heart” can be
true to E ngland. And at first, Thomas’s new commitments in Mexico do seem
more feigned than sincere. In the first days after his vows of repatriation he
says that he “went dressed as an Indian warrior” (191, my emphasis) to a parley
with the Spaniards, suggesting his role is more costume than identity. And
days later, on the battlefield of the Noche Triste (a famous Aztec victory over
the Spanish that Montezuma’s Daughter gives Thomas credit for devising), he
encounters conquistador Bernal Díaz, who is startled by Thomas’s apparent
hybridity, exclaiming, “Holy M other! who are you? An Aztec who speaks Cas-
tilian?” Thomas immediately denies his brand-new Aztec identity: “I am no
Aztec. . . . I am an Englishman and I fight with the Aztecs that I may slay him
whom you name Sarceda. But with you I have no quarrel, Bernal Diaz. Be-
gone and escape if you can” (196–197). Mere days a fter swearing an oath to
be “born again of the p eople of Anahuac,” Thomas asserts that he is “no
Aztec.” And by letting Díaz escape, claiming to have “no quarrel” with a man
waging war against the Aztec, he further violates his promise to make their
causes his own. Instead, Thomas assures Díaz that he is allied with the Aztec
only as a pragmatic way to fulfill a different oath—the one he took to avenge
his mother’s death.25 Though he promised to renounce his English family, he
still puts his duty to them above the duty he has just sworn to his Aztec f amily.
In fact, Thomas never fully loses his English identity. Even a fter twenty
years of living with the Aztec, he retains the conviction that their faith and
religious rites are “savage,” and although his three sons with Otomie have dark
skin, Thomas calls them “English boys and not Indian, for I christened them
all, and taught them our English tongue and faith” (259). It would seem that
throughout his time in Mexico he heeds his f ather’s warning not to let hybrid-
ity be anything more than skin deep. Anaya Ferreira argues that this kinship-
surface/imperial-depth model is the essence of Thomas’s relationship with the
Aztec, that “aunque aparentemente llega a asimilarse por completo a la socie-
dad azteca, en el fondo nunca se integra y retiene siempre su fe cristiana, su
conducta caballerosa y sus innatas virtudes morales puritanas, ‘cualidades’ que
en última instancia lo hacen superior a los indígenas.”26 In this analysis,
Thomas’s sworn commitment to Aztec familial and politic al belonging is
merely a surface he wears over his much deeper connection to England and
to the reproduction of Englishness in his family line.
But the novel teaches us repeatedly that both feigning and oath-breaking
are deeply dishonorable. Still early in his marriage to Otomie, Thomas sug-
gests they dress as peasants to escape danger, a proposal his wife only disdain-
fully agrees to:
Presently she was clad, and minced before me with savage mockery, saying:
“Prithee, soldier, do I look my part?”
“A peace to such fooling,” I answered; “our lives are at stake, what does it
matter how we disguise ourselves?”
“It matters much, husband, but how can you understand, who are a man and
a foreigner?” (244)
Thomas attributes Otomie’s icy contempt to “savage” class prejudice, but he

clearly misses her point. Suggesting that there is no honor in escaping death
through disguise, Otomie seems to pick up on the parallel between this mo-
ment and the one pages earlier where Thomas elected to marry her and re-
nounce England in order to save his own life. If this narrow escape is achieved
through feint, perhaps the last one was as well; perhaps Thomas took his mar-
riage vows with crossed fingers. Perhaps he is not Aztec but only “dressed as”
one. Choosing this moment to call Thomas a “foreigner,” Otomie connects
feigned or disguised identity to outsider status, tacitly accusing him of only
feigning his belonging with the Aztec and further suggesting that such a feint
is morally shameful.
Thomas, though, already understands the shame of breaking vows. The
entire narrative is catalyzed by the oath he swears to find his m other’s killer,
and when he leaves England he tells his fiancée, Lily, “do not weep, I have
sworn to do it, and were I to break my oath I should be dishonoured” (41).
And just as that aversion to dishonor drives him to the Americas, so too do
his promises to the Aztec produce real claims on his behavior. He may swear
his oaths reluctantly, but he keeps them, never abandoning Otomie or the
Aztec rebellion to seek his old life in England. In fact, he is twice given the
opportunity to save his own life and return to England by betraying his
Aztec family, and twice he declines. In the first instance, his Spanish captors
give him a choice between a painful death and safe passage to England in ex-
change for the location of Montezuma’s treasure, but remembering “my oath
and Otomie” (228), and swearing not to betray “my brother’s secret” (a refer-
ence to the prince Guatemoc), he stays silent (233). L ater, when the Aztec sit
doomed in their final stronghold, he again rejects the Spanish offer of a return
to England, saying, “I cannot come, for my wife and son are [in the temple],
and I must return to die with them if need be” (287). In both cases he gives up
what he expects is his last chance to ever see his English f amily again, believ-
ing his sworn vows to his Aztec family—his brother and wife—to have the
stronger claim on his honor. While he may originally have liked his Aztec
oaths “little enough,” they do effectively make him family.
And despite Otomie’s fears, Thomas never feigns his love for his Aztec re-
lations. Guatemoc calls Thomas “my b rother in blood and heart” (188),
which Thomas echoes when he says that Guatemoc “became my dear com-
panion and brother in arms” (108) and calls him “my friend and blood brother”
(211). T
hese particular turns of phrase reference Thomas’s initiation ceremony,
during which he was “baptized” with Guatemoc’s blood, and they therefore
doubly signify the bond of Thomas’s oath and fraternal relation. Likewise, his
marriage to Otomie is not merely a lifesaving necessity; he falls in love with
her even before they are wed, remarking, “I felt that no woman could ever be
so dear to me as this glorious w oman, no, not even my [English] betrothed”
(171). Twenty years later, as Otomie lays d ying, she specifically remarks that
Thomas has felt both duty and real love toward her: “You swore that death
alone should sever us, and you have kept your oath in the letter and in the
thought” (310–311). He has kept his promise in the technical sense and the felt
sense, a duality he repeats moments later: “I loved her well and I was faithful
in my oath to her” (311).
Duty and love in fact change Thomas’s identity. No longer merely “dressed
as an Indian warrior,” by the end of the novel he refers to himself as “I, an In-
dian chief” (265), expressing his self-identification as an Aztec man. He re-
encounters Díaz after the war has ended and his f amily has perished (ending
his commitment to the Aztec), but where he once declared to him “I am no
Aztec,” this time he greets Díaz “a fter the Indian fashion by touching the
earth with my hand, for what was I but an Indian captive?” (296). He never
loses his Englishness, as we see in the way he raises his sons, but this duality
is precisely what makes him hybrid. He is still English, but he is also, by his
own assessment, “Indian.” Kinship, marriage, community belonging—these
are no feint. Far from being impostures that mask English self-interest, they
are sincere ties that significantly erode Englishness itself.
Let’s now translate t hese interpersonal f amily ties back into the language
of the international relations they trope. The way Thomas’s f ather suggests he
move through the world, a hybrid on the surface but an Englishman at heart,
is a figure for the surface/depth model of informal empire, in which familial
relations are merely a cover for the promotion of English self-interest. But
Thomas’s experience in Mexico suggests that neither impulse, one to partner

with America on behalf of her freedom and the other to promote English su-
premacy, is in fact more “real” than the other. Under examination, partner-
ship with Latin America is a moral good and a m atter of honor, but so is the
dominance and continuance of English cultural heritage. T hese two halves of
the discourse of informal empire are much more complicatedly arranged than
surface and depth; they are, like Thomas’s divided loyalties, two warring parts
of an irresolvable whole.
Once again, this dynamic marks informal empire as differently formed
than its formal counterpart. In Haggard’s Africa novels, the English heroes
may well love native w omen and join their political causes, but they never risk
becoming African b ecause they never have to shed their English identity. Far
from being cut off from home, they are connected to it by an imperial network
of British settlers and coastal shipping routes. They speak English, travel in
a supportive group, and retain their cultural practices. Forming a f amily in
Africa, then, poses no threat to national identity. Compare Thomas’s marriage
to Otomie, which strips him of English belonging and repatriates him as
Aztec, with Sir Henry Curtis’s marriage to Queen Nyleptha of the Zu-Vendi
in Allan Quatermain. Like Thomas, Curtis’s marriage binds him to a native
people, but it does so on his own terms. Because the Zu-Vendi marriage cer-
emony does not make him “feel half married,” he readily takes Quatermain’s
suggestion that he “read the English marriage service . . . to give it the sanc-
tion of your own religion.” And his bride, “fully understanding that her hus-
band wished to celebrate the marriage according to the rites prevailing in his
own country,” makes no objection.27 This marriage performs precisely the op-
posite of Thomas’s, displaying the primacy of the groom’s English belonging
and making clear that his membership in the Zu-Vendi nation depends on
their willing acceptance of this.
The marriage further makes Curtis king-consort, a nominally inferior po-
sition to his wife’s, but she gives him full ruling authority, saying, “thy w ill
shall be my w ill, and thy ways my ways” —this entails not Zu-Vendi-f ying
28
himself but rather, we learn, Christianizing his new community. Thomas,

meanwhile, has pledged to subordinate his own national prejudices to Aztec
causes, and he notably fails to Christianize the Aztec, not even his own wife,
who, far from deferring to him in all t hings, mocks him when she disagrees
with him. His marriage, in short, makes him a partner but does not enable
his dominance within that partnership. Curtis, on the other hand, enters into
a partnership that is openly unequal, enabling him to be both partner and

predator in Africa because his family takes an overtly patriarchal, hierarchi-
cal form. Like Thomas, he becomes part of both the domestic and national
family, but it is as an Englishman atop the imperial F amily of Man.
Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry, in which imperialists work to render
the colonized “almost the same but not quite,”29 also obtains in Curtis’s case,
where he rules over and culturally colonizes a population that, partly due to
their implied ancestral connection, are implausibly receptive to imperial rule.
But in Montezuma’s Daughter, it is not the Aztecs who are constructed as the
mimics; rather, it is Thomas who must become “almost the same but not
quite”—retaining kernels of his English identity while “becoming an Indian.”
This inversion both results from Thomas’s practical inability to rule in Mex-
ico, and, as we w ill see, in turn makes him ethically averse to the pursuit of
informal empire.
Antagonistic Relations
Thomas’s hybrid nature, a figure for the twinned discourses of informal em-
pire, is not stable but in a constant state of antagonism, which appears as an
international crisis of familial loyalty. Thomas faces a choice between an
Aztec and an English fiancée, each of whom represent both the nuclear f amily
and the national f amily to which he w ill belong. It is a binary and mutually
exclusive choice. Before marrying Otomie, Thomas tells her that he is already
engaged to Lily, his fiancée in England, and Otomie replies: “She is vowed to
you in marriage. . . . W hy, then we are equal, for so am I. . . . Though I bear
her no ill will, between me and her t here is a struggle to the death. We are
strangers to each other, and strangers we shall remain, but she has touched
your hand as I touch it now; you link us together and are our bond of enmity”
(147). Stressing that the two vows of engagement are “equal” demands on
Thomas’s honor, Otomie frames them as fundamentally antagonistic precisely
because equal. Thomas simply cannot marry two w omen, and the competing
promises are a triadic relational structure held in zero-sum dynamic tension.
On the day he marries Otomie, he reflects specifically on this antagonism:
Once my hands w
ere tied by this marriage [I could never return to E
ngland] dur-
ing Otomie’s lifetime, and so far as Lily Bozard was concerned I should be dead.
How could I be thus faithless to her memory and my troth, and on the other
hand, how could I discard the woman who had risked all for me, and who, to
speak truth, had grown so dear to me, though there was one yet dearer? A hero
or an angel might find a path out of this tangle, but alas! I was neither the one
nor the other, only a man afflicted as other men are with h
uman weakness.
(180–181)
This choice is complicatedly, messily, irreducibly, about both love and citizen-
ship at the same time. Each marriage represents a different possible life, both
romantic and national. This is no mere lark or adventure; Thomas will owe
his f uture to Otomie, to the Aztec p eople, and to Mexico, effectively causing
his own death in the photo-negative family he might have had in E ngland.
This “tangle” has no possible remedy.
In an analysis of Antigone, George Eliot calls the heroine’s forced choice
between family and citizenship an “antagonism of valid principles.” Leila May
paraphrases Hegel’s interpretation of the same conflict as “a war between good
and good.”30 This could also be described as Antigone’s conflict between the
two scalar levels of familial community—the domestic and the national. In
Montezuma’s Daughter, Thomas faces an international version of this same
choice. He is caught not between the domestic and the national like Antigone
but rather between two different national versions of their union. His two
choices of bride each represent family and national belonging, one in England
and one in Mexico. As Otomie says, both are equal, and as Thomas feels, both
are legitimate. This tension is an antagonism of valid fiancées, each represent-
ing a different politico-family.31
Montezuma’s Daughter, then, participates in the complex discourse of
nineteenth-century sociality in which family relations both trope the nation
and produce its subjects’ commitment. Thomas’s two possible marriages are
not merely the sides of a love triangle, but also parallels for Britain’s dual am-
bitions in Latin America: one an affective and moral solidarity with the
Americans who fought against Spain (partnership), and the other an abiding
self-interest (predation). We might also describe t hese as an antagonism of
valid principles, since to the British they would likely both seem good. Their
antagonism, then, could be difficult to see, since informal empire seems to of-
fer both in one geopolitical package. This is how the surface/depth model of
informal empire presents the two ideas—not as antagonistic but mutually
constitutive, a complex but coherent whole offering the British two moral
goods in one. But when rendered as specific family commitments—not
abstract discourses of political orientation but the potential relations among

Lily, Thomas, and Otomie, not as antagonistic principles but antagonistic
fiancées—it is clear that they are mutually interrupting. On their wedding
night, Otomie reminds Thomas that “we are one till death, for such vows as
ours cannot be broken.” And Thomas, agreeing with her but expressing the
essential paradox of honoring unbreakable vows by breaking identical vows,
adds: “our oaths are lifelong, though other oaths have been broken that they
might be sworn” (190–191). Presented as two literal marriages, commitment
to Mexico and commitment to England are not complementary halves of a
coherent w hole but rather indissoluble, irreconcilable alternatives, choosing
one of which always means refusing the other. They are, as Otomie describes
herself and Lily, two “strangers,” “linked,” but locked in “a struggle to the
death.”
Even though Thomas does marry both w omen—Otomie in his youth and
Lily in his m
iddle age—separating them sequentially does not resolve their
antagonism, as instead, each relationship poisons the other. Throughout his
twenty years with Otomie, he thinks of Lily:
Memory would rise up against me, and time upon time I would lie awake at
night, even by the side of Otomie, and remember and repent. . . . For I was a
stranger in a strange land, and though my home was t here and my c hildren w
ere
about me, the longing for my other home was yet with me, and I could not put
away the memory of that Lily whom I had lost. . . . The thought of her went with
me like my shadow; it shone across the stormy love of Otomie, I remembered it
even in my children’s kiss. (265)
Lily “rise[s] up” in his mind while he is with Otomie, casting a “shadow” on
that marriage, but when he returns to England, finally free to marry the love
of his youth, it is Otomie who rises up to taint their first kiss: “And yet as our
lips met I thought of Otomie” (323). It is not just that he loves each woman;
the strength of each love, paradoxically, weakens the other. His twenty-year
commitment to Otomie necessarily distances him from Lily, and he remarks,
“The gulf between us widened with the widening years” (265). But his En
glishness, in particular his Christianity, also distances him from Otomie,
and about this distance he remarks nearly identically, “There was a g reat gulf
between us which widened with the years” (311–312). Thomas is fully commit-
ted to each woman, and yet his decision to live in Mexico produces a “gulf”
between him and his English wife, while his English religion produces a “gulf”
between him and his Mexican wife. T hese marriages are not merely mutually
exclusive commitments, but mutually destructive ones.
Once again, however, sincerity is key to this antagonism. In the surface/
depth model of informal empire, expressions of love, solidarity, or kinship
with Americans do not contradict British imperial self-interest because they
are not sincere. And Thomas raises the analogous possibility that he might
only pretend to love Otomie. Noting that he had to marry Otomie or die, he
says he might easily “have declared myself to my affianced and to all the world
as a slave of events from which there was no escape” (181). But Thomas is re-
peatedly depicted as driven by three forces—his commitment to honoring
oaths, his hatred of the Spanish empire, and his real love for Otomie—and
the novel teaches us to value all three as moral goods. Feigning them for the
sake of preserving or strengthening his English marriage would make him an
unpardonable cad, deceitful to a w oman who loves him and unsympathetic
to a worthy political cause. Indeed, he concludes that he could not in good
conscience pretend that his marriage to Otomie was a mere convenience, stat-
ing that in the m atter of his two lovers—the antagonism of competing
fiancées—“my mind was divided” (181). At the end of his life, a fter he has
buried both wives, he hopes that in heaven “there is no marrying and giving
in marriage,” because “I do not know how my wives, Montezuma’s daughter
and the sweet English gentlewoman, would agree together were it otherwise”
(7). But even in his imagination, in the utopia of heaven, he cannot be sure
that t hese two commitments can be reconciled—that is how strongly they are
at odds. As an invocation of Britain’s choice to support Latin American sov-
ereignty or their own supremacy, we can see the implication that both should
be sincerely felt, but that at the same time, honoring each means forgoing the
other. This family form, the antagonism of competing fiancées, is not a sta-
ble if dynamic dialectic but rather a dysfunctional paradox.
A number of theoretical approaches to f amily form lend their own vocab-
ulary to this impasse. Sara Ahmed, for instance, argues that when polities
express their unity as a function of mutual love, the “sticky” quality of that
love, its capacity to bind people together, also necessarily creates exclusion.32
Like many theorists of social belonging, Derrida argues that politics relies on
filiation, which he defines as e ither “real fraternity” (blood) or “spiritual fra-
ternity” (affinity), to unite a p
eople. He further interprets Montaigne as argu-
ing that spiritual fraternity—or “sovereign friendship”—can only be made
with one friend b ecause of “the simultaneously politic al and apolitic al, or
a-civic, structure of a perfect friendship which assumes the impossibility of

honouring multiple demands and doing one’s duty.”33 And Leela Gandhi,
whose book Affective Communities owes much to Derrida, puts this in the
specific context of how a relationship with a stranger or outsider may threaten
one’s national belonging. She argues that Derridean “philoxenia” (friendship
with the stranger) can cause one to “becom[e] strange or guestlike in her own
domain, w hether this be home, nation, community, race, gender, sex, skin,
or species.”34 All three theories suggest that filiative bonds of social relation
get their strength in part by excluding filiation with others. To be fully
bonded into a national family, one cannot have equally strong relations with
an “outsider.” In a formulation that exquisitely captures Thomas Wingfield’s
predicament, Gandhi writes that “friendships t oward strangers or foreigners,
in particular, carry exceptional risks, as their fulfillment may at any time
‘constitute a felony contra patriam.’ ”35 This is the crux of Thomas’s dual en-
gagements and the twinned discourses of British informal empire that they
figure. In both cases, when the English forge real attachments (not feigned
ones) to the Mexican people, these relations make demands that compete with
English colonial interests. They cause a felony contra imperium.
Relational Success and Generational Failure

The “felony” produced by dueling familial relations is ultimately against the
future of the imperial English family. Thomas’s two fiancées not only repre-
sent mutually exclusive synchronic structures of family-nation belonging, but
also two forking diachronic narratives. Reminding him on the eve of their
union that “in such a marriage you renounce your past and give me your
future” (185), Otomie suggests that committing to her re-forms the narrative
of Thomas’s life. It performatively vacates his biological birth and early life,
instead beginning his story with his Aztec wedding vows. Likewise, what re-
mains of the story of his life must now (as far as they all know) end in, and
produce closure on behalf of, Mexico. This is reminiscent of concerns about
how British–Latin American relations might call into question whose progress
narrative the f uture would see told (as discussed extensively in chapters 1 and
2). And it is also a striking example of how genealogical consciousness and
historical consciousness in the late nineteenth century were potently mutual.
Family form enacts narrative form by filtering the events of Thomas’s life
through the mesh of a new set of relations. When he marries into the Aztec
f amily, he w ill no longer have a f uture in the English f amily, e ither personal
or imperial.
If Haggard shared his late Victorian milieu’s obsession with origins, he also
shared their related preoccupation with generational descent, particularly in
its patrilineal form. T hese are of course connected, especially in the nineteenth-
century British novel, which, as Barry McCrea argues, so often ends in mar-
riage as a way of marking a new origin, fulfilling another turn in the cycle of
generational continuity.36 Haggard himself was “fervently attached to the dy-
nastic ambitions of his family and class but frustrated in these ambitions by
historical change,” and his imperial fictions enact the fantasy of primogeni-
tal dynasty he could not achieve in his own life.37 Allan Quatermain uses the
fantasy of ancient origins to bring the British to power in Africa and begin a
new generation of imperial rule through marriage and procreation. Curtis not
only rules over the Zu-Vendi p eople by virtue of his marriage to Nyleptha, but
also produces an infant son and heir, “a regular curly-haired, blue-eyed young
Englishman in looks.” This boy, Curtis says, w ill both “inherit the throne of
Zu-Vendis” and “become what an English gentleman should be, and gener-
ally is—which is to my mind even a prouder and a finer thing than being
born heir apparent to the g reat House of the Stairway, and, indeed, the high-
est rank that a man can reach upon this earth.”38 The child represents the
future of both the Zu-Vendi and the English family b ecause the two have
been joined in imperial familial form—a union made possible because there
is no antagonism of competing filiation. Curtis’s primary filiation is to the
British imperial family, and his marriage to Nyleptha makes her a member of
it. Marrying into the Zu-Vendi family causes no felony against the British
Empire but rather expands its reach. For this reason, t hese imperial fantasies
do not interrupt but rather strengthen English families at home; as Mc-
Clintock notes, the journey in King Solomon’s Mines restores Curtis’s missing
brother, helps bond Quatermain to his son, and turns mineral plunder into
the means of upward mobility into the gentry, “promising therewith the con-
tinuity, however tenuous, of the landed patriarch.”39 Imperial spoils materi-
ally sustain the future of the imperial family. W hether it is the heroes of King
Solomon’s Mines returning home with unprecedented mineral wealth, or the
Scotsman in Allan Quatermain set to return with thirty thousand pounds
after having made his homestead “blossom like a rose in the wilderness,”40
adventures in Africa provide handsome financial support for the families of
the Empire.
Haggard’s preoccupation with the legacies of patrilineal descent, both in

his own life and his African fictions, make the shattered families of his Mex-
ico novels all the more significant. That is not to say that Thomas’s adventures
in Mexico have no imperial aspect. Indeed, he is ethnocentric and religiously
intolerant. He rises to a position of leadership among the Aztecs, “cleanses”
their culture of h uman sacrifice, redesigns their armies a fter English military
models, and f athers sons (“English boys”) who are set to inherit the Aztec em-
pire. But Thomas is never able to change the religious beliefs of the people he
leads, and what power he does accrue only exacerbates his ultimate crushing
failure. Summing up his time in Mexico, he laments: “My oath was fulfilled
and my vengeance was accomplished, but . . . the tribe that I ruled was con-
quered, the beautiful city where I dwelt was a ruin, I was homeless and a beg-
gar, and my fortune would be g reat if in the issue I escaped death or slavery.
All this I could have borne, for I had borne the like before, but the cruel end
of my last surviving son, the one true joy of my desolate life, I could not bear”
(306). In both Montezuma’s Daughter and Heart of the World, Englishmen are
imperially impotent. Hampered at the outset by their need to form real part-
nerships with the indigenous, what cultural supremacy they do build comes
to nothing when Mexican religions are too persistent to be changed, Anglo-
American offspring that seem to promise dynastic rule are killed, and the in-
digenous races are ultimately wiped out.
And while the English in Africa build a unified imperial family that
strengthens their legacy both at home and abroad, each of Thomas’s two an-
tagonistic families are left barren. His three sons with Otomie are killed,
summarily discontinuing the narrative of descent in his Aztec family. And by
the time Thomas returns to E ngland and marries Lily, he has loved Otomie
too well to forget her, and, likely due to his long absence, there are destined
to be no English progeny, e ither. Thomas and Lily’s only child dies in infancy,
after which, “when she had abandoned further hope of children, . . . Lily grew
jealous of t hose dead sons of mine and of my ever present love for them” (326).
In the end, Thomas notes sadly, “it was fated that I should die childless” (328).
This is a marked deviation from the typical nineteenth-century British novel,
which was “in the thrall of a sort of fertility cult, where all sense of beginnings
and endings are predicated upon marriage and procreation.”41 While King Solo
mon’s Mines and Allan Quatermain achieve narrative closure by shoring up
the family future, in Montezuma’s Daughter both of Thomas’s marriages con-
spicuously fail to produce a line of descent, symbolizing an end to domestic

and national narrative.
This is, in large part, due to the presence of the two antagonistic marriages:
marriage to Otomie cannot bear fruit because this would mean total abandon-
ment of the English narrative, and marriage to Lily cannot bear fruit b ecause
the marriage to Otomie has interrupted it. Each set of relations is so impor
tant, so real, so successful, that it prevents the other from successfully produc-
ing a line of descent. McCrea argues that the English novel of this period
gets its form from the obsession with family, and that its plot often revolves
around the introduction of a stranger who “must interrupt the f amily and
break it apart to allow it to reconstitute itself healthily in another generation.”42
The nuclear family “neutralizes [the stranger], brings him in from the wilder-
ness and assimilates him to the syntax of genealogy and kinship, rerouting
his energies back into f amily life and, by extension, civilized society.”43 In this
case, Otomie would be the stranger, and Lily the intended wife. But Otomie
does not serve as a plot device for delaying and ultimately strengthening the
intended English nuclear family. Rather, she becomes the nexus of a second,
just as legitimate f amily structure, whose gravity pulls Thomas to a halfway
point between two equally valid networks of belonging. If the novel is a mar-
riage plot, it is not one in which an unsuccessful marriage is mere plot device
before the consummation of a successful one. And if British–Latin American
relations are a marriage plot, it is not one in which the international partner-
ship is mere narrative device used to leverage a stronger British imperial Family
of Man. Each wife, and each political position, is valid, and honoring e ither
undermines the other. They are locked in an unresolvable paradox, in which
the undiminishable validity of each diminishes the validity of the other. Mon
tezuma’s Daughter therefore suggests that it is not formally possible to build
one coherent, fruitful narrative out of two distinct f amily forms.
The fact that Thomas’s marriages do not lead to imperial rule or genera-
tional dynasty might be more damaging to fantasies of territorial colonialism,
however, than to fantasies of informal empire, which specifically bypasses di-
rect rule. In fact, so long as Thomas is enriched during his adventure, we
could read the novel as precisely propagandizing for the dynamics of informal
empire: English plunder of Latin American wealth during a state of compro-
mised sovereignty. And yet, as I discussed in the opening to this chapter,
Thomas refuses to transfer Aztec wealth to the emergent English empire.
Although he returns to England in possession of priceless mineral wealth, he

pacifies Queen Elizabeth’s material greed by giving her only a single gemstone,
while withholding the remainder and burying it underground for eternity.
The reason for this act is the loyalty he feels to his Aztec f amily relations—to
his wife, Otomie, and his b rother, Guatemoc. Marriage, of course, does not
and did not have to mean equality, nor in the nineteenth c entury was it a par-
ticularly good institution for the preservation of wealth from patriarchal
power. In fact, marriage might make a perfect figure for informal empire, as
it specifically and legally oversaw the transfer of a bride’s wealth into a hus-
band’s possession and curtailed her sovereignty. But that makes it all the more
remarkable that Montezuma’s Daughter does not figure marriage as informal-
empire-through-coverture. Instead, as a husband Thomas sees himself as hav-
ing a moral duty to ensure that his wife’s wealth is disposed of according to
her own wishes, which specifically means not allowing it to become fodder for
English imperial power. The marriage, far from serving as a conduit through
which mineral wealth may pass into English coffers, acts as a blockade.
Even Haggard’s use of titles suggests his interest in family over empire. The
title King Solomon’s Mines advertises the plunder the heroes successfully carry
home. But Haggard did not give his first Mexico novel the analogous title (and
familiar phrase) Montezuma’s Treasure. Instead, by calling it Montezuma’s
Daughter he foregrounds what Thomas w ill carry home—not riches but
family connections. He possesses the “priceless” necklace only b ecause of his
wife’s love, and he possesses the secret of the treasure only because Guatemoc
recognized him as an Aztec “brother in blood and heart.” Thomas has “ex-
tracted” Latin American wealth only because of his Aztec family relations,
and t hese same relations convince him to protect that wealth from England’s
reach. To put this in terms of informal empire, Thomas does not leverage
transnational family in order to extract wealth. This is the dynamic in both
Allan Quatermain and King Solomon’s Mines, where “all that had to be accom-
plished to succeed to the treasure was a demonstration of family resem-
blance.”44 Rather, by ceremoniously gifting a single gemstone to Queen Eliza-
beth, Thomas puts on a show of imperial wealth extraction as a cover so that
he can honor his Aztec family. He has not pretended to be a good partner in
order to be an imperial predator—he has pretended to be an imperial preda-
tor in order to be a good partner. And the result is not support for English
imperialism but disgust for it. So while uniting African w omen into the sin-
gular family relations of the British Empire services and reproduces imperi-
alism, Thomas’s two valid but mutually exclusive family relations have
caused a “felony contra imperium,” which is to say that they have denied the
empire its spoils. If informal empire relies on the dual drive to both defend
Latin American sovereignty and profit by it, Montezuma’s Daughter shows that
the models of international family implied by each drive are mutually
exclusive.
In Haggard’s oeuvre, then, different settings are not merely interchange-
able backdrops for the imperial adventure story; rather, they condition differ
ent possibilities for English power. What McClintock describes as the ascen-
dancy of three British o rders—“the male, reproductive order of patriarchal
monogamy; the white economic order of mining capital; and the global, politi
cal order of empire”45 —is unavailable in Mexico, where the imminent tri-
umph of the Spanish over the Aztec makes any English interest in conquest
hopelessly belated. Nor can Thomas act the part of the informal imperialist,
which so regularly involved speaking in forked-tongue praise of both Latin
American sovereignty and British imperial rule, b ecause he simply cannot do
both. He can join the Spanish and conquer Mexico or he can join the Aztecs
and fight European colonialism, but he cannot be liberator and conqueror at
the same time. He might well wish to do both: Thomas interprets the indig-
enous people through a racialized hierarchy and a colonial gaze, but he also
believes it is honorable to defend them against Spanish imperialism. He mod-
els both an imperial and anti-imperial perspective at the same time, and as
such, he is a figure for Britain’s two-faced aims in Latin America in the nine-
teenth century. But Montezuma’s Daughter presents t hese conjoined discourses
as inseparably divided, both across a literal b attle line and across marriage
vows that can be made only with one bride at a time.
The Nineteenth Century

The connection to informal empire is even more unmistakable in Haggard’s
next Mexico novel. Two years after penning Montezuma’s Daughter he pub-
lished Heart of the World (1895), which tells an extremely similar story. Both
novels follow an Englishman in Mexico who, for his own personal reasons,
becomes involved in the fight for indigenous independence. Both Englishmen
become as close as brothers with an indigenous prince and both marry an in-
digenous princess. They both face the risks of a culture of human sacrifice
and narrowly survive, both are ultimately made heir to a kingdom that is
doomed to die, and in both novels a vast treasure is left b ehind, buried for-
ever. Heart of the World’s dynamics of belonging, f amily commitment, and the
failure to profit from the collapse of indigenous sovereignty are strongly par-
allel to t hose of Montezuma’s Daughter, and I w ill not rehash them. A differ-
ence worth remarking, however, is Heart of the World ’s direct engagement
with informal empire. Set this time in nineteenth-century Mexico, the story
not only figures the discourses of international relations through individual
familial relations, but also introduces a ctual British “informal imperialists” like
Jebb into the novel. Using a frame structure, Heart of the World tells its story
through not one but two Englishmen who have traveled to independent Mex-
ico to make their fortune by overseeing mining projects that use indigenous
labor. The novel therefore blends the fantasies of Montezuma’s Daughter with
the present-day realities of informal empire that Haggard saw firsthand. That
Haggard essentially rewrote Montezuma’s Daughter but added direct refer-
ences to British mining projects is strong evidence that he had informal em-
pire in mind when composing both stories.
Just as it is in Haggard’s autobiography, nineteenth-century British min-
ing in Mexico appears in Heart of the World as unfeasible, unprofitable, and
undesirable. The two Englishmen who have come to attempt it are James
Strickland, whose adventures with the “Indian” Ignatio form the plot of the
novel, and Jones, who receives the story from an elderly Ignatio in the frame.
Jones, perhaps a figure for Jebb himself, notes in the novel’s opening pages that
“life at a mine in Chiapas, though doubtless it has some compensations, does
not altogether fulfil a Europea n’s ideal of happiness.”46 On top of suffering
from the difficult work, the risk of fever, the inhospitable climate, and the re-
mote location, Jones grows “too poor” to return to England (14). Strickland
likewise cannot keep his mines operational and winds up broke: “With the
exception of one thousand dollars which remain to my credit in Mexico, I
have spent all my own money that I had saved upon this mine, and of that
thousand dollars, eight hundred are due . . . for back pay, so, whatever trade
I take to next, I shall not begin as a rich man” (41). These accounts, consis-
tent with Haggard’s and Jebb’s, hardly advertise for British capitalist success
in Mexico at the fin de siècle.
Moreover, these failures, like Jebb’s, are framed as ethical. Strickland dem-
onstrates his good character by abandoning mining—including the possibil-
ity of once again exhuming Montezuma’s treasure (still undiscovered three
hundred years after Thomas Wingfield’s death)—to help Ignatio reignite an
indigenous rebellion against Mexican authority. The looting of treasure is set

against support for indigenous rights, a contrast made clearer by the merci-
less and avaricious Spaniard Don Pedro, who plans to find Montezuma’s trea
sure by torturing the location out of an indigenous priest and his d aughter.
Salivating over his potential bounty, Don Pedro says it will make him “rich
as the Queen of E ngland” (107). The contrast, therefore, between loot and in-
digenous rights is not simply a binary opposition between rapacious Spain
and noble E ngland; both Queen Elizabeth in Montezuma’s Daughter and
Queen Victoria in Heart of the World are figured as imperial, associated with
the desire to possess indigenous treasure despite the wishes of its Mexican
owners. In this way they are quite like not only the Spanish in Mexico but also
the English heroes of King Solomon’s Mines, who eagerly loot the treasure of
Kukuanaland against the w ill of its local guardian. Thomas Wingfield and
James Strickland, however, both of whom become “brothers” with their in-
digenous companions, offer a contrast to their own metropole by honoring
indigenous guardians over imperial English desire.
Strickland and Jones, like Thomas, do each inherit wealth through their
Mexican relations—specifically through their brotherly connection to Igna-
tio. As a young man, Ignatio gives Strickland the location of Montezuma’s
gold, and as an old man, he bequeaths his prospering farm to Jones. This
might seem to propagandize for such transfers of property into English hands.
And yet Jones receives Ignatio’s farm only because he is committed to staying
in Mexico, having “been too long away to go to live in England for good.”
Moreover, Ignatio tells him that he will be made wealthy by the farm, but only
insofar “as we understand wealth in this country,” which is to say that the rela-
tive poverty of Mexico means that Jones cannot abscond with his profits to
live fatly somewhere e lse. He w ill remain in Mexico, where he has grown to
feel more at home and where Ignatio is certain that he w ill “deal justly and
gently” by the indigenous p eople (14). And Strickland’s knowledge of Mont-
ezuma’s treasure is even less productive of imperial profit. When he tells him
about it, Ignatio remarks: “Perhaps, if I return again, you will give me a share
in the profits, so that we may grow rich together” (52). This hope, that both
the English miner and the local man may profit equally from the former’s in-
vestment in the latter’s land, is the very dynamic many had hoped for in the
first half of the nineteenth century. Simón Bolívar envisioned precisely this
non-zero-sum mutuality as the ideal f uture for Britain and Latin Americ a,
who he thought might rise together through partnership. But Bolívar was
wary that partnership might be impossible in a world run by predatory em-

pires, and by the end of the century Heart of the World seems certain at least
that partnership is an ideal not to be realized. Montezuma’s gold is not fated
to enrich either the Mexican Ignatio or the Englishman Strickland who hope
to “share in the profits.” That hope, in the form of the mine, quite literally col-
lapses on top of them, nearly killing them both. Rather than dig it up again,
they abandon the site to pursue indigenous freedom instead.
Conclusion
Edward Said was right to point critics to the inherently imperial nature of ad-
venture quests, which “far from casting doubt on the imperial undertaking,
serve to confirm and celebrate its success.” But his claim that in the adventure
genre, “explorers find what they are looking for, [and] adventurers return home
safe and wealthier,”47 does not describe Haggard’s Mexico novels. Thomas
Wingfield finds what he is looking for (revenge against his mother’s killer) only
after twenty years and having lost nearly everything else. Jones and Strickland
never do return home. No one unearths Montezuma’s treasure. No one par-
ticipates in the flow of Mexican wealth to E ngland. And what all three find
on their adventures, above and beyond what they set out to seek, is a strong
familial attachment to the indigenous people that reroutes their sense of na-
tional obligation. Moreover, the association of the queens of E ngland with
unseemly international plunder precisely does “cast doubt on the imperial un-
dertaking.” There is simply a different dynamic in these texts, where the
fantasy of English rule is preempted by the Spanish Conquest, and where the
two discourses of informal empire—partnership and predation—are revealed
to be mutually antagonistic. Montezuma’s Daughter and Heart of the World are
as reluctant to endorse informal empire as they are unable to fantasize about
traditional empire. Haggard’s heroes come to find that marital and fraternal
relations are no mere instrumental device for securing English imperial su-
premacy. Instead they inhibit and disarm the competing relational dynamics
of empire.
My aim has not been to claim Haggard as an anti-imperialist; his belief in
racial hierarchy and civilizational progress marks his work generally as racist
and ethnocentric, and he had no more intrinsic love for the independence of
Mexico than for Africa. In the same chapter of his autobiography in which he
disparages mining projects in Mexico, he suggests that “if only [Mexico] w ere
inhabited by some righteous race, what a land it might be with its richness and
its beauty! For my part, I believe that it would be well for it if it should pass
into the power of the United States.”48 What this tells us, however, is that ter-
ritorial colonialism and informal empire w ere markedly different projects in
his view, not, as Gallagher and Robinson famously argued, two interchange-
able paths to the same goal of British supremacy. This aligns Haggard with
Anthony Trollope, who (as I argued in chapter 3) was another Victorian au-
thor famous for his imperial views who turns out to be much less comfortable
with the informal empire. Where Trollope stumbled over informal empire’s
seeming disruption of the progress narrative, Haggard stumbles over its insin-
cere use of familial relations.
In this way, Montezuma’s Daughter and Heart of the World diverge from a
number of critical traditions. In addition to defying Said’s account of the ad-
venture story, they do not fit well with analyses of the “lost race” novel, in
which “securing the wealth of a lost people is always somehow accidental, or
more appropriately, depicted as a justly deserved but unsought reward for
bringing British civilization into the hinterlands.”49 And they likewise contra-
vene a dominant interpretation of the literature of informal empire, put forth
by scholars like Rebecca Cole Heinowitz and Tim Fulford, in which familial
partnership is an artifice, a gambit to gain advantage. Fulford puts it this way:
“Intermarriage and filial piety, rather than indoctrination and discipline . . .
allowed colonial conversion to seem a benign and sentimental harmonization
of cultures achievable through love.”50
To be clear, I am not arguing that informal empire does not work this way,
in literature or the world. As Kwame Nkrumah puts it in his seminal text,
Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, the general objective of neo
colonialism is “to achieve colonialism in fact while preaching independence.”51
This is the same surface/depth model that Heinowitz and Fulford both com-
pellingly show is at work in some literary depictions (at least in the Romantic
period, which is their subject). But what I have argued here is that these two
halves of informal empire—what Nkrumah calls “preaching independence”
and “achiev[ing] colonialism”—exist, in the case of Latin America, in much
greater tension than such surface/depth models account for. And that this ten-
sion might, in literary depictions, where the already overlapping family
form and national form meet novel form, be just as likely to result in the
unraveling of imperial ideology as its promotion. Both Haggard and López
linger for the span of entire novels over what one half of informal empire’s
doctrines—“preaching independence”—really means. They give it familial

form as partnerships like marriage and fraternity and suggest that England’s
own values demand that t hese families be sincere, not the means to exploita-
tion. Their novels thereby expose the paradox of informal empire by refusing
to participate in the conjoining of its discourses into a stable surface/depth
arrangement, arguing instead that the ethical imperatives of each invalidate
the other. We might say, then, that as Haggard and López understood the
relation between the twin discourses of informal empire, the form they saw
them arranged in was a failed marriage plot.
It is no coincidence that Haggard and López both staged this dynamic
through historical novels. The reticulated nature of historical and genealogi-
cal consciousness in the nineteenth century meant that questions of family
and history w ere each often answered in the language of the other. The search
for a proper explanatory familial structure was also a search for original rela-
tions and lines of descent. Their novels, then, are just as concerned with his-
torical temporality as t hose I discussed in part I, but whereas Simón Bolívar
and Anna Laetitia Barbauld seemed to suggest that the past was a stable source
they could turn to in order to predict the f uture, López and Haggard make
the opposite claim: that the present can be used to reimagine the past. If Bar-
bauld and Bolívar asked the historical question, Where w ill the established
course of events take us next?, Haggard and López asked the genealogical one,
What kind of past might help explain what we are d oing now? If Barbauld and
Bolívar turned to the past as one would turn to tarot cards to predict the
f uture, López and Haggard stacked the deck. And the distinct trajectories
each proposed are telling. While López, still eager to establish strong British–
Latin American relations in the mid-nineteenth c entury, allowed his heroes
to slip the noose of history and carry their international marriage forward into
a counterfactual f uture, Haggard’s lovers are doomed to part in death. They
cannot ultimately overcome the historical gulf placed between them by Spain,
nor the differences in race and culture that keep their families from real hy-
bridity. It is this unsolvable remainder, the inability to truly achieve transna-
tional family through British–L atin American hybridity, that we w ill see
haunts William Henry Hudson in our next and final chapter.
ch apter six
Where Progress and Family

(Almost) Meet
William Henry Hudson and the
Industrialization of the Pampas
For most of the nineteenth c entury, Latin America was only an offstage lo-
cale in the British novel, rarely if ever directly depicted. In Frankenstein (1818),
the creature pleads for a female companion by promising Victor that “neither
you nor any other human being shall ever see us again: I will go to the vast
wilds of South America. . . . I will quit the neighborhood of man.”1 Although
Shelley was writing at the precise moment when South America began to open
dramatically to the world, she figured it as entirely empty of h uman activity.
Even the Arctic, where Frankenstein, the creature, Walton, and his crew all
somehow cross paths, is more populous than South America, which is “out-
side the neighborhood of man.” Throughout the nineteenth century, Latin
America continued to appear in British fiction as e ither empty or unrepresent-
able. Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–60) uses Honduras as a site
for Walter Hartright to discover his masculinity, but despite sending him there
for hundreds of pages, it cannot depict the place; a fter Walter’s expedition
enters a “primeval forest,” “civilisation . . . lost all trace of them.”2 Even
Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1874–75), whose plot turns entirely around
the plan to build a railroad in Mexico, never leaves Britain’s shores. Despite
the tremendous volume of travel narratives published throughout the nine-
teenth century, in literature Latin America continued to serve as a device, a
place that might reform or enrich Englishmen but need not be presented to
the reader in any detail.
William Henry Hudson’s novel The Purple Land That E ngland Lost (1885,
republished in 1904 as The Purple Land) changed that. Set in Montevideo and
the surrounding plains, it went where Victorian fiction was previously unable
or unwilling to go: into the lived experience of modern, independent, con
temporary South America.3 It is “the story of an a ctual country, its geography,
landscape, politics, and social culture.”4 Written in the 1880s, set in the
1860s, and taking the brief, failed English occupation of the La Plata region
in 1806–1807 as titular inspiration (hence the “land that E ngland lost”), the
novel’s palimpsestic temporality almost seems to make up for lost literary
decades.
Hudson was able to bring South Americ a into the diagetic world of the
British novel b ecause he belonged to both places. He lived in E ngland from
1874 u ntil his death in 1922, where he featured in a prominent literary circle
that included Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and John Galsworthy. When
he died, the British government commissioned a monument in Hyde Park that
still stands as a testament to his literary influence and his passionate, founda-
tional work in ornithological conservation. But to the extent that Hudson was
an Englishman, he was, as Jed Esty calls J. R. R. Tolkien and T. S. Eliot, an
“outsider-cum-insider.”5 Because seven thousand miles away in the wide, flat,
mythic pampas south and west of Buenos Aires there is a different story to be
told. This, too, is Hudson’s country, where he was born to sheep-farming im-
migrants from the United States, where he grew up bilingual, and where he
became profoundly attached to the nature and culture of Argentina. In this,
his native land and home u ntil he was thirty-three, “Guillermo Enrique Hud-
son” has also been memorialized, with an ecological park, a museum, and
even a Buenos Aires suburb bearing his name.6 He also, unusually, holds a
place in the literary canons of both countries: Ford Madox Ford called him
“the unapproached master of the English tongue”;7 Jorge Luis Borges hailed
his novel The Purple Land as the quintessential expression of gaucho culture;8
and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada suggested that Hudson was one of the “ver-
daderos creadores de la gran literatura argentina” and the “brújula” to be
followed.9 Hudson himself was conflicted about his national belonging. He
referred to E ngland as “home” before he had ever been t here,10 but at age sixty-
nine, after thirty-six years in E
ngland, he spoke of his native South America
as the place “I have longed to be all my life.”11 As Richard Maxwell puts it,
Hudson should encourage us to think outside of “a literary model in which
nationality, ethnicity, and language of writing and subject matter are always
perfectly synchronized.”12 He touches diverse and sometimes antagonistic
worlds, including Victorian and modernist literatures, gaucho culture, met-
ropolitan London, the Spanish language, the spread of industrial agriculture
in Latin America, the Argentine novel, ornithological collection and conser-
vation, and transatlantic readership networks.
Where Progress and Family (Almost) Meet 197
So I end this book with a man who, unlike the authors I have discussed al-
ready, could truly see informal empire from both sides of the Atlantic. And
to put it briefly, he was extremely critical. Hudson saw firsthand how the
rural Argentina of his youth lost its character through global industrialism,
and as a naturalist and conservationist, he was incensed by the damage this
did to both ecosystems and culture. Throughout his writing he explicitly cri-
tiques empire, progress, and the rich,13 reserving a particular bitterness for
how all three colonized Argentina. One aim of this chapter, then, is to high-
light the infrequently studied voices of those who moved within the complex
network of informal empire without simply promoting or advancing it—of
which Hudson’s is one. He helps account for how capital flows and imperial
ideologies on the large scale interacted with individual transnational subjects
who were made possible by these same boundary dissolutions but who didn’t
necessarily help reproduce them. But my primary aim is less to show that
Hudson critiqued British informal empire in South Americ a and rather to
show how he did so. His “peculiar insider-outsider position,” as many critics
have positioned him, makes his work “uniquely suited to discussions on the
shifting nature of cultural categories.”14 And as I w ill show, Hudson is preoc-
cupied precisely with how cultural categories shift, and with how hybrid sub-
jects are formed, but he locates an ethical resistance to informal empire in
the recognition of what is incommensurable, of what cannot be made hybrid.
This chapter w ill range across Hudson’s writing about South America, in-
cluding his fiction, nonfiction, and letters, though I w ill give an extended
reading of The Purple Land. As I will argue, his work presents Anglo–Latin
American hybridity as the state most conducive to anti-imperialism, suggest-
ing that Englishmen who form genuine relations with South Americans and
shed their own national identity can avoid being agents of colonialism. He
further figures the encounter between the English and the South Americans
as a function of narrative. That is, forming t hese relations occurs through the
sharing of stories, because narrative is at the heart of individual exchanges and
also international relations, structuring encounter on both local and global
levels. In a return to the subject of part I of this book, then, Hudson suggests
that the form of English–Latin American relations is fundamentally narrative
in nature. But in his depiction, narrative is not only the most natural conduit
to international relations and hybrid subjectivity, but also the most stubborn
barrier to both. That is b ecause different national narratives are inevitably di-
vided across an irreducible gap, a chasm of translation across which it is not
languages but modes of narrative storytelling that fail to correspond. Just as

the European narrative of progress brought destruction through informal em-
pire, so did individual Europeans bring prejudices and assumptions about
narrative that held them apart from, and suggested their colonization of, lo-
cal culture. At both a national and a personal scale, therefore, the hybridity
that he theorizes might prevent imperial sociality proves impossible because
of nationalist disagreement over narrative form. What can be achieved is in-
stead only a respect for narrative otherness that fosters a robust anti-imperial
politics. This chapter w ill tease out Hudson’s vision of a utopian South Amer
ica that through cultural hybridity could be both international and resistant
to informal empire—as well as his belief in this vision’s impossibility.
In a way, this chapter inverts the methodology of those that precede it. In
the first five chapters of this book I have read literature to uncover its assump-
tions about what forms informal empire took. The novel, the poem, or the
essay, in other words, revealed certain structures of thought about the social.
It contained a particu lar vision of how history or f amily w as arranged both
in general and under the conditions of British financial imperialism in Latin
America—and crucially, how those two versions misaligned. With Hudson,
however, I do not trace the forms that his writing understands informal em-
pire to take. Rather, I expose his baseline assumption that all transnational
encounter, of which informal empire is a particular version, occurs through
narrative form. Hudson does not, as I argued that the other authors in this
book do, expose the paradoxical misalignment of informal empire’s deploy-
ment of narrative or family form. Instead, he points to narrative and family
themselves as paradoxical social forms, simultaneously conducive to anti-
imperialism and unable to achieve it. For Hudson, an equitable, hybrid,
transnational f amily might (as it was for López and Haggard) be the antidote
to the dynamics of informal empire. But the unbridgeable gap between how
the English and the South Americans narrate their experience makes such a
family unattainable.
Hybridity
It is worth emphasizing just how difficult it is to assign Hudson a national
identity, a fact much more often remarked by Latin American scholars than
English ones. Laura Fernández notes that Argentine writers and critics, look-
ing for ways to describe an oeuvre “que parece gaucha pero está en inglés,”
have variously described Hudson as “hijo pródigo, el más criollo de los escri-
tores nacidos a orillas del Plata, británico y también hombre de nuestra lla
nura, verdadero sentidor de la pampa, escritor inglés, gaucho desprovisto de
todo aditamento y ornato puramente externos, angloargentino, autodidacta,
nómade contemplativo, intérprete romántico del Nuevo Mundo, inglés chas-
comusero y hombre de ciencia universal, viajero empedernido, primer lector
argentino de ‘El origen de las especies,’ romántico inveterado, y barbecho de
viñas nórdicas regado con el agua de la pampa.”15 This superabundant list fig-
ures over and over again Hudson’s slippery duality as both Englishman and
dyed-in-the-wool native Argentine—which is a function of both transatlan-
tic networks (he is, according to Fernández, the first Argentine to read Dar-
win) and his innate dual subjectivity (he is a European vine watered in the
pampas). Hugh Hazelton puts it somewhat more succinctly, writing that
Hudson was “en el fondo tan argentino como británico.”16 However you de-
scribe it, this divided subject position surfaces so often in criticism b ecause it
suffuses Hudson’s writing. Consider this otherwise unremarkable moment
from Far Away and Long Ago, a memoir of his early life in Argentina that fo-
cuses on the natural world he knew there: “The bird I speak of is the Char
adrius dominicana. . . . In appearance it is so like our golden plover, Charadrius
pluvialis, as to be hardly distinguishable from it. The birds were quite tame:
all our wild birds w ere if anything too tame.”17 In back-to-back sentences and
without remark Hudson uses the word “our” to identify himself as first Brit-
ish and then Argentine. He slides between the two with pronominal ease, not
seeming to notice the potential confusion. As Ariana Huberman puts it, his
narratorial perspective in this text is “both as a foreigner watching the gau-
cho in awe and a native participating in the rituals of the Argentine country-
side.”18 It often seems to be both at the same time.
But Hudson’s complex identity as Anglo-A rgentine is even more nuanced
by the fact that the Argentina he grew up in was itself a transnational contact
zone. He was born t here in 1841 to US American immigrants, his parents be-
ing part of the significant migrations that brought foreigners to Latin Amer
ica after independence. During the Spanish colonial period, the remote, flat
plains surrounding Buenos Aires had been populated primarily with free-
range c attle, the gauchos who wrangled them, and small communities who
subsisted on the beef. But in the late eighteenth century and especially a fter
independence in 1816, enclosed estancias began to spread across the pampas,
bringing mechanization, increased trade with Europe, and an influx of
uropean settlers like Hudson’s parents.19 Foreign capital and influence

E
spread inland from the port of Buenos Aires, industrializing farming and
building the infrastructure to support it. By 1910, major railway lines—a ll
English-owned—had brought rural Argentina into close communion with
the bustling capital.20 So, at the mid-nineteenth century, the time of Hud-
son’s formative years, gaucho country stood on the threshold of global in-
tegration. Describing the same phenomenon in rural Colombia in 1850 (the
setting of Jorge Isaacs’s María), Ericka Beckman calls it a “a world of incipi-
ent liberalization” where men still “spen[t] their time hunting and visiting local
haciendas at a day’s remove on horseback” but global capitalism was nonethe-
less beginning to shape daily life.21
Hudson lived in the Argentine pampas from 1841 to 1874, during this tip-
ping point when the traditional gaucho lifestyle began to face encroachment
from modernized agriculture and internationalization—the forces of informal
empire that gave G reat Britain enormous leverage in lopsided loan deals and
the development of industry favorable to their interests. His own presence in
the pampas was a result of the very globalizing flows that brought the mod-
ernization he would come to despise. Of course, this transitional period in the
mid-nineteenth c entury was written on top of a parallel history. The gauchos
of Hudson’s day had themselves been agents of colonial displacement for cen-
turies, slaughtering the indigenous and occupying their land; studies of “set-
tler colonialism” and “the frontier” tend to deal with this kind of violent con-
tact between European and indigenous p eoples. Hudson’s nineteenth-century
context evokes a later, postcolonial iteration of the frontier, when the settler
colonists and their descendants took over the role of Argentine “natives” fac-
ing a new wave of European migration and new technologies of change. The
settler colonialism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave way to
nineteenth-century transnational immigration; violent confrontation was re-
placed by the inexorable creep of industrialization. However, theories of the
frontier, particularly those that push back against a binary depiction of two
cultures in conflict, instead describing the frontier as a “middle ground” where
new cultural formations emerge,22 or as a multiplicitous, heterogenous
“rhizome,”23 help us see Hudson’s Argentina as a space of recurrent racial,
cultural, and epistemological mixing in which various kinds of hybridity
were possible.
And indeed, while Hudson is famous for the portrayals of the ostrich-
hunting, cattle-branding, throat-cutting gaucho that helped define Argentine
literature, his work also strikingly captures the international nature of the
mid-nineteenth-century pampas. In Far Away and Long Ago, for instance, we
meet landholding gaucho “patriarchs” whose ancestors “colonized the wide
pampas in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,”24 urban Creoles,
indigenous groups, “negresses” who serve urban and rural families, and a wide
range of English, Scottish, and Irish ranchers, teachers, and wanderers. De-
scribing one estancia inhabited by an Englishman, his Spanish wife, and their
two daughters—one dark and one “perfect little English girl”—as well as
black servants and their children, Hudson remarks that it was “a most extraor-
dinary ménage, a collection of the most incongruous beings . . . whose lives
and characters would be regarded in civilised countries as exceedingly odd and
almost incredible” but whose coexistence is typical in rural Argentina.25 Hud-
son’s pampas, therefore, are already international, populated with p eople
who have migrated in the flows of colonialism, slavery, and immigration for
centuries. Even before its transformation by European industrialization, this
world bears palimpsestic traces of multiple diverse crossings, has become post-
colonial, is globalizing, and remains beset by internecine rebellions with
fluctuating allegiances. What interests Hudson is the intersection of two kinds
of hybridity: one, the threshold state of the Argentine pampas that w ere al-
ready international but not yet inevitably imperial, and two, a certain kind of
hybrid individual whose positive influence might help preserve Argentina in
this state of equilibrium.
Hybridity and Imperialism

Within this contact zone, of course, agents of informal empire already moved.
These British merchants, naturalists, and explorers have received a good deal
of scholarly attention for how they laid the ideological and infrastructural
groundwork for British control over industry and transportation. We know
them as “missionaries of capitalism” in Jean Franco’s analysis, and the “capi
talist vanguard” in Mary Louise Pratt’s. T hese were men with an imperial
gaze, who saw South America’s resources as grist for the mill of British prog
ress, and they paved the way for the international labor relations and trade
agreements that would bend South American markets to the service of wealthy
Englishmen and Creoles while stagnating local industry.26
But the capitalist vanguard were not the only Britons who moved through
this space. As Matthew Brown points out, they were a specific subset of British
travelers who typically did not stay long or integrate into local culture. A dif
ferent group, however, representing hundreds of British soldiers and travel-
ers, did just this. They “disappeared into Hispanic American society, marry-
ing local w omen, working in new professions or living off military pensions
in rural areas. These people—the vast majority of British travellers to South
America in this period—were as much missionaries of capitalism as they w ere
missionaries of Protestantism, which is to say, not at all.” These permanent
27
emigrants have been insufficiently studied, at least partly because of their in-
visibility: they tended to do much less writing and publishing than their
more commercially minded counterparts who returned to London. Hudson,
whose own parents slipped quietly into Argentine life, whom John Walker
terms a “sympathetic observer,”28 offers a glimpse into the perspective of t hese
more integrated foreigners who moved within the same contact zone as the
capitalist vanguard but saw with different eyes. For his part, Hudson observed
and despised the work of informal empire, particularly its environmental im-
pact on what was, for him, one of the world’s most beautiful places. In a 1910
letter he fumed that Argentina’s erstwhile “wild nature . . . is spoilt and ‘prog
ress and civilization’ have made the country a kind of detestable suburb of
Europe.”29 His ornithological passion often inflects t hese laments; for instance,
in Far Away and Long Ago he remembers one particu lar estancia as having
been “alive with herons and spoonbills, black-necked swans, glossy ibises in
clouds, and great blue ibises with resounding voices,” but grieves that it “is
now possessed by aliens, who destroy all wild bird life and grow corn on the
land for the markets of Europe.”30
And as early as his childhood, Hudson began to see British residents in
Argentina as belonging to one of t hese two groups: the aloof, ethnocentric
stand-aparts whom he would come to associate with imperialism (the capital
ist vanguard), and t hose who assimilated into Argentine life, developing hy-
brid identities and anti-imperial attitudes (the “disappeared”). In Far Away
and Long Ago, we see that he oozes disdain for settlers like his drunkard child-
hood tutor Mr. Trigg, who “could not affiliate” with the locals, “and not
properly knowing and incapable of understanding them he regarded them
with secret dislike and suspicion.”31 A neighbor, Mr. Blake, is similarly singled
out for being “one of those unfortunate persons, not rare among the English,
who appear to stand b ehind a high wall and, w hether they desire it or not,
have no power to approach and mix with their fellow-beings.”32 These men
leave “walls” erected between the native South Americans and their own stub-
bornly unchanging English selves. By contrast, we meet the English landlord

of “a little wayside pulperia, or public-house” who “had lived so long among
the gauchos, having left his country when very young, that he had almost for-
gotten his own language.”33 This man fails to converse with Hudson in En
glish, continually slipping into the more comfortable Spanish they both speak
fluently. As we will see, Hudson used his fiction not only to satirize the first
type of Englishman but also to suggest that this type is part of the industrial
colonization of Argentina. He associates them with the imperial Europe
anization of South America while the second group submit to the reverse
process, allowing themselves to become Argentinized.
Hybridity is a concept with deep roots in both imperialism and postcolo-
nial theory. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it had high-stakes im-
plications for the construction of social hierarchy; the concept of the “hy-
brid” typically referred to mixed-race offspring, who became a testing ground
in lingering debates about monogenesis and were policed and categorized in
colonial settings.34 In postcolonial theory, however, Homi Bhabha’s influen-
tial theory of hybridity describes the inevitable mutual construction of colo-
nizer and colonized. For Bhabha, hybridity is a disturbing reminder for the
colonizer that t here is no pure or aut hentic culture and therefore no stable
ground for the assertion of their dominance.35 Following Bhabha, hybridity
in colonial theory often refers to the emergence of new cultural forms and
identities in the contact zone—these may pose a threat to imperial power, or,
as Leela Gandhi warns, be a passive, “quietist” reinscription of capitalist priv-
ilege.36 And in linguistics and literary criticism, Mikhail Bakhtin theorizes
the innately hybrid nature of language and praises what he calls the “poly-
phonic” or “dialogic” novel, which gives voice to conflicting ideas without
resolving them into a single truth-making perspective.37 My aim is not to read
hybridity in Hudson’s work through any of these lenses in particular (histori-
cal, postcolonial, linguistic) but rather to show how his texts offer their own
theory of hybrid form. However, as he tacks variously close to and far away
from t hese theories, they will be useful lights with which to illuminate the
precise contours of his thought.
Returning to Hudson, then, he casts the 1840s and 1850s in the pampas as
a kind of golden age when increasing internationalism meant that you might
encounter “a most extraordinary ménage” of people in the pampas, but the
forces of informal empire had not yet wreaked cultural and environmental
destruction. For Hudson, contra Bhabha, different nationalities do have some
“pure” nature and essential difference from one another, and his version of
hybridity is not, as it is for Bhabha and Bakhtin, inevitable. He depicts the
English as entirely capable of holding themselves aloof from threats to the
purity of their identity, and this separation is the stuff of imperialism. Hybrid-
ity may, however, be chosen. This is a conscious act, he suggests, and the
self-hybridizing Anglo-A rgentines who relinquished not only their prejudice
for G reat Britain but also any material connection to it gave Hudson hope for
a benign British presence in the pampas divorced from the ravaging effects of
imperial capitalism. He admires figures like Jack the Killer, whom he calls
“one of those strange Englishmen frequently to be met with in those days, who
had taken to the gaucho’s manner of life,” who “dressed like them and talked
their language, and was horse-breaker, cattle-drover, and many other things
by turn,” who “could g amble and drink like any gaucho to the manner born—
and fight too.”38 This kind of hybridity is less about making something new,
something part English and part Argentine, and more about un-making En
glishness altogether. Jack the Killer and the pulpería owner retain almost
nothing of their English nature except the fact of their birth, and it is this pro
cess of altogether relinquishing the national self, a near-assimilation (as we
will see, the “near” is crucial) that Hudson upholds as the ideal of Anglo–
South American hybridity.
Pointing to the specific temporality of “those days,” Hudson suggests that
there was a brief utopian moment when the story of Englishmen in Argentina
might have been a narrative of near-assimilation rather than imperialism. But
of course Hudson gazes back on this moment from the fin de siècle, when the
imperial story had long since won out. Even at midcentury, he acknowledges,
the seeds of the coming catastrophe had already been sown in the insidious
presence of the Mr. Blakes and Mr. Triggs. And crucially, even assimilated,
hybrid Anglo-A rgentines retain an essential difference that hints at the inevi-
table failure of transnational community. Even gone-native Jack the Killer
“could affiliate with the natives, yet could never be just like them. The stamp
of the foreigner, of the Englishman, was never wholly eradicated.”39 It is this
unclosable gap between the two cultures that obsesses Hudson, seeming to
signify at once respect for the unassimilable otherness of Argentine culture and
also the sad reality that the English will never really relinquish their English—
and therefore partially imperial—nature.
Hybridity and Imperialism in The Purple Land

I now turn to Hudson’s 1885 novel The Purple Land to show how he specifi-
cally formulates hybridity’s simultaneous desirability and impossibility.40 The
novel is a picaresque adventure through the gaucho country of the Banda Ori-
entál (Argentina’s neighboring republic, now known as Uruguay). But it is
also an opportunity for Hudson to fictionalize and taxonomize the various
breeds of Englishmen he had known as a young man in Argentina. The story
is set around 1860—the same threshold era he knew as a young man and cap-
tured in his memoir. It follows the travels of an English naturalist named
Richard Lamb, who has married an Argentine girl against her father’s wishes
and must wander the pampas looking for employment to support her. The
story stages Lamb’s repeated encounters with both locals and other interna-
tional migrants, particularly those from Britain. It is also inscribed on a tem-
poral palimpsest, written in the 1880s, set in midcentury, and, as suggested by
the original title, The Purple Land That England Lost, framed by an awareness
of the notorious British invasion of Buenos Aires in 1806–1807 when Gener-
als Whitelocke and Auchmuty briefly tried to plant an English flag on the
then-Spanish continent. Framed by Lamb’s awareness of territorial imperial-
ism in 1806 and Hudson’s awareness of economic imperialism in the 1880s, the
novel casts its bidirectional, wistful gaze on the 1850s and 1860s as a moment
when an anti-imperial course might have been charted.
Just as Hudson’s memoir does, The Purple Land depicts a spectrum of En
glish settlers ranging from the culturally aloof to the assimilated, and at the
beginning of the story Lamb himself is firmly in the first group. Before set-
ting off on his rambles through the pampas, he ascends the hill overlooking
Montevideo and delivers a harangue against the British military for forfeiting
their 1806–1807 occupation of the region. He is infuriated that Montevideo,
“the key to a continent,” lies stagnant in the hands of its own unindustrious
people rather than u nder the improving auspices of the British Empire.41 La-
menting that the invasion of 1806 eventually failed, Lamb cries:
Never was there a holier crusade undertaken, never a nobler conquest planned,
than that which had for its object the wresting this fair country from unworthy
hands, to make it for all time part of the mighty English kingdom. . . . Here, sit-
ting alone on this mountain, my face burns like fire when I think of it—this
glorious opportunity lost for ever! . . . W hen yon queen city was in our grasp, and
the regeneration, possibly even the ultimate possession, of this green world be-
fore us, our hearts failed us and the prize dropped from our trembling hands.
(I.25–26)
Two conjoined features of Lamb’s identity are immediately salient here. The
first is that despite his presumably long residence in Argentina—his father, like
Hudson’s own, “was a sheep-farmer on the Argentine pampas” (I.7), and he
speaks Spanish like a native—and despite his marriage to an Argentine woman,
he uses the word “our” to signify his belonging to E ngland. The second is that
he is overtly imperialistic toward the Banda Orientál, so much so that he longs
for “a thousand young men of Devon and Somerset” to make “blood . . . flow
in yon streets” (I.24). Lamb, therefore, represents a simultaneous unwillingness
to assimilate in South America and an imperialist desire t oward it.
Lamb quickly encounters other Englishmen characterized by this same
combination. Early in his ramble across the pampas he stops at an “English
colony,” a group of lazy drunkard English settlers who have sealed themselves
off from local life. They have tried local traditions such as “ostrich-hunting,
visiting their native neighbours, partridge-shooting, horse-racing, etc.” (I.108)
but found them not to their taste, deciding instead to socialize only with each
other. This activity they do in comically hyper-English fashion, shouting their
English “hullos,” “don’t you knows,” and “steady, old cocks” at one another
while tying one on. During Lamb’s stay they even attempt an English fox
hunt, an out-of-place absurdity that violently disrupts the locals’ cattle herds.
Naturally, the locals see the English “as strange and dangerous creatures”
(I.117), and with good reason: their aloof detachment from pampean culture
goes hand in hand with their explicitly imperial ambitions. Reflecting Lamb’s
own perspective but with a heavy dose of Hudson’s satire, one of them drunk-
enly speechifies, to applause: “Here we stand, a colony of English gentlemen. . . .
We are here, gentlemen, to infuse a little of our Anglo-Saxon energy, and all
that sort of thing, into this dilapidated old tin-pot of a nation” (I.119–120).
This is the capitalist vanguard as seen from Hudson’s perspective: entirely
resistant to hybridization and explicitly (if farcically) pursuing imperial in-
fluence. The two are, in fact, complementary dynamics. Assuming influence
of some kind must occur in the contact zone, these “colonists” attempt to po-
lice its directionality. In order to preserve their Englishness from local influ-
ence, they plan to “infuse” their own “Anglo-Saxon energy” into their sur-
roundings. Colonialism is their tonic against hybridity.
By contrast, late in the novel Lamb arrives at the ranch of John Carrick-
fergus, an English outsider-cum-Orientál-insider, a man who has shed his na-
tive nationality so completely that Lamb calls him an “un-Scotched Scotch-
man” (II.112). Don Juan, as he is locally known, describes his life in the Banda
Orientál as a welcome antithesis to the culture of his native Edinburgh: “Had
enough reading when I was a boy; heard enough psalm-singing, saw enough
scrubbing and scouring. . . . Couldn’t bear it; ran away at fifteen, and have
never heard a word from home since. What happened? I came h ere, worked,
saved, bought land, c attle; married a wife, lived as I liked to live—am
happy. . . . There are my c hildren, six of ’em, all told, boys and girls, healthy,
dirty as they like to be, happy as the day’s long” (II.108–109). H ere is a per-
fect figure for Matthew Brown’s “disappeared” Englishmen, a man whose very
migration is due to global flows but who is now cut off from home, partici-
pating in the local culture and economy rather than accumulating capital for
use back in Britain. Unlike the members of the “English colony,” who are un-
willing to lose even their most malapropos hobbies, Carrickfergus has re-
nounced them all, swapping psalms for cattle and fastidiousness for nature.
Unlike the colonists who w ill not even socialize with locals, Carrickfergus has
formed a loving local family. And while we d on’t know the colonists’ long-
term goals, they seem unlikely to settle permanently in South America. Car-
rickfergus, meanwhile, has “never heard a word from home” since age fifteen
and presumably never will. Hudson, then, is suggesting a thick relationship
among a set of behaviors—hybridity, f amily, and local commitment—that are
also anti-imperial. In pointed contrast to the “English colony,” Lamb calls Car-
rickfergus’s ranch a “home of liberty and love” (II.120; emphasis mine). These
notions, so closely linked by informal empire, are h ere separated into two dif
ferent h
ouseholds, structured on different relations, and split across the novel.
According to The Purple Land, then, t hese are the available orientations
that a Briton may have toward South America—an unmingled British colo-
nist or an Anglo-A rgentine ally of freedom. These two vignettes, pointedly
marked by the words “colony” and “liberty,” bookend Lamb’s journey and
form a spectrum along which, over the course of the narrative, his own views
migrate. At the end of his adventures, he returns to Montevideo and climbs
the same prospect, but this time he regrets his former—a nd particularly
British—“contempt” for “the people of other nationalities” (II.236), saying,
“Let me at last divest myself of t hese old English spectacles, framed in oak and
with lenses of horn, to bury them for ever in this mountain, which for half a
c entury and upwards has looked down on the struggles of a young and feeble
people against foreign aggression and domestic foes, and where a few months
ago I sang the praises of British civilisation” (II.236–237). By burying his
glasses, Lamb acknowledges that in order to shed his nationalism he must
symbolically revise his gaze; he must learn to see, not through the lens of Brit-
ish imperial progress but as the mountain sees, acknowledging the people of
the country. And in this speech, he proclaims his wish, not for the revival of
a colonial past u nder British control but for the preservation of the Banda Ori-
entál’s sovereign future: “May the blight of our superior civilisation never fall
on your wild flowers, or the yoke of our progress be laid on your herdsman—
careless, graceful, music-loving as the birds—to make him like the sullen, ab-
ject peasant of the Old World!” (II.246). Speaking of the “superior civilisa-
tion” of G reat Britain, Lamb’s words are now tinged with irony, as he calls
England’s grand empire a “blight” and a “yoke” that w ill destroy the spirit of
the local p eople. That he compares the p eople to “music-loving . . . birds” can-
not help but recall Hudson’s own bitter laments over the ornithological losses
Argentina suffered at the hands of industrial farming and points to his over-
lapping critique of both territorial and informal empire.
Borges famously described Lamb’s anti-imperial conversion as his “ven-
turoso acriollamiento,”42 and others have agreed. Aaron Landau, for in-
stance, argues that Hudson’s novel inverts the logic of the nineteenth-century
travelogue, “narrating a different, decolonising type of travel” in which Lamb’s
“deep integration into local cultures and families” dissolves the imperial ide-
ology he arrived with.43 On the flip side, Joselyn Almeida argues that Lamb’s
“transcultural skills” actually serve the project of financial imperialism, mod-
eling “the ability of capital to penetrate different regions of the globe.”44 Lan-
dau and Almeida each have a point. On the one hand, Lamb’s final declara-
tion overlooking Montevideo echoes Hudson’s own view that European
civilization was destroying the nature and culture of the pampas. On the
other, Lamb’s very presence there is part of the process of internationalization
to which capital will (and did) naturally attach. But I want to suggest that
Lamb, a mercenary and philanderer whom Hudson himself once described as
“distinctly not a nice young man,”45 doesn’t make a particularly good spokes-
man for either imperialism or anti-imperialism. The novel, as I will now show,
is much more interested in thinking through what transnational encounter
consists of, and w
hether something like British-pampean hybridity is possible
at all. Borges, Landau, and Almeida, despite their differing conclusions, all
read Lamb as actually achieving a transnational hybridity that allows him to

move seamlessly within gaucho culture, and they further read this accom-
plishment as the telos of the novel’s argument about Anglo-A rgentine iden-
tity. But I argue that The Purple Land, through its exploration of narrative
form as an index of the culturally unassimilable, ultimately suggests that hy-
bridity, although a valuable concept, masks irreducible national difference.
Anti-imperialism, therefore, lies not in hybrid identity but in recognizing and
valuing the forms that make it impossible.
Narrative as National Difference

The interpersonal relational forms I have been discussing in part II of this
book have, then, circled back to the narrative forms of part I. In fact, The
Purple Land suggests that interpersonal relations—the marriages, fraternities,
and paternalisms at work in Haggard’s and López’s texts—are formed through
narrative in the first place. As a picaresque, the novel is somewhat repetitive:
traveling through the Banda Orientál, Lamb continually meets new charac-
ters, gets to know them, and moves on. This pattern of encounter creates an
accumulated portrait of how p eople get to know one another across differences
of identity—particularly across the English–South American divide—a nd
this is repeatedly figured as occurring through storytelling. Characters are
rarely long together before turning to a narrative mode, regaling each other
with stories of their lives and adventures. Lamb’s first stop is punctuated by
his disgust at hearing an old ranchero’s tales of bloodshed in b attle, and his
second one finds him admiring a horse tamer’s “genius” orations, “sparkling
with passion, satire, humour, pathos, and so dramatic . . . wonderful story fol-
lowed story” (I.37). Soon thereafter a minor character named Anselmo
emerges, fills an entire chapter with one of his exceptionally dilatory tales, and
just as quickly disappears from the novel. Storytelling passes time during mil-
itary bivouac, it lends characters their individual particularity, and it even
serves as a passport, since Lamb often needs to evade legal trouble by telling
stories that will convince authorities he is English. In short, if The Purple Land
is a novel about cultural crossing, it has an overwhelming investment in nar-
rative storytelling as the means by which such crossing is attempted. Hudson
is not exactly asking how we tell the story of English–Latin American encoun-
ter (and therefore informal empire); rather, he’s insisting over and over that
such encounter occurs through the sharing of stories.
Narrative storytelling has nationalist implications, as scholars ranging from

Homi K. Bhabha to Hayden White have made clear. Nations tell collective
stories that explain and justify their existence, and, as I detailed in part I, mas-
ter narratives like progress have both formal structures and imperial reper-
cussions.46 National narrative was an especially salient part of British–Latin
American relations in the nineteenth century because new nations like Argen-
tina were in the process of national self-fashioning by writing their histories
and projecting their futures, and b ecause foreign economic activity in regions
like the pampas forced the question of whose progress narrative was being
written—for instance, E ngland’s or Argentina’s. In the pampas of Hudson’s
novel, where stories both serve as passports and identify cultural biases, nar-
rative storytelling locates the nexus of national and individual identity.
In particular—a lthough each storyteller in The Purple Land has a unique,
often comic style—Hudson codes English and Orientál forms of narrative as
fundamentally different in genre and form. Locals have little investment in
narrative linearity, nor in distinguishing between fantasy and reality, while
Lamb clings to stories that follow a progressive trajectory and keep “true” and
“false” comfortably separate. Critics usually describe Lamb as “criollo” (“Cre-
ole”) because, like Hudson himself, he fits seamlessly into the culture and
language of the pampas. One gaucho even calls Lamb not a hybrid but “a pure
Oriental.” But like Jack the Killer in Far Away and Long Ago, upon whom “the
stamp of the foreigner, of the Englishman, was never wholly eradicated,”47
Lamb will always have a core of irreducible otherness. Hudson figures this gap
as a function of communication style; notably, the same gaucho who calls
Lamb “a pure Oriental” also notes that “though you speak as we do, t here is
yet in the pepper and salt on your tongue a certain foreign flavour” (I.41). As
I will show, this difference in communication style scales up from speech pat-
terns to storytelling, marking national difference as a matter of narrative
form.
Anselmo’s story—an example of nonteleological, nonprogressive form—
shows how this communication gap refuses to close specifically at the jagged
misalignment of different narrative forms. As he begins his tale, Lamb sup-
poses that Anselmo is making use of conventional foreshadowing: “I rode out
towards the side on which the sun sets, little expecting that anything unusual
was going to happen to me that day” (I.138). This sentence is so suggestive to
Lamb of a later narrative fulfillment that he delays going to bed so that he
might hear “what extraordinary t hing had happened to him on that very
eventful day” (I.138). But instead of following a narrative arc that will lead him
to satisfy his pregnant opening, Anselmo repeatedly diverts into what seem
to Lamb to be arbitrary new tracks. The mention of his h orse leads him to
explain how he acquired it, which in turn leads him to describe an argument
he once had with his cook, and the maddening result for Lamb is that An-
selmo quite contentedly ends his tale “without one word about those marvel-
lous m atters he had set out to tell. They had all been clean forgotten” (I.151).
Lamb bears no ill will t oward this “inexhaustible talking-machine” (I.136) and
his “interminable yarns leading to nothing” (I.152), but the incident reveals
Lamb’s intrinsic belief that proper narrative form is linear and teleological. He
holds this belief so innately that he cannot interpret Anselmo’s story any other
way than as a formal mistake, but neither Anselmo, nor the other locals who
love his stories, seem to believe t here has been any error.
In subsequent episodes Lamb’s foreignness emerges increasingly clearly
through his insistence that narratives maintain a strict distinction between
fantasy and the real. This occurs most prominently during an extended set
piece in the m iddle of the novel: Lamb has joined a band of revolutionary
fighters, and one night while bivouacking they pass the time by telling sto-
ries, “drift[ing] into matters extraordinary—wild creatures of strange appear-
ance and habits, apparitions, and marvellous adventures” (II.57–58). Al-
though he sounds game enough for the fun, Lamb quickly grows irritated and
then enraged as story a fter fantastical story is presented as truth. The first
teller recounts having seen a “lampalagua,” a snake with powers of suction
strong enough to pull its prey through the air and the ability to make the man
who kills it invincible. Lamb laughs, thinking this an appropriate response to
such a “fable,” but he is “severely rebuked for [his] levity” (II.61). Another sto-
ryteller recounts sheltering one night in a tiny hovel with an old woman
whose previously empty room suddenly came alive with a raucous midnight
witchcraft ritual. Lamb cannot help offering a logical explanation—“You w ere
very hungry and tired that night . . . perhaps after the w
oman locked her door
you went to sleep and dreamed all that about people eating fruit and playing
on the guitar” (II.67)—which only further distances him from his fellows,
who remark that “when a person is incredulous, it is useless arguing with him”
(II.67). A ghost story follows, and then Lamb, who “thought we had had
enough of the supernatural by this time” (II.73), is in no mood for the fourth
tale, in which the teller recalls having had a physical fight with an embodied
Satan. Our protagonist is left “feeling half stupid with amazement, for the
man apparently told it in the full conviction that it was true, while the other
listeners appeared to accept every word of it with the most implicit faith”
(II.79). What vexes Lamb is not that the men lie (he proves his comfort with
falsehood throughout the novel), but rather that they tell stories in a nonfic-
tion mode that appear to him to belong to the genre of fantasy.
So of course, when Lamb tells stories of his own, he tends to get in trouble
because of his sense that the distinction between real and fantastical w ill be
obvious to his listeners. For instance, at one estancia he discovers that a young
girl, Anita, “had never heard a story, and did not know what it meant” (I.224).
To correct this, he invents a fable about a supernatural child made of mist. So
far as it goes, this shows Lamb’s willingness to embrace fantasy, but the epi-
sode nearly ends in disaster when Anita wanders off alone to the river in search
of the mystical mist-child, leaving Lamb “astonished to find that she had taken
the fantastic little tale invented to amuse her as truth” (I.234). In this early in-
stance Lamb attributes the misunderstanding to his listener’s age, reasoning
that “the poor babe had never read books or heard stories, and the fairy tale
had been too much for her starved l ittle imagination” (I.234). But by the time
he finds himself at the soldiers’ bivouac, he has come to explain such failures
not through individual circumstances like age but in terms of national differ-
ence. Needing to follow the four “extraordinary” stories with one of his own,
he warns: “I am . . . a native of a country where marvellous t hings do not of-
ten happen, so that I can tell you nothing to equal in interest the stories I
have heard. I can only relate a little incident which happened to me in my own
country before I left it” (II.79). Lamb appears to concede that the “marvellous
things” in the soldiers’ stories have really happened, but he does not believe
this. Instead he simply converts a disagreement about genre—fantasy or
autobiography—into an intrinsic national difference.
When he does tell his story, moreover, it is the local specificity of its Lon-
don setting that discredits him among his listeners. He sets the scene on a
January evening with snow and smog, near the Crystal Palace, but t hese de-
tails only inspire disgusted disbelief in his listeners, who refuse to let him
continue, insisting that January is a summer month, fogs are not black, and
buildings are not made of glass. National perspective makes the difference
between true and false: “Remember that we w ere speaking of actual experi-
ences, not inventing tales of black fogs and glass palaces. . . . Surely, friend,
you do not consider us such simple persons in the Banda Oriental as not to
know truth from fable?” (II.82). Which is to say that national perspective gives
a narrative of events its generic form: what scans as autobiography in the pam-
pas strikes the English ear as fantasy, and what scans as autobiography to an
Englishman is fantasy to the Orientál. Plot events shift from “truth” to
“fable” depending on the identity of speakers and listeners, a factor that is
simultaneously impossible to overcome and constitutive of an entire world-
view. Lamb himself understands that this is the crux of his foreignness in the
pampas, remarking at the very end of volume I, a location of some emphasis,
that “often in the Banda Oriental I did not quite seem to know how to mix
my truth and lies, and so preferred to hold my tongue” (I.286). In fact, his
most successful storytelling efforts are the ones in which he uses a story to
convince someone that he is English, not Orientál.
Lamb is not Hudson, but the two do share features (such as their sheep-
farming parents in Argentina), and this perspective on narrative difference
seems to be one of them. In a letter to a friend, Hudson tried to explain his
disappointment in the c hildren’s book he had written, A Little Boy Lost:
I only know the kind of t hing which pleased me as a boy and I tries [sic] to do
that kind of thing: but I find Eng lish c hildren love another kind of thing.
Namely—the kind of book in which children make believe—as in Bevis and
H. Finn. That kind of a child or boy book appeals less to me because I knew the real
thing as a boy and saw blood and rude sights; and the sham or imitation adven-
tures and excursions and alarums falls flat. What I liked was the fantastic and
grotesque (if I could accept it as part of the order of t hings), and wildness.48
Hudson contrasts his boyhood in Argentina with boyhood in England and

suggests that c hildren in each place like different stories. C
hildren in E
ngland,
he says, with emphasis, like “make believe,” that is, they like extraordinary
t hings that are clearly marked as fantasy. Hudson says that because he saw
extraordinary things in Argentina, he only liked stories in which “the fantas-
tic” was “part of the order of things.” Although Hudson differs from Lamb
in preferring stories like t hose the bivouacking soldiers tell, both share the be-
lief that narrative form is (and does) something different in England than in
the pampas.
Specifically, the Orientál narrative, as practiced by the soldiers and as de-
scribed by Hudson about his boyhood reading habits, is what I would call ir/
rational. By this I mean to indicate that “irrational” or fantastical elements
occur within a rational world, and the combination is taken as a coherent
reality—“as part of the order of t hings.” In a schematic sense we could call
this magical realism, although that genre is associated with Latin American
fiction that emerged forty or fifty years a fter The Purple Land. I do not want
to predate the genre nor claim Hudson as its inaugural figure; the novel itself
is not an example of magical realism. But it does understand the people of
the pampas to have a worldview and a correspondent narrative style that we
would call magically real, and the fact that dec ades later none other than
Borges would call The Purple Land the quintessential portrayal of the Argen-
tine gaucho suggests an affinity between his own magical realist style and
the catalogue of gaucho tales in Hudson’s novel. The ir/rational or magically
real gaucho narrative in The Purple Land is marked as opposed to and (na-
tionally) incompatible with Lamb’s particularly English approach to narra-
tive, which is linear, teleological, “rational” narrative. This divide represents
a difference in formal vision, which is to say that Lamb and the Orientales
each understand narrative to be differently formed, and the specific forms
they use to make narrative also shape how they see the world. It also stages a
political antagonism, between the imperial progress narrative espoused by a
European imperialist like Lamb, and the anti-progressive narrative forms
deployed by the Orientales.49 This is, for Hudson, an unbridgeable divide.
This incommensurability of communication across cultural difference is
also a subject Hudson lingers over in other texts. In Far Away and Long Ago
he describes a vagabond figure called the Hermit who wears animal skins,
mud, and bones, and who speaks a language no one knows. And his novel
Green Mansions (1904) is nearly entirely about the inability to be understood.
It tells the story of a Venezuelan Creole man named Abel who falls in love with
the indigenous and ambiguously supernatural Rima. Even though they can
communicate in Spanish, Abel knows that only in Rima’s “mysterious . . .
bird-like” language can she express “her swift thought and vivid emotions.”
Rima, for whom speaking in Spanish is like “the merest stammering” and “not
speaking,” understands that this language gap means they cannot share sto-
ries in a meaningful way; when Abel asks her to tell the story of her m other
in Spanish, she says, “I can tell you, but it w ill not be telling you.” A native
tongue, in other words, preserves something elemental and untranslatable
about narrative. This means, Abel remarks, that “so long as she could not
commune with me in that better language, which reflected her mind, there
would not be that perfect u nion of soul she so passionately desired.”50 Family,
here, emerges as a figure for hybridity. Rima and Abel, who might otherwise
love each other as husband and wife, cannot make a “perfect u nion” out of
their two selves, b ecause that hybrid center state is unachievable across the
chasm of their different languages and untranslatable narratives. Lamb in The
Purple Land understands this chasm as a matter of family as well. Leaving
one estancia and realizing he has misunderstood the d aughter’s interest in
him, he supposes that the family has its own particular “language” with its
own “signs and symbols” (I.81). A family, in other words, shares language and
meaning at an intimate level that a foreigner cannot understand. Families
made of different nationalities and languages will not share story and w ill
therefore lack what Abel calls “that perfect union of soul.” The entire plot
of The Purple Land exists because the Englishman Lamb cannot find a way
to see eye to eye with his Argentine wife’s family.
Hudson does not want to close such communication gaps in search of per-
fect union, but rather suggests that holding them open is the stuff of anti-
imperial politics. Critics have been perhaps too quick to label Lamb “the fully
legitimate and even organic presence of the colonial hybrid.”51 It is true that
partway through the story he congratulates himself on his unique ability, one
“not . . . every wanderer from England” can boast, to “make himself familiar
with the home habits, the ways of thought and speech, of a distant people”
(I.196). But at the end of the story he acknowledges that throughout his trav-
els in the Banda Orientál, he carried with him “only a fading remnant of that
old time-honoured superstition to prevent the most perfect sympathy between
me and the natives I mixed with” (II.237). While the word “only” emphasizes
the slightness of the gap that his nationalism maintained between himself and
the locals, that gap was nonetheless present and was enough to prevent “per-
fect sympathy.” But importantly, while he never achieved such sympathy, or
what Abel in Green Mansions called the “perfect union of soul,” he did learn
an active anti-imperial politics. His next sentence after acknowledging the ap-
erture of irreconcilable difference is this: “I cannot believe that if this coun-
try had been conquered and re-colonised by England, and all that is crooked
in it made straight according to our notions, my intercourse with the people
would have had the wild, delicious flavour I have found in it” (II.237). The
word “flavour” h ere recalls the e arlier moment in which an Orientál reminded
Lamb that his own speech contained “a certain foreign flavour” and thus once
again highlights the distinctness of English versus South American commu-
nication styles. Lamb further acknowledges his cultural difference by align-
ing himself with England (“our notions”), and he evokes the difference-a s-
narrative-misalignment that he encountered by suggesting that the English
prefer t hings “straight” while the Banda Orientál is comfortable with what is
“crooked,” and that Orientál “intercourse” is “wild.” This shows his recogni-
tion, despite his “hybrid” nature and his appreciation for the Banda Orientál,
of his own ongoing adherence to imperial narrative form. But his awareness
of cultural and narrative difference now prompts him to adopt an anti-imperial
politics, arguing that English imperialism would have destroyed the “delicious
flavour” contained in that difference.
In the end, Lamb is less hybrid than amalgam. He has parts of an Orien-
tál identity—language fluency, gaucho temperament, and so on—and parts
of an English identity as well. One way to define hybridity, one often used in
postcolonial theory, would be as precisely this kind of admixture of traits that
makes Lamb neither fully English nor fully Orientál, but rather something
new, emerging in a “third space” that challenges the notion of an authentic
original in the first place. But this is not Hudson’s notion. The Purple Land
in fact insists upon the existence of a national essence, an identity native to
the Englishman and to the Orientál. This essential core, the novel suggests,
lives in the forms of the stories we tell. And so Lamb might be able to speak
Spanish, sip maté, and fight in revolutions, but t hese behaviors are as leaves
skimmed off the surface of a reservoir whose depths he cannot plumb. The
defining feature of Orientálness, its very nature, remains fundamentally other
to him, inaccessible across a small but uncrossable divide of narrative form.
This kind of partial or surface hybridity then, does not challenge the notion
of essential difference, as Bhabha theorizes that hybridity in the colonial con-
tact zone does; rather, it serves as a reminder of an essential difference that
can never be collapsed. The place where Englishness and Orientálness meet—
the site of transnational encounter—is story, and The Purple Land argues
that this is not the overlapping center of a Venn diagram but an asymptotic
aperture across which one cannot migrate. In this sense, transnational hybrid-
ity emerges as a paradox in which the closer you come to understanding the
other, the more you realize you can never fully understand (nor therefore be-
come) the other. Lamb must remain English, as he reminds us that he is at
the end of the novel. But if he cannot be hybrid, he can be anti-imperial, and
this is not merely a consoling alternative. Anti-imperialism is produced by the
very act of recognizing the narrative gap that makes hybridity impossible.
Lamb’s understanding that he cannot close the gap between himself and the
other is coincident with his dawning respect for that very difference and the
right of the other to sovereignty.
The form of The Purple Land itself replicates this same investment in re-
fusing to reconcile narrative difference. It holds open the space between an
English and an Orientál narrative. For instance, although the entire story is
written by Lamb, his interaction with locals means that, as Landau puts it, the
South Americans “get to interweave their own stories, anecdotes, jokes, verses,
parables and witticisms into the very fabric of the narrative.” This amalgam
has anti-imperial implications, interrupting “the totalising and essentialising
power of imperial discourse.”52 For although Lamb tries to “reform” the sto-
rytelling mode of the Banda Orientál by re-forming the narratives he hears
at the bivouac—offering rational bases for the action and truncating the
fantastical—the South Americans reject his intervention. They get narrative
space to tell their own stories, in their own narrative forms, and ultimately
they even have the power to truncate the Englishman’s story and exclude it
from the novel. This defense of local storytelling has clear implications for the
ideology of informal empire, especially given the implied content of Lamb’s
untold tale. His story fragment figures British progress, set amid the “black
fog” of industry in the shadow of the Crystal Palace, the very display case for
the power of commerce and empire. At a time when many wondered how
South America would enter into the story of Britain’s progress, Hudson fig-
ures South Americans as literally silencing that narrative altogether, choosing
their own stories instead.
And just as Lamb can never be truly Orientál, neither can the novel. At the
end of the story, Lamb tells Doña Demetria, with whom he has established
the bond of brother and sister, that he wants to write his adventures into a
book called “The Purple Land.” But Demetria “will never read it, of course,
for I s hall write it in English, and only for the pleasure it w
ill give to my own
children—if I ever have any—at some distant date” (II.217). Again we see that
narrative can unite a family (in this case, Lamb with his future English-
speaking c hildren), but when it comes to the transnational family Lamb and
Demetria want to establish as adopted siblings, the very same narrative that
brings them together—the novel—a lso figures their incommensurable divi-
sion across the gap of translation. In this passage, despite the fact that The
Purple Land is so formally hybrid, and despite its subsequent canonization as
an Argentine gaucho tale, Hudson himself figures his novel as finally, inescap-
ably English. And so, just like Lamb himself, The Purple Land is not a seam-
less English/Orientál hybrid but an amalgamation that leaves visible traces of
unassimilable difference. For instance, as Hugh Hazelton observes, the novel
is a “palimpsesto linguístico” b ecause Hudson writes in English while captur-

ing the hispanophone speech patterns of the gauchos.53 It is likewise a tem-
poral palimpsest, gazing on midcentury through the lens of territorial occu-
pation in 1806 and informal empire in the 1880s, and a geographic palimpsest,
eschewing the linear, imperial form of the travel narrative (which Jean Franco
argues the “missionaries of capitalism” used to model progress) in favor of a
loop that returns the hero to his starting point to repeat the action of climb-
ing a prospect. T hese overlaps refuse to assimilate otherness into a seamless,
linear, imperial narrative. They leave geographic, temporal, and linguistic re-
mainders in the text that make it not hybrid, not resolved, not coherent, but
an unsettled amalgam—or, as Ezequiel Martínez Estrada puts it, describing
Hudson’s writing in general: “Todo tiende a deshacerse, a fragmentarse, a
disolverse.”54
Particularly in its multivocal (hybrid) narrative form, The Purple Land is
reminiscent of what Bakhtin calls the “polyphonic” or “dialogic” text. In a
dialogic text, characters make their own meaning distinct from the author’s
worldview. Divergent ideas retain their “power to signify”; they are not
subsumed—as they are in “monologic” texts—under “a fixed and finalized
image of reality,” and so the text is not unified under a single notion of the
truth.55 This lack of resolution is what makes Bakhtin’s dialogics different
from dialectics. The Purple Land could be described as a dialogic text in the
way that Lamb and the Orientál characters disagree entirely about the form
and purpose of narrative, while the novel, rather than affirming one and repu-
diating the other, simply acknowledges their opposition. This is itself a potent
figure for how Hudson, as well as the other authors I have discussed in this
book, perceives the forms of informal empire. British informal empire in Latin
America contained two conflicting drives—the drive to liberate and the drive
to subjugate. Hudson presents these as distinct kinds of narratives, one the
linear, teleological, progressive, imperial narrative of the English, and the other
the inverse narrative forms of the Orientales that he suggests deserve sovereign
space. Many critics want to describe the conflicting drives of British informal
empire in Latin America as a kind of dialectic; t here is tension and opposition
between imperialism and liberation, but that tension resolves itself into an ef-
fective imperial strategy. But as I have endeavored to show, many onlookers in
the nineteenth century perceived the two foundational ideas of informal em-
pire less as a resolvable dialectic and more like Bakhtin’s dialog. That is, as in
The Purple Land, they saw them as two divergent ideas, constitutive of in-
compatible worldviews, simultaneous but opposed, irresolvable into unity.
Progress Again
Fragmentation, amalgamation, and palimpsest are important forms b ecause
in their nonlinearity and non-assimilation they counter the kinds of narratives
that Lamb prefers and that on a national scale his country uses to justify im-
perialism. Like the triumphal travelogue of the capitalist vanguard, these
narratives are linear and teleological—they give form to the imperial notion
of progress. And it is precisely the ideology of progress that Hudson blames
for informal empire. In a preamble chapter to The Purple Land, which is other
wise composed of Lamb’s first-person narrative, Hudson describes the mid-
century setting of the tale. This story, he says, “take[s] us back a quarter of a
century” from the time of publication, to a time when “in spite of fierce pas-
sions and dark crimes, poetry and heroic virtues, with that sweet archaic
simplicity of life and conversation which has vanished from the old world to
return no more, still flourished.” This was a time of stasis, when “all things
were very much in the condition in which they had remained since the colo-
nial days.” He says this historical moment of equilibrium gives the story its
interest, which it would lack if it took place in the contemporary 1880s. That
is because by now, Hudson says, foreigners have begun “breaking up the soil
and the ancient usages of the country.” This process, the one that brought the
industrialization and environmental destruction he despised, the one we have
since termed informal empire, he calls here simply “the iron-shod monster
named Progress” (I.8).
By setting his story near midcentury, Hudson offers a vision of a utopian
South America—violent but beautiful, already international but also not yet
crushed under progress’s iron boot. It was poised in “those distant days,” as
he calls them in Far Away and Long Ago, when “the country had not . . . been
overrun by bird-destroying immigrants from Europe.”56 With figures like Jack
the Killer and John Carrickfergus, he suggests that a certain kind of En
glishman, one who is willing to hybridize himself, could belong to this place
and time without posing an imperial threat. But the temporal displacement also
suggests why Hudson is pessimistic about the possibility of such hybridity—he
has already seen the effects of informal empire carried out. His vision of an
international utopia in the pampas has already been overridden by time.

Blaming “the iron-shod monster named Progress” for this, he figures the im-
possibility of hybridity as the stubborn national allegiance to narrative form.
Men like Lamb, and even Jack the Killer, are too beholden to the English
mode of communication—those linear, teleological forms that would bring
imperial progress to the pampas. The forms of international family, then—
the relations between lovers like Abel and Rima, elective brother and sister
Lamb and Demetria, or brothers in arms like Lamb and his fellow soldiers,
or the hybrid subjectivities forged in the fires of close contact—are undercut
by the forms of narrative that the individuals who make up t hose relations
cannot escape.
The progress narrative, Hudson suggests, doesn’t belong in South Amer
ica. In fact, when it arrives on American shores, it undergoes a formal rever-
sal. In a letter he wrote to Graham while working on Far Away and Long Ago,
Hudson remarked that he hoped the memoir would give “a sort of civilized
picture of the country and people before it began to be civilized.”57 This ironic
category inversion suggests that Europea nization means the destruction of
South Americ a’s own version of civilization, and that therefore “civilizing”
means its opposite. For Hudson, European “civilization” meant a distancing
from nature and natural relations. It robbed man of “animism, or that sense
of something in nature which to the enlightened or civilized man is not there,”
and it kept the “civilized w oman” who is “the artificial product of our self-
imposed conditions,” from understanding her children.58 Most tragically, it
had an irreversible effect on the ecosystems of the pampas: writing to Garnett
at the end of his life, Hudson recalled nostalgically the “great cries of water-
fowl” he would hear as a boy, which “the loathsome cursed civilization of Eu
rope has now blotted out for ever and ever.”59 In this way, the progress narra-
tive that drove Europeans to industrialize the pampas was in fact not progress
at all but destruction. As Cannon Schmitt puts it, Hudson “revers[es] the po-
larities of value between savage and civilized, casting prehistoric savages in
the role of creators and preservers and featuring Hudson’s European contem-
poraries as destroyers. [He] inverts the common account of relations between
savage and civilized in the service of a critique of nineteenth-century Europe,
and specifically of European colonialism.”60 This “inversion” is one of narra-
tive form; the linear, teleological increase of progress is not legible from a South
American perspective b ecause South Americans see it run in reverse, t oward
destruction. So when individuals replicate this same divergence, when Lamb
prefers linear, teleological narratives that Orientales do not, empire itself is

what is at stake.
Despite his critique of industrialism and environmental degradation, how-
ever, it must be noted that Hudson’s views on race were not so forward
thinking. His feelings about Argentina’s cultural composition can be best de-
scribed as nostalgia, a spatiotemporal longing perfectly captured by the titles
of both Far Away and Long Ago and The Purple Land That E ngland Lost.
Schmitt describes Hudson as a “memorian,” which is to say that he was pri-
marily concerned not with history as such but with the preservation of his own
memories of the past.61 These memories, however, preserve a pampean culture
that was thickly striated by a racist hierarchy Hudson did not find fault with.
In Far Away and Long Ago, for instance, he portrays white, “civilized” people
as “a superior race”62 to the “negroes” and “savages” in Argentina. So while he
was damningly critical of the destructive environmental and cultural effects
of “progress,” his views on race w
ere very much indebted to the imperial prog
ress narrative, making for a complex, uncomfortable vision of who exactly
should inhabit his beloved homeland. His body of work together suggests his
belief that the rightful stewards of the pampas w ere the Creole gauchos he
specifically associated with post-independence but pre-industrial Argentina.
The only ethical way for the British to engage with South America was to help
preserve a gaucho culture that was simultaneously pastoral and multinational
(local and global) against the dual threats of both industry and indigenous
barbarism (progress and regress). He wanted to “bridge the gap between ‘sav-
age’ and ‘civilized’ by returning moderns to a savage state [thereby] resur-
recting something of that past whose loss so preoccupied him.”63 Any excep-
tional Englishman who could inhabit this spatiotemporal limbo would be a
welcome ally, but Hudson believed it was already too late. The idealized past
had been consumed by an unwelcome present, and he did not imagine any
alternate future.
Next Literary Efforts

As I have argued, Hudson’s aversion to the notion of progress, and his insis-
tence on the sovereignty of South American narrative, suggest that narratives
can be imperial—perhaps just as imperial as capital. For this reason, his re-
action to other British fiction about South America is telling. The Purple Land
represented South America directly in a way that Victorian literature had not
done, but two better-k nown texts soon followed suit: Joseph Conrad’s
Nostromo (1904) and V irginia Woolf ’s The Voyage Out (1915). All three are
set in post-independence South Americ a, and all three consider the dy-
namics of British migration t here. This makes them a unique miniature ar-
chive, and it is not surprising that Conrad’s and Woolf ’s books came to
Hudson’s attention.
We might assume Hudson would be pleased that his native continent was
finally emerging in British literature. And we might expect him to be doubly
pleased that one such effort came from Joseph Conrad, whom he admired. For
his part, Conrad spoke almost breathlessly of Hudson’s abilities, remarking
once to R. B. Cunninghame Graham that “it is as if some very fine, very gentle
spirit were whispering to him the sentences he puts down on the paper,” call-
ing him a “privileged being,”64 and once exclaiming to Ford Madox Ford that
“[Hudson] writes as the grass grows. The Good God makes it be t here.”65
Hudson likewise admired Conrad, referring to him once (also to Graham) as
“such an artist in words, such a genius and such a prolific author”66 and de-
claring that “Mirror of the Sea” contained “one of the sublimest passages in
recent literature.”67 But despite their mutual admiration, despite running in
the same London literary circle and frequenting the same clubs, and despite
counting the same men—Graham, Ford, and Edward Garnett—as their best
friends, the two men w ere apparently not close. Conrad said they never met
more than ten times in their lives,68 and on Hudson’s death he reflected, “I
was not an intimate with him but I had a real affection for that unique per-
sonality of his with its, to me, somewhat mysterious fascination.”69 The two
men, though they spoke of each other to mutual friends, apparently remained
at a respectful remove. As though replicating this relationship, Ford gives them
adjacent chapters in his autobiography, and he describes their first meeting as
a comical misunderstanding in which, despite Hudson repeatedly shouting,
“I’m Hudson!,” Conrad could not understand who he was.70
And when it came to the novelization of South America, Hudson certainly
thought that he and Conrad spoke at cross-purposes. According to Hudson’s
letters, Conrad personally gave him a copy of Nostromo just a fter it was pub-
lished71 (surely no ordinary event, given how infrequently they met), but Hud-
son found that the novel did “not fascinate” him.72 Ten years later, he con-
fessed to a friend that he never finished reading Nostromo because of “the idea
it produced when I first began to read it—that the S. American atmosphere
is false . . . t he mental atmosphere—t he mind of the natives.”73 And about
Woolf ’s The Voyage Out he was even more damning, though for different
reasons:
Here are a lot of p

eople . . . at a h
otel—a ll English people of one class (that of the
author)—all thinking, talking and acting exactly like the people one meets every
day in every London drawing-room. . . . A nd all they think and do has no rela-
tion to the environment—the place they are supposed to be in which only dif-
fers from an English background in having a sky of Rickett blue. Somewhere in
S. America it is supposed to be, and once or twice “natives” are mentioned. The
scene might just as well have been in some hotel on the south coast of England.74
Hudson had notoriously exacting standards for literary quality, but these cri-
tiques are about content, and they have the ring of personal affront. Conrad,
he says, has been unfair to the South American p eople, and Woolf has not
been interested in them at all. Given The Purple Land ’s emphasis on the
75
value of South Americans’ specific particularity, it is not hard to understand

why he would be disappointed that Woolf had not acknowledged it, and Con-
rad had not respected it. Conrad’s characters are agents of informal empire
during its height (the capitalist rear guard, so to speak), and Woolf’s refuse to
mingle or assimilate in South Americ a; both texts, then, tend to see South
Americ a through English eyes. It is hard to imagine that Hudson did not
think to himself, once again, how imperial narratives can be.
Conclusion
Hudson may have been exceptional in many ways, but he also belonged to a
surprisingly robust network connecting South America to the Atlantic world.
Before emigrating from Argentina he worked as a collector for the Smithson-
ian, shipping bird specimens from the pampas—by way of the better-
established London routes—and tracking his packages by reading about the
items he’d sent in London newspapers imported to Buenos Aires.76 He be-
longed to the transatlantic traffic of ideas and material, therefore, before he
ever left South Americ a. His arrival in E ngland in 1874, far from removing
him from a network that included South America, helped him forge new con-
nections within it; in fact, one of the first sights to greet him upon landing in
Southampton was the home of deposed dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, the
controversial ruler of Hudson’s youth (and Vicente López’s m iddle age) who
had exiled himself to England with his family. Decades later Hudson would
77
bemusedly find himself corresponding with Rosas’s grandson, Terrero, whom

he described as “a wealthy English gentleman” who enjoyed learning about his
own Argentine ancestry by reading Hudson’s memoirs.78 He communicated
with publishers in North and South America, kept in touch with a s ister in
Córdoba, Argentina, and regularly corresponded with readers and acquain-
tances who reached out to him, w hether from Cornwall, Devonshire, or
Miami, to share their own similar experiences on the pampas.79 He even found
himself in a transatlantic argument with Theodore Roosevelt about pumas.80
This all helps show how South America had a robust presence in nineteenth-
century transatlantic networks, and not only those of imperial commerce but
also of shared literary, geographical, and cultural identity.
Hudson’s movement within this network further helps us see how it was
possible for Victorians to have various and surprising perspectives on Latin
Americ a. In his memoir, Ford Madox Ford exquisitely captured Hudson’s
complex identity and the unique way it shaped his gaze:
Coming from afar, Mr. Hudson . . . has an air of consummate and unending per-
manence wherever he may happen to be. . . . He is a native of Argentina, and La
Plata, and Patagonia and Hampshire and the Sussex downlands—wherever the
grass grows. That is perhaps the best gift that has been given to him by the Good
God who has made him such a g reat poet. For s imple people, shepherds, bird-
catchers, girls wheeling perambulators, old w
omen cleaning front steps, South
American Dictators, gamblers, duellists, birds, beasts, and reptiles, have been
natural before him; and the green earth and the sombre trees and the high downs
and the vast Pampas have been just themselves before him. He looked at them
with the intent gaze of the bird of prey and the abandonment of the perfect
lover.81
Ford, like so many others, turns to the form of a copious list to capture Hud-
son’s apparently boundary-exceeding nature. But his items do not describe the
man himself; they describe the abundant world that has “been natural before
him.” Citing phenomena as different as “South American Dictators” and “girls
wheeling perambulators,” Ford suggests that Hudson has been able to move
among urban and rural people, the powerful and the powerless, animal and
landscape, E ngland and South America, with enough natural ease to see t hose
things as they r eally are. Ford positions Hudson not as one who gazes with
Pratt’s “imperial eyes,” but as what John Walker calls a “sympathetic observer,”
someone who sees clearly because he belongs to the world he sees. Someone
who might actually have what Hudson’s own characters could not achieve—a
“perfect sympathy” with o thers in the international milieu of the pampas.
And yet Ford’s closing line accidentally betrays a failure of such sympathy.
He sums up Hudson’s natural gaze on the world as not one way of seeing but
two: he sees with “the intent gaze of the bird of prey and the abandonment
of the perfect lover.” This is familiar, familial rhetoric for the way the English
gazed on South America in the nineteenth c entury: as both predator and part-
ner. Ford does not mean to suggest that Hudson is colonial—he is in fact
trying to express just the opposite—but the strange image of the “bird of prey”
nonetheless links Hudson with the acquisitive gaze of Victorian empire.
Within the discursive arena of British informal empire in Latin America, the
images of the predator and the lover w ere routinely conjoined. And yet Hud-
son’s own fiction shows that he saw them as both logically and actually diver-
gent. Englishmen in South America could be “birds of prey,” which is to say
they circled above the pampas, not mixing with t hose below, and harboring im-
perial desire. Or they could be “perfect lovers,” forming family, relinquishing self,
and establishing a sympathy that carried anti-imperialism within it. For Hudson
these were not two halves of one English approach to Latin America but two dif
ferent approaches altogether. “Perfection” of love and sympathy, however, remain
elusive in his depiction—he would, in the end, probably not have agreed with
either of Ford’s two characterizations. But he did see the possibility of an English
anti-imperial politics, one that stemmed precisely from recognizing that En
glish narratives w ere inherently predatory and that there could therefore be no
“perfect love” with South America—only respect for sovereign otherness.
Hudson’s direct critique of informal empire is instructive, because he lo-
cates it precisely in the space where narrative form and family form meet. He
suggests that Europeans and South Americans have an irreconcilable disagree-
ment about narrative form (and “progress” in particular) that interrupts the
formation of truly sympathetic families. Rather than critiquing the forms of
informal empire, then, he suggests that it uses discourses that can never unite
two inherently divided peoples. Hudson was aware, as I think Anna Barbauld
was, and Simón Bolívar, too, that the sudden and robust exchange between
England and South Americ a (containing cultures previously virtually un-
known to one another), the rapid rise of global capitalism, and the emer-
gence of market dominance as a tool of political suppression, meant that global
historical narratives w ere being reconsidered. And like López and Haggard,
he was aware that the arrangement of t hese contacts into families—both real
and metaphorical—would have profound implications for empire. But Hud-

son was not concerned about what the progress narrative consisted of in this
new context, or even how f amily was formed; rather, he questioned the abil-
ity of Britons and Latin Americans to even use the same narratives and tropes
in the first place, particularly within an arena of imbalanced economic and
industrial power. He suggested, ultimately, that the very master narratives
informal empire would try to wrangle w ere themselves already beset by para-
dox when used to figure international relations.
This chapter has argued that for William Henry Hudson, the different sto-
ries that Englishmen and South Americans tell constitute an interruption to
the perfect sympathy required for individual hybridity and interpersonal fa-
milial relation. But a second aim has been to highlight a kind of voice that re-
ceives little attention in scholarship—that of a person who moved in the
same contact zone as the “capitalist vanguard” of British informal empire in
Latin America but saw with a different gaze. Hudson figures alternate kinds
of exchanges, ranging from the interpersonal relationships he experienced
in the pampas and memorialized in writing, to his own “peripheral”-to-
metropolitan migration, from his participation in literary and kinship net-
works between London and Buenos Aires, to his opposition to imperial ones.
He therefore represents a kind of subject who moved in the same network of
ideas, the same international contact zone as the capitalist vanguard, but made
different sense of the narrative and familial forms at play. And he shows, cru-
cially, how the ideology of informal empire might have collided with and
struggled against other extant Victorian concepts like transnational identity,
environmental conservation, and local sovereignty. My goal with this book,
in fact, has been to show that there were writers, thinkers, travelers, and stake-
holders on both sides of the Atlantic who variously critiqued, questioned, or
supported (sometimes reluctantly or accidentally) informal empire. They rec-
ognized it as distinct from the formal empire, irreducibly dual in form, and
frequently in conflict with Victorian master narratives. Such recognition was
possible because the nineteenth c entury produced powerful ways of seeing the
social in formal terms. Informal empire, in being “informal,” did not escape
this formal scrutiny nor lack form altogether; on the contrary, skirting dom-
inant institutions of oppression only set into relief the ways in which it was
differently formed. And it shows, ultimately, how nineteenth-century social
and political arrangements, particularly b attles over power and resources, w ere
contested through the forms that made them legible.
C oda
The forms in which we arrange language are powerful things. Metaphors like
“brother” and narratives like “progress” can both invite common purpose and
occlude inequality. They also describe and produce the forms in which we ar-
range h uman bodies and material goods into structures like governance, fi-
nance, and family. Language forms and social forms produce one another re-
ciprocally and constantly, such that it can become hard to know whether
“progress” and “brotherhood” are more properly the discursive realm of lan-
guage or the material configurations of our existence. Often, they are both;
the intercourse of the two is politics. And so the question of what kinds of so-
cial arrangements these metaphors describe and enact—liberatory, oppres-
sive, communal, unequal—is one with high stakes.
The literary texts I have discussed render this political process visible. The
metaphorical distance between the nation and the f amily is flattened in both
H. Rider Haggard’s and Vicente Fidel López’s fiction when a British man mar-
ries an indigenous American w oman and their u nion not only symbolizes
international relations but also produces each individual’s national belonging.
In novelistic form, the treatment of British–Latin American relations as a mar-
riage loses any claim to the purely abstract. Instead, t hese stories force us to
consider international marriage on the level of relations between two individ-
uals who elicit our empathy, and therefore to pursue the ethical implications
of the political metaphor. If spouses should not exploit one another for profit,
then neither should two nations who consider themselves wed. Likewise, Trol-
lope’s texts ask us to consider how a formalized abstraction of historical time
like the progress narrative produces the experience of being in the world for
individual people. In The Way We Live Now, progress is not merely a shape for
capturing an idea about history; to take it seriously as a governing philosophy
means speaking in certain tenses, avoiding certain financial practices, and

limiting colonial impingements on sovereignty in foreign countries.
Literary criticism is a powerful tool for untangling the relationship between
political discourses and their social implications, b ecause literary texts already
constantly traverse the distance between metaphor and human relations. Close
reading can unpack the way a novel does this; it can also unpack the way poli-
tics does. Doing so helps us better understand how language creates the con-
ditions of our social and political life. Moreover, literature creates worlds. That
remarkable feat gives us a way to see that such conditions are neither unitary
nor inevitable. The worlds we encounter when we read are dynamic precisely
because, instead of being slickly governed by totalizing forces, they register the
conflicts and misalignments of the multifarious stories, institutions, meta
phors, structures—in short, forms—t hat combine and recombine to shape
experience. Literature can show us not only how oppressive forces take
form, but also where their outer limits lie and in what configurations they
are weakest.
But why turn to the past? My subject in this book has been informal em-
pire, which is a problem that persists—and grows worse—in the twenty-first
century. It has also grown more complex, as not only nation-states but also
multinational corporations exert sway over economically vulnerable countries,
states, and regions. The nineteenth century, therefore, may not seem the most
critical site for analysis. What can we learn about financial imperialism from
a world before, for instance: the internet, the World Bank, neoliberalism,
US-backed coups in Latin America, super-exploitation of labor in the Global
South, and the Fortune Global 500?
One obvious reason to look backward is that it helps us see how we are still
Victorian. This book has worked to expose the thick reliance of nineteenth-
century British thought on the concepts of progressive history and familial
community. But those ideas have not faded from use. The Family of Man, for
instance, endures in notions of global community that are themselves impli-
cated in the imperial dominance of the west. In the 1950s, a photography ex-
hibition that sought postwar global unity by depicting human diversity went
by the name “The F amily of Man,” but it invited many critiques, including
Roland Barthes’s assessment that it was merely an anodyne suppression of cap-
italism’s structural inequalities.1 And as Sara Ahmed reminds us, the align-
ment of race, f amily, and nation still underpins violent white nationalist ide-
ologies in the twenty-first c entury.2 We remain tempted to explain politics in
Coda 229
familial terms, but we do not grapple enough with the cuts such a metaphor
can make after a century and a half of sharpening itself in the grooves of rac-
ism and oppression. “Progress,” likewise, still dominates the mainstream left’s
view of history, but its application in certain sectors (the fraught notion of
“development,” for instance, as a concept for describing struggling national
economies) often helps pave the way for corporatization and the exacerbation
of the global division of labor. Turning back to the nineteenth century shows
us that despite changes in technology, industry, and finance, we are still the
descendants of Victorian thought.
But for this reason, the most important way the nineteenth c entury offers
insight is that in its basic proposition—leveraging economic advantage to
achieve political control—informal empire was at that time still a new idea.
It had been practiced in India on the way to formal rule, but the nineteenth
century saw the rise of f ree trade as a hegemonic theory of economics, and as
this collided with Latin American independence, it became possible for the
British to imagine using nothing more than commercial sway to bring an en-
tire continent under their influence. It was a shift in the very concept of im-
perial power.3 As a new idea, emerging at once against traditional imperial-
ism and alongside other new ideas like progress and nationalism, informal
empire was highly visible, not yet simply woven into the ideological fabric of
international finance. Its two constitutive concepts—the freedom and the sub-
jugation of Latin America—were separate, opposed ideas, long before they
were joined, and bringing them together was a complicated, awkward process
that churned illogic and contradiction to the surface. Neither the material in-
frastructure nor the rhetorical explanations for informal empire emerged
fully formed from a centralized imperial machine. Rather, the material rela-
tions w
ere often improvised and ad hoc,4 and the rhetoric—the narratives, the
stories, the tropes—that described those relations lurched uncomfortably
along for decades, clashing with other dominant ways of understanding his-
tory and community. As the idea of informal empire developed, therefore, its
internal paradoxes and external frictions with other ideas were quite apparent
to contemporary thinkers like Simón Bolívar, Anna Barbauld, Anthony Trol-
lope, and others. Studying the nineteenth century, then, helps us become re-
sensitized to the strangeness and unaccountability of informal empire, its
clash with other dominant ideas. It can remind us that we should see the col-
lusion of family and white supremacy in our own time, or progress and neo-
liberalism, as paradoxical u nions.
Critics, however, have not tended to see nineteenth-century British infor-

mal empire in Latin America as troubled and available for critique to its con-
temporaries. They read the contradictions of informal empire as resolvable
into coherency and the whole as an effective extension of the formal empire.
They see it, in other words, as a functional part of the surrounding nineteenth-
century ideological landscape. This view, I believe, emerges from a kind of
unspoken presentism. That is, it is all too easy to see the eventual success of
financial imperialism, particularly as it replaced the formal empire in the
twentieth c entury, and to interpret its emergence in the nineteenth c entury
as a prehistory of that success. It is tempting to view the past as part of a te-
leological drive t oward the present. But the eventual success of an idea does
not equate to its early inevitability. The authors whose work I have discussed
in this book lived in a time when such power was far from certain.
This book proposes, therefore, a different kind of presentism, one that
starts from the past. We must and should be interested in informal empire
because we live t oday u
nder the oppressive conditions of worsening global
neoliberal wealth inequality. Our present emergency makes the past urgent.
But as we turn to that past, we must train ourselves not to see it merely as the
first page of our own story, but rather as a kind of rough draft that might have
produced many different narratives, many different f utures. To return to the
nineteenth century is to revisit a moment when the structures of financial im-
perialism were shrouded in uncertainty, ambiguity, and potential failure—a
moment when strangeness was still one of its dominant features, and when
arguments against informal empire had all the potency that came from their
possible success. Approaching the past this way can both inform our work
with the urgency of the present and help us see history as less deterministic.
And, moreover, it can also ward off the temptation to view imperial power as
totalizing. Returning to the discomfort and contradiction of informal empire
as it emerged shows that, like all discourses, it has form. And although forms
can be constraining and oppressive, they are also discernible, describable, ex-
posable, limited, and therefore critiquable. They may be combined in alter-
nate ways to open alternate f utures. We may challenge the forms that produce
our unequal life, but we must first learn to see what they are.
no t e s
Introduction • Freedom and Empire in the Nineteenth C

entury
1. Throughout this book I use the term “Latin America” to refer to the former Spanish
and Portuguese colonies in the Americas. Though it was not coined until the mid-nineteenth
century, it usefully concretizes the bounda ries of a region in flux. This project focuses on
the hispanophone colonies of the former Spanish Empire, but Brazil should be considered
part of this cultural and economic movement as well.
2. It is hard to put firm dates on the revolutions. Rebellion was in the works before 1810,
and skirmishes lasted after 1824. Cuba did not gain independence u ntil 1898. But these dates
capture the most important and intense period of struggle.
3. Despite abundant attention paid to the American Revolution in the 1770s and 1780s,
one could argue that Latin America’s independence a generation later had the more trans-
formative impact on Atlantic dynamics and the British imagination. A fter the American
Revolution, Britain and the United States remained linked by language, literature, history,
commerce, and politic al interests. As Trevor Burnard argues, “the loss of thirteen North
American colonies was a personal disaster for a few people” in Britain, but the nation as a
whole hardly felt any consequences (Planters, Merchants, and Slaves, 213). Latin American
revolutions, on the other hand, connected the British to a vast geography and myriad pop-
ulations they knew little about, opening up entirely new corridors of trade, translation, ex-
ploration, and power. Amid such crossings, the Atlantic world would see new conceptions
of sovereignty and finance, new transculturations, and new configurations of imperial power.
4. Trifilo, “British Travelers in Chile,” 392.
5. Waddell, “British Neutrality.”
6. Southey to Rickman, December 23, 1806, 212.
7. Bethell, “Britain and Latin America,” 1.
8. Mill, “Emancipation,” 298–299. Mill also argues against seeking commercial monop-
olies in Spanish America, but his desire to see England, rather than France, reap the re-
gion’s profits, betrays his sense that a European nation can nonetheless occupy the role of
primary beneficiary.
9. Cited in Heinowitz, Spanish America, 4 (emphasis in the original).
10. [“In her [England’s] shadow Americ a can assert her freedom.”] Bolívar, “Artículo
Comunicado,” 155. All translations that appear in notes, unless otherwise stated, are mine.
232 Notes to Pages 3–7
11. Chasteen, Americanos, 58.

12. Anderson, Imagined Communities; Brennan, “National Longing for Form.”
13. For more on the scholarly value and the ethical imperative of multilingual Victorian
studies, see my article “Toward a Multilingual Victorian Transatlanticism.”
14. The terms “informal empire” and “neocolonialism” are more recent coinages, both
dating from the mid-t wentieth century. Gallagher and Robinson brought “informal empire”
into mainstream usage with their famous 1953 essay, “The Imperialism of Free Trade.” Jean-
Paul Sartre (Colonialism and Neocolonialism, 1964) and Kwame Nkrumah (Neo-Colonialism,
1965) popularized “neocolonialism” a decade later. Onlookers in the nineteenth century did
not have an accepted, shared term for what we today call informal empire, but, as this book
shows, they understood the concept. In the following pages, I say more about my decision
to use the label “informal empire.”
15. Çelikkol, Romances of Free Trade, 8, 5. The rise of free trade not only enabled the infor-
mal empire but also transformed Britain’s relationship to its formal colonies as well. Christo-
pher Taylor shows that the West Indies experienced the lessening of political ties with Britain
in favor of looser commercial ties, becoming an “empire of neglect” (Empire of Neglect).
16. Cardoso and Faletto, Dependency and Development, 30–31.
17. Centner, “Chilean Failure.”
19. Bulmer-Thomas, Economic History, 101.
20. Centner, “Chilean Failure,” 293–294.
21. “For example, in 1845, as in 1806–07, British forces intervened in the River Plate. Brit-
ish forces were also used in the landing at Callao in 1839 and the Mexico intrusion of
1861–62. On other occasions the mere presence of the Royal Navy was sufficient to obtain
compliance, as off Peru in 1857 on behalf of bondholders, and against Chile in 1863. British
pressure helped the creation of Uruguay, while Palmerston used the navy to threaten Brazil
over the slave trade in 1848–49. From the 1830s to the 1860s the government clearly showed
its willingness to intervene assertively in Latin America to open ‘the markets of that great
continent.’ ” Lynn, “British Policy,” 110.
26. Coatsworth, “Structures, Endowments, and Institutions,” 128.
28. Bértola and Ocampo, Economic Development, 7–8.
30. Gallagher and Robinson, “Imperialism of Free Trade,” 5, 9–10.
31. “By the 1850s Britain was well established as the main trading partner of the region.
Latin America took around 10 per cent of total British exports between 1850 and 1913 and
around 10 per cent of British imports, figures second only to India’s in Britain’s trade. Equally,
British financial involvement in Latin America increased with British investment growing
from some £30m in 1826 to around £81m by 1865. Overall, there was clearly a considerable
British economic presence in the continent by the 1880s.” Lynn, “British Policy,” 110.
Notes to Pages 7–12 233
32. Bethell, “Britain and Latin America,” 1.

33. Burns, Poverty of Prog ress, 137. Burns’s work is something of a polemic, and he has
been rightly critiqued for idealizing the conditions in Latin Americ a that existed prior to
foreign influence or that might have existed without it.
34. Lynn argues that this is true of British informal empire around the world, and for
this reason he takes issue with the term “informal empire” in the first place, claiming it is
“unhelpful in implying . . . that this influence simply reached one way, from Britain into the
world outside. Relations between Britain and the wider world, in these years at least, need
to be seen in a much more pluralistic and mutually permeable fashion.” Lynn, “British Pol-
icy,” 120.
35. Burns, Poverty of Progress, 11.
36. According to Cardoso and Faletto, this is its own kind of trap: “Peripheral econo-
mies, even when they are no longer restricted to the production of raw material, remain de-
pendent in a very specific form: their capital-goods production sectors are not strong
enough to ensure continuous advance of the system, in financial as well as in technological
and organizational terms.” Dependency and Development, xxi.
37. Porter, “Introduction,” 7.
38. Wong, “Informal British Empire in China,” 480.
39. Lynn, “British Policy,” 113, 120.
40. Burke, “Speeches,” 292.
41. Onley, Arabian Frontier, 12.
42. Lynn, “British Policy,” 115. See Lynn for more on the economic differences among
various regions of British informal empire.
43. Thompson, “Afterword,” 231.
44. See Lynn, “British Policy,” and various chapters in Brown, ed., Informal Empire.
45. Beckman, Capital Fictions, xix.
46. Barbauld, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, l. 164.
47. Gallagher and Robinson, “Imperialism of Free Trade,” 7.
48. Franco, “Not-So-Romantic Journey”; Pratt, Imperial Eyes.
49. Brown, “Richard Vowell,” 99.
50. Hahner, Women Through W omen’s Eyes; Mörner, “European Travelogues.”
51. Waddell, “British Neutrality,” 5.
52. Brown, ed., Informal Empire, 7–8.
53. See Franco’s reading of Francis Bond Head as an exceptional traveler and Leask’s
similar reading of Frances Calderón de la Barca. Franco, “Not-So-Romantic Journey”; Leask,
“Ghost in Chapultepec.” For more, see the essays in Almeida, ed., Romanticism, especially
Fulford, Caballero and Hayward, and Damián.
54. See Almeida, Reimagining the Transatlantic; Aguirre, Informal Empire; Fulford, “Brit-
ish Romantics”; Hayward, “No Unity of Design”; Heinowitz, Spanish America; Ramirez,
British Representations. Ramirez specifically uses the word “ambivalent” (2).
55. Aguirre, Informal Empire, xvii.
56. Hayward, “No Unity of Design.”
57. Heinowitz, Spanish America, 15.
58. Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, ix, 239.
59. Sartre, Colonialism, 194, 197.

60. Heinowitz, Spanish America, 15. Tim Fulford offers a similar formulation, arguing
that “South American Indians” w ere portrayed in Romantic writing as “heroic liberators and
noble warriors . . . [in order] to assuage colonial guilt.” Fulford, “British Romantics,” 247.
61. Caballero, “Honour,” 112; Schmitt, Memory of the Human, 9; Heinowitz, Spanish
America, 2.
62. Hensley, Forms of Empire, 2, 5.
63. Mill, On Liberty, 41.
64. Mill, “A Few Words,” 259 (emphasis in the original); Mill, On Liberty, 6.
65. Gandhi, Affective Communities.
66. Conrad, Nostromo, 83, 138, 137.
67. Mufti, Civilizing War, 124.
68. Said, Beginnings, 100.
69. Hensley and Steer, “Signatures,” 76, 77.
70. Mufti, Civilizing War, 116, 119. For more on the nonlinear, fragmented forms of his-
tory and narrative in Nostromo, see Demory, “Making History”; Erdinast-Vulcan, “Writing
of History”; Mallios, “Untimely Nostromo”; Miller, “Material Interests”; and Robin, “Time,
History, Narrative.”
71. Esty, Unseasonable Youth, 17.
72. Prominent examples include Helen Maria Williams’s Peru (1784), John Thelwall’s
The Incas; or, the Peruvian Virgin (1792), James Moore’s Columbiad (1798), R. B. Sheridan’s
Pizarro (1799), and Robert Southey’s Madoc (1805). The Spanish Conquest and the history
of the native peoples remained a popular literary subject throughout the nineteenth c entury.
In a disparaging 1894 review of H. Rider Haggard’s novel Montezuma’s Daughter in the Spec
tator, the critic argued that Haggard “voluntarily enters into rivalry with a historical record
which, in the matter of exciting narrative, beats most novels hollow. The conquest of Mex-
ico is a sensational romance of fact, and to turn it into a sensational romance of fiction is
very like painting the lily and gilding gold.” (“A Novel and Two Romances.”)
73. Shelley, Frankenstein, 99; Collins, Woman in White, 198; Schmitt, Memory of the
Human, 20.
74. Kaul, Poems of Nation, 10.
75. Barrell and Guest, “Use of Contradiction,” 135, 123.
76. Schwarz, “Objective Form,” 193.
77. White, Content of the Form.
78. Bhabha, “Narrating the Nation”; Carr, Time, Narrative, and History; Gellner,
Nationalism.
79. Koselleck, Futures Past, 287.
80. Levine, Forms, 2.
81. Levine, “Strategic Formalism,” 627.
82. Levine, Forms.
83. Kramnick and Nersessian, “Form and Explanation.”
84. The introductions to each half provide chapter descriptions, so I do not summarize
each chapter here.
85. Kornbluh, “Never Been Critical,” 401.
86. For more on deterrence as a corollary to affordance, see chapter 2.

87. Gallagher, “Formalism and Time,” 231.
88. Levine, Forms, 16.
89. See Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, and Mehta, Liberalism and Empire.
90. French, “Reading Informal Empire,” 189.
91. Beckman, Capital Fictions, xx, x.
92. Hegel, Science of Logic, 35.
94. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2.
95. Almeida, Reimagining the Transatlantic, 5.
96. As Anna Kornbluh argues, while literary form (particularly novelistic form) contains
the potential for immanent critique, certain texts—“perhaps most” of them—fail to offer
this critique, “whether b ecause they lack imagination, lack the minimum norms of justice,
or lack aesthetic consistency” (“Never Been Critical,” 406).
Part I • Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
1. Scholars widely agree that the idea of history as progress can be dated to the mid-to
late eighteenth century. For detailed accounts of its emergence, see Koselleck, Conceptual
History and Futures Past; Lukács, Historical Novel, 23–29; Mehta, Liberalism and Empire,
82–85; Nisbet, Idea of Progress.
2. Koselleck, Conceptual History, 168. See also Lukács on the importance of the French
Revolution to the idea of historical progress.
3. Koselleck, Conceptual History, 229–230.
4. White, Content of the Form; Hartog, Regimes of Historicity.
5. Koselleck, Conceptual History, 120, 121.
6. Nisbet, Idea of Progress, 4–5; Koselleck, Conceptual History, 113, 123, 165–168.
7. Bann, Rise of History, 11.
8. Chandler, England in 1819, 107.
9. For more on the way prog ress achieved a takeover of nineteenth-c entury western
thought, see Mandelbaum, who argues that a key feature of the period was “the tendency
to view all of reality” through the lens of development (History, Man, and Reason, 41), or
Nisbet, who writes that “from being one of the important ideas in the West [progress] be-
came the dominant idea” (Idea of Progress, 171).
10. In other words, if progress is a mushroom, I’m less concerned with distinguishing
among portobello, shiitake, and oyster than I am in understanding what basic principles give
them all their mushroom-ness.
11. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 90.
12. For a compelling discussion of how the progress narrative relies on two paradoxical
visions—linear, gradual change on the one hand, and total rupture from a radically other
(because barbaric) past on the other, see Hensley, Forms of Empire, particularly his chapter
on The Mill and the Floss.
13. Even the most ardent adherents to a progressive explanation of history will acknowl-
edge that it may contain small regressions, but these are minor and temporary enough
that, when seen from the vantage of history writ large, they disappear into the overall form
of inevitable upward climb. Prior states may recur as blips or hiccups, but they are not re-
peated in a sustained way.
14. Arendt (Origins of Totalitarianism) argues that by the end of the nineteenth century,
progress in fact lost the teleological form it had had in its eighteenth-century manifestations,
precisely b ecause of its new imbrication with the endlessness of capital accumulation. I explore
this clash between progressive teleology and capitalist accumulation in depth in chapter 3.
15. Hobsbawm, On History, 19.
16. Each of t hese ideas is well discussed elsewhere. For more on diachronic versus syn-
chronic history, see White, Metahistory. For discussions of the linear nature of progress, see
Nisbet, Idea of Progress, 4–5; Hobsbawm, On History, 14–15; Koselleck, Conceptual History,
123; Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason, 43; Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, 4–5. For
more on the concept of increase, see Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason, 43–45. For ac-
celeration, see Hobsbawm, On History, 13; Koselleck, Futures Past; and Koselleck, Concep
tual History, 113. And for teleology, see Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason, 45.
17. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 8.
18. See Fabian, Time and the Other.
19. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 30.
20. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 30; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 8.
21. Esty, Unseasonable Youth, 22, 17.
Chapter 1 • (In)dependence
1. Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution, 2.

2. [“This nation [ancient Rome] has examples for everyt hing, except for the cause of
humanity. . . . But the resolution of the g reat problem of man set f ree seems to have been
something inconceivable, a mystery that would only be made clear in the New World.”]
Bolívar, “15 de agosto,” 4–5. English translation from Bolívar, “Oath Taken in Rome,” in El
Libertador, 113. The “Juramento del Monte Sacro,” or “Oath Taken in Rome,” as it has come
to be called in Spanish and English, was written by Bolívar’s tutor, though both men claimed
it to be an accurate record of a spontaneous speech Bolívar uttered at the summit of Monte
Sacro. In it, the youthful Bolívar, inspired by the history of ancient Rome, swears his com-
mitment to someday seeing Latin Americ a set f ree. While its origin may be specious, the
general argument that Rome could offer no precedent or example to speak to Latin Ameri-
can independence is a fascinating piece of rhetoric, both connected to Bolívar and simply
as a revolutionary utterance.
3. Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution, 2.
4. Where possible I have quoted Bolívar in his original language of writing or speaking—
whether Spanish or English. In the case of some of his more obscure texts, however, it has
been necessary to cite published translations.
5. Bushnell, “Introduction,” xxvii.
6. The word “Creole” has a wide variety of specific referents in various cultural contexts.
Here I use it to refer to p
eople of Spanish descent who w ere born in the Americas as opposed
to having relocated t here.
7. Lynch, Simón Bolívar, 30, 31.

8. McFarlane, “Political Dissent,” 323–324.
9. Collier, “Simón Bolívar,” 13.
10. Lynch, Simón Bolívar, 51–52. For more on the Bolívar-Wellesley talks, see Cussen,
Bello and Bolívar; Waddell, Gran Bretaña; Waddell, “International Politics.”
11. [“Be assured, Your Excellency, as we are, that in spite of the tone of coolness and re-
serve evident in their reply to our proposals, and in the memorandum that we are enclos-
ing, there are in this government genuine and very favorable attitudes t oward us; attitudes
that accord too well with the actual state of affairs and with the interests of Great Britain
to be disputed or doubted. L ittle shrewdness is needed to discover it in the very same
papers we cite, even though they have been crafted to communicate with the Spanish,
and, what’s more, we expect t hese attitudes to grow and develop with each passing day, in
proportion to the advancing dissolution of Spain.”] Bolívar, “Los comisionados,” 6.
12. Racine, “Simón Bolívar, Englishman,” 58; Cussen, Bello and Bolívar, 33–34. Andrés
Bello, another member of the delegation, stayed behind in London for many years to rep-
resent Latin America’s interests to the British.
14. Although he would eventually invite the United States, he originally preferred not
to because of their differences in culture and out of deference to Britain. See also Lynch on
his general orientation t oward the two: “Toward the United States he was cool and guarded,
but not overtly hostile, and he respected its revolutionary and republican credentials. Brit-
ain, however, engaged his sympathy as well as his admiration.” Simón Bolívar, 216.
15. Lynch, Simón Bolívar, 214.
16. [“The p eople have had two objectives in undertaking the current American revolu-
tion: to shake off the Spanish yoke, and to establish friendship and commerce with Great Brit
ain.”] Bolívar, “Comunicación del Libertador,” 333.
17. Racine, Francisco de Miranda, 106–107; Cussen, Bello and Bolívar, 40.
18. In fact, several decades later, a fter independence was won and large communities of
British emigrants had settled in South America, they still spoke of Britain’s involvement with
independence using the same pairing. In the second issue of The Britannia and Montevideo
Reporter, the editors write: “When the lamented Canning resolved upon employing the in-
fluence of the British Cabinet in favour of the Recognition of the Uruguay Republic, his
comprehensive mind saw at once the immense advantages which the creation of the new
State, in its geographical position, would confer, not only upon the commercial interests of
his own country, but also, upon the political condition of the p eople inhabiting the regions
bordering upon the tributaries of the River Plate.” “The Republic of Paraguay,” 1.
19. Bolívar to Wellesley, May 27, 1815, El Libertador, 154.
20. Ewell, “Atlantic World Diplomacy,” 44. See Lynch for the original and ongoing sig-
nificance of the letter: “The Jamaica Letter is more important as a reflection of Bolívar’s
thinking and a source of the springs of action than as a call to the American people, for in 1815
the American people did not hear it. It was first published in English, in 1818, and it was only
in 1833 that the first known Spanish version was issued. But the Liberator drew on the Letter,
sometimes word for word, in other more public utterances in the years to come, and thus it
became part of the political currency of the Spanish American revolution.” Simón Bolívar, 95.
21. He addressed the letter to “a gentleman from this island,” invoking an upper-class
resident of the British-controlled island of Jamaica but also, by implication, the island na-
tion of England. And by promoting “world equilibrium” (see more later in this chapter), he
further speaks to Britain’s concern that France might acquire the Spanish colonies and be-
come an outsized power. Thus, despite his repeated use of the larger designation “Europe,”
his dual appeal to commerce and justice was most pointedly aimed at Britain.
22. Bolívar, “The Jamaica Letter,” El Libertador, 15.
23. Bolívar, “The Jamaica Letter,” 16.
24. Ewell, “Atlantic World Diplomacy,” 43.
25. Racine, Francisco de Miranda, 143.
26. Ewell, “Atlantic World Diplomacy,” 37.
27. See also Lynch, Simón Bolívar, 216–217.
28. Bolívar to Wellesley, May 27, 1815, El Libertador, 154.
29. [“No one doubts that the powerf ul nation [Great Britain] which, even in adversity,
has constantly defended the independence of Europe, would not equally defend America’s
if it w
ere attacked. On the contrary, let us rejoice in the irresistible ascendancy that E
ngland
is about to establish over both hemispheres in guarantee of universal freedom.”] Bolívar,
“Artículo Comunicado,” 155. This essay has no attributed author in the original printing, but
critics agree that it is Bolívar’s, and it appears in multiple anthologies of his collected writ-
ing. Original spelling and capitalization have been preserved, while diacritical marks have
been added for consistency.
30. [“In her [England’s] shadow Americ a can assert her freedom.”] Bolívar, “Artículo
Comunicado,” 155.
31. Mill, “Emancipation,” 299.
32. Moraña, “Ilustración y delirio.”
33. [“regionalism/Westernism, indigeneity/Europea nization, traditionalism/progress,
rootedness/modernity, colonialism/Enlightenment, [and] barbarity/civilization.”] Moraña,
“Ilustración y delirio,” 32.
34. [“evasion and reconciliation.”] Meléndez, “Miedo, raza y nación,” 17.
35. Collier, “Simón Bolívar,” 18. See also Lynch, Simón Bolívar, 28.
36. Lynch, Simón Bolívar, 28–29.
37. In fact, the British had already discovered that the United States was far more finan-
cially valuable f ree than it had been as a colony.
38. Bolívar to Revenga, February 17, 1826, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 568.
40. Bolívar to Monteagudo, August 5, 1823, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 389.
42. Racine, “Simón Bolívar, Englishman,” 59.
43. Gallagher and Robinson, “Imperialism of Free Trade,” 13.
44. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire.
45. White, Content of the Form, 10.
46. See chapter 4 for more on how Latin American nations, particularly Argentina, pur-
sued the authoring of new histories in order to develop national identity and join world
affairs.
47. Brown, Adventuring, 110.

48. For more, see Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time, 185.
49. Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time, 186.
50. [“one of the first texts in which the tension inherent in the word we, out of which
came the attempt to define Latin American identity, is made explicit.”] Rivas Rojas, “Del
criollismo al regionalismo,” 104.
52. [“it is impossible to say for certain to which h uman family we belong.”] Bolívar,
“Oración inaugural,” 129.
53. “Shared identity” is a double-edged sword. When two national communities agree
to open the bounda ries of imagined community to include one another, we might say that
this is a powerf ul counter to nationalism, but particularly when t here is an unequal balance
of power between the two nations, we can also see the beginnings of a potentially insidious
cultural imperialism. From our twenty-first century perspective we cannot help but see the
latter, but in fairness to Bolívar, his writing suggests that he saw the former as a genuine
possibility.
55. Bolívar, “To Maxwell Hyslop,” Selected Writings, vol. 1, 98.
56. Cited in Lynch, Simón Bolívar, 202–204.
57. Waddell, “British Neutrality.”
58. Johnson, Simón Bolívar, 68.
59. [“Americans would take British character and customs as the standards of their future
life”; “would, over time, become t hose between equals”; “a perfect equilibrium would be es-
tablished in this truly new order of things”; “in the course of the centuries, there might
perhaps come to be a single nation covering the world—a federal one.”] Bolívar, “Un pens-
amiento,” 261.
60. Racine, Francisco de Miranda, 108–109.
62. Bolívar, “To Maxwell Hyslop,” Selected Writings, vol. 1, 98.
65. Bushnell, “Introduction,” xliii.
66. Bolívar, “Reflexiones.” (This essay has no attributed author in the original printing,
but critics agree that it is Bolívar’s, and it appears in multiple anthologies of his collected
writing.)
67. [“in short, social reform would be achieved under the blessed auspices of freedom
and peace, but E ngland would necessarily take the control of balancing the scales into her
own hands”; “England would no doubt reap considerable advantages from this arrange-
ment.”] Bolívar, “Un pensamiento,” 261.
68. Ewell, “Atlantic World Diplomacy,” 53, 52.
69. [“In exchange for their recognition [of American sovereignty, the English] are
demanding that we sacrifice some of our political principles . . . a nd if we do not sacrifice
them, England will dissolve us like so much smoke, as I will say again that her omnipotence
is absolute and insuperable. The proof of this is that a small French squadron is blockading
us, insulting us with impunity. What power we have! What strength! Let us take advantage
of this humiliation and league ourselves body and soul to the English, to preserve at least
the forms and advantages of a legal and civil government. . . . [ W]e cannot exist, neither
isolated nor united in federation, except through the consent of E
ngland. . . . This is the Ro-
man Empire at the end of the republican stage and on the threshold of becoming an em-
pire. E
ngland finds herself on an ascendant progression, to the detriment of all who oppose
her: wretchedness will even befall he who does not become her ally or fails to align his fate
with hers. All America combined does not equal one British fleet; the entire Holy Alliance
cannot combat the combined force of her liberal principles and her immense wealth; means
employed by a clever and invincible politics, that achieves whatever it attempts.”] Bolívar to
Santander, July 10, 1825, Obras Completas, vol. 2, 167–168.
70. Marx, Holy Family, 113.
71. Anderson, Imagined Communities.
Chapter 2 • “Dependant Kings”
1. For more on this, see Favretti, “Politics of Vision”; Keach, “Regency Prophecy”; Mel-
lor, “Female Poet”; Ross, Masculine Desire.
2. Favretti, “Politics of Vision”; Mellor, “Female Poet.”
3. Barbauld, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven. Hereafter parenthetical citations.
4. Mill, “Emancipation,” 298–299.
5. The former argument is made by Bradshaw, “Dystopian Futures.” The latter is made
by Birns, “ ‘Thy World, Columbus!’ ”; Gottlieb, “Fighting Words”; and Kaul, Poems of Na
tion. Although each critic comes down on one side of this debate, they each also acknowl-
edge that their side needs to be argued, suggesting that the scope of the poem’s concerns is
not self-evident.
6. Gottlieb, “Fighting Words,” 336.
7. Birns, “ ‘Thy World, Columbus!,’ ” 554.
8. Rohrbach, “History of the Future,” and McCarthy, Voice of the Enlightenment, both
discuss the ways that Eighteen Hundred and Eleven engages with these models, though not
in the schematic way I have h ere.
10. Carr, Time, Narrative, and History, 167.
12. One further way the poem’s general discontinuity comes to the surface is through
its tangled sense of what drives history. Sometimes the poem suggests that western civiliza-
tion will inevitably collapse because of its own constitutive elements (“Arts, arms, and wealth
destroy the fruits they bring”); other times it is a particular empire’s corruption that augurs
collapse (“Thou who hast shared the guilt must share the woe”). We also see history’s events
attributed to the preference and caprice of the abstracted Spirit (“The Genius now forsakes
the favored shore”), yet other times empires fall only b ecause the passage of time means they
must (“fairest flowers expand but to decay” or “Time may tear the garland from her brow”).
So what is the prime mover of history? Choice or chance? Man or myth? (Keach argues that
it is the presence of the Spirit that confuses the sense of causality in Britain’s history of rise
and collapse. Having understood the poem as I do through the notion of narrative layers,
this observation is unexpectedly significant, suggesting that the presence of one narrative
layer, or one version of history, interrupts the coherence of the other.) There are obvious ideo-
logical and formal implications to these differing ideas about the processes that propel
historical events. W hether the fall of empires results from political mismanagement or the
inevitable march of time speaks to the interrelated questions of w hether civilization is teleo-
logical and whether certain empires can be understood as exceptional.
14. Crocco groups both into “the peoples of the Western hemisphere.” And Birns sug-
gests that Latin America is simply a pragmatic “placeholder” for the United States amid the
political thorns of the impending 1812 war (“Colonial Subtext,” 555).
15. Birns, “ ‘Thy World, Columbus!,’ ” 546.
16. Crocco, “Colonial Subtext,” 92.
17. Her references to the Andes, Chimborazo, La Plata, and Potosí, respectively indicate
a continental mountain range, a single volcano, a river, and either a silver mine or the city
surrounding it (Potosí would refer to both).
18. For more, see Heinowitz, “ ‘Thy World, Columbus.’ ”
19. Levine, Forms.
20. Levine, “Strategic Formalism.”
22. One might h ere interject that when Barbauld figures Latin American freedom from
Europe, this is a clear reference to Spain, not to E ngland, and it is almost a tautology to ar-
gue that Latin American freedom would come sequentially a fter the fall of the Spanish
empire. And yet her poem is hard at work to link England and Spain as representatives of
aging continental imperial power, augmented by inclusive diction like “Europe.” Addition-
ally, the fall of the British Empire is quite clearly the central event that occasions the poem.
And finally, w hether the “Europe” who lies desolate in the final lines of the poem is a refer-
ence to Spain, England, or both, the functional result is the same. Barbauld’s poem admits
no possibility that Britain can maintain its status as a powerf ul (and predatory) empire if
Latin America has taken the torch. The Spirit can only be in one place at a time.
23. The La Plata River is a wide, placid body of water that could hardly be said to have
“roaring torrents,” so while Barbauld is interested in the specificity of South America, she
is not always entirely accurate about it.
24. Heinowitz, “ ‘Thy World, Columbus,’ ” 157.
25. Gottlieb, “Fighting Words,” 339.
26. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire.
27. Shalev, Rome Reborn, 44.
28. See the introduction of this book for an account of how scholars put forth variations
on this claim.
29. Bann, Rise of History, 11.
30. Koselleck, Futures Past.
31. Morgan, Narrative Means.
32. That is, apart from the fairly safe assumption that by the 1820s Barbauld would have
known who Simón Bolívar was, as did most of Europe.
33. Barbauld’s most prominent biographer, William McCarthy, titles her life story Voice
of the Enlightenment, and two separate scholars have used the phrase “child of the Enlight-
enment” to describe Bolívar’s upbringing and political philosophy. We could certainly re-
flect on the paternalism of the latter description. John Chasteen calls Bolívar “a child of the
Enlightenment through and through” (Americanos, 13), and Simon Collier refers to him as
“fully a child of the Enlightenment in his love of . . . historical political surveys” (“Simón
Bolívar,” 18).
35. “Bolívar to Wellesley,” May 27, 1815, El Libertador, 154.
36. Both also turn to the figure of Christopher Columbus as the rightful owner of the
Americ as. Barbauld refers to the Americ as as “thy world, Columbus,” and in the Jamaica
Letter Bolívar writes that the naming of Colombia is a “fair and grateful tribute to the cre-
ator of our hemisphere” (26). This suggests that for neither author does America seem to
exist prior to European “discovery” and conquest. But it also shows the problem of writing
America’s heritage. There is an entire history in the Americas that precedes Columbus, but
how can it be written into a Euro-c entric world history, even a decentered world history,
when Columbus is the figure who makes the hemispheres aware of each other’s existence and
begins the process of mutual gazing? He seems to be the figure who unites Europe and Amer
ica, drawing the first Atlantic pathway in the network that would follow. But in so doing,
he also brings about a collision of histories, epistemologies, empires, currencies, beliefs,
subjugations, and technologies that make that network so impossible to categorize into iso-
lated groups or narrate coherently.
Chapter 3 • Anthony Trollope and the Collapse of Historical Telos
1. Trollope, Prime Minister.

2. Undoubtedly, Lopez does not mean to be the literal head of state, but the phrase none-
theless fits his own imperial vision of the world and participates in what is by now the all
too familiar rhetorical link between global capitalism and disrupted local sovereignty. What’s
more, Lopez knows that the only reason such “kingship” is possible is b ecause of the great
wealth divide between Guatemala and G reat Britain, understanding that a sum of money
that would not go far in London will elevate him to royalty in Guatemala precisely because
of a depressed local economy he looks forward to exploiting.
3. Poovey, Financial System, 15.
4. Kornbluh, Realizing Capital, 1.
5. Odden, “Puffed Papers,” 135–136.
6. Reed, “Friend to Mammon,” 180, 183.
8. Miller, Victorian Subjects, 86.
9. Alborn, “Victorian Money Market,” 199.
10. Birns, “Trollope and the Antipodes,” 187.
11. See Trollope, Australia and New Zealand.
12. See Trollope, West Indies, discussed later in this chapter.
13. Davidson, “Trollope and the Colonies,” 315, 316.
14. Trollope, The Way We Live Now. Hereafter parenthetical citations.

15. Goodlad, “Trollopian ‘Foreign Policy.’ ”
16. This is reminiscent of the way Lukács describes Walter Scott’s “Waverley type[s],”
who signal “the age-old steadfastness of English development amidst the most terrible cri-
ses” (Historical Novel, 37).
17. Kornbluh, Realizing Capital, 96. Kornbluh has an excellent reading of the Mel
mottes’ lack of identity, and mine is very much in concert with hers. I only risk making
similar observations in order to reach a complementary but distinct conclusion: while she
connects the Melmottes’ vacuousness to the ungroundedness of capital, I connect it to a
lack of narrative form.
18. In fact, Nancy Henry argues that the difference between Carbury and Melmotte is
one of literary genre, of “Romantic against realist sensibilities” (“Rushing into Eternity,” 172).
19. It i sn’t only Melmotte who resists narration; two other supporters of the railway also
lack an origin. Fisker “had sprung out of some Californian gully, was perhaps ignorant of
his own father and mother, and had tumbled up in the world on the strength of his own au-
dacity” (v.I, 324). And when Paul proposes to Mrs. Hurtle despite “how little he knew of
the lady,” Roger points out that she “might never have had a husband,—might at this mo-
ment have two or three,—might be overwhelmed with debt,—might be anything bad, dan-
gerous, and abominable” (v.I, 242, 256).
20. Goodlad, “Trollopian ‘Foreign Policy,’ ” 83, 67. For more on Trollope’s treatment of
“rootless” Jewish characters, see also Cheyette, “Promised Land”; Delany, “Jews in the L ater
Trollope”; Litvak, “Jewish Geography”; Ragussis, “Moses in Egypt.”
21. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 30–31.
22. For more on the distinction between event and structure, see Koselleck, Futures Past.
23. It bears mentioning that Trollope’s investment in this dynamic runs deep enough
that he repeats it almost exactly in his next novel, The Prime Minister. Ferdinand Lopez is,
in a parallel to the Melmottes, “a friendless Portuguese,—a probable Jew” (30), and no one
“knew whence he had come, or what was his family” (8). In the eyes of society, therefore,
he is “without those far-reaching fibres and roots by which . . . the solidity and stability of
a human tree should be assured” (65). His foil, Arthur Fletcher, is like Carbury in belong-
ing to “one of the oldest families in England” (30). Like Melmotte, Lopez seeks to profit from
Latin American projects (guano) that do not exist, and, like Melmotte, he is coded as im-
perialist: “he was imperious, and he had learned to carry his empire in his eye” (10). Lopez’s
story ends much like Melmotte’s, in disgrace and suicide, and his foil, Arthur Fletcher, wins
Lopez’s widow and the implied fulfillment of his family line. I do not give readings of both
novels, but the significant overlap shows that the connection between individuals and nar-
ratives, faulty narratives and informal empire, exceeds just one text.
24. Çelikkol helpfully points out that “in a world of chaotic circulation,” like the one
that enables Melmotte’s mobility and his international finance, it is hard to “have a sense
of belonging to a nation” (Romances of Free Trade, 8).
25. See especially Beckert, who argues that under capitalism past data is only so predic-
tive because at any given time the next crisis may overturn all previous expectations of the
likely or possible. We all know this and thus operate with less assurance that the past can
tell us anything about the future (Imagined Futures, 74). See also Koselleck, who argues that
nder industrial modernity the f uture carries more weight than the present, which is reduced
u
to a “superseded former f uture” (Futures Past, 3).
26. Sewell, “Temporalities of Capitalism,” 518.
27. Sewell, “Capitalist Epoch,” 7.
28. Kornbluh, Realizing Capital, 32.
30. According to Sewell, “the unique or uncanny temporal dynamics of the capit alist
epoch” are “what Karl Marx called the endless accumulation of capital” (“Capitalist Epoch,”
3). Elsewhere Sewell writes that “the rule that dominates capitalist economic life is accumu-
lation of capital for accumulation’s sake” (“Temporalities of Capitalism,” 525).
31. Postone, Time, L abor, and Social Domination, 289.
32. Postone, Time, L abor, and Social Domination, 296 (emphasis in the original).
33. Postone, Time, L abor, and Social Domination, 300 (emphasis mine).
34. Sewell: “This dynamic should not be understood as teleological” (“Capitalist Epoch,”
9). Postone: “In dealing with the category of capital, then, one is dealing with a central cat-
egory of a society that becomes characterized by a constant directional movement with no
determinate external telos, a society driven by production for the sake of production, by a
process that exists for the sake of process” (Time, L abor, and Social Domination, 269).
35. Sewell, “Temporalities of Capitalism,” 535; Sewell, “Capitalist Epoch,” 9; Postone,
Time, L abor, and Social Domination, 269.
36. This discussion of the telos of capitalism is related to but different from the question
of capitalism as the telos of history. There is a robust conversation about whether history is
itself teleological, leading inevitably to the triumph of capitalism (and/or socialism) as the
end of history. For more on this, see Sewell, “Capitalist Epoch”; Sewell, “Temporalities of
Capitalism”; Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism; and Fukuyama, End of History. However,
I am engaging a slightly different question h ere, which is not capitalism as the telos of his-
tory, but the telos internal to capitalism itself—that is, the ends that capitalism imagines for
itself within its own unique temporal manifestations.
38. Kornbluh, Realizing Capital, 27, 29.
39. See Beckert (Imagined Futures) on this dynamic generally, and Jaffe (“Trollope in the
Stock Market”) on it in Trollope.
40. Victorianists have discussed extensively the mutually formative relationship between
literature and finance in the period, showing that changing economic structures produced
new vocabularies and demanded new genres. (See Delaney, “Jews in the L ater Trollope”;
Houston, Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction; Poovey, Financial System; and Wagner,
Financial Speculation.) And a few have discussed the ways that novelists considered the over-
lapping narrative forms of finance, history, and literature. See Alborn, “Victorian Money
Market,” and Kornbluh, Realizing Capital. The latter is closer to what I’m interested in h ere.
41. Porter, Absent-Minded Imperialists, 139–141.
42. This puts Mrs. Hurtle in company with Gallagher and Robinson’s famous argument
that the British Empire preferred financial influence over formal occupation when possible
(“Imperialism of Free Trade”).
43. Schmidt, Social and Economic Effect, 4–5.

44. Poovey, Financial System, 178, 182–183.
45. For a classic example of this, see Seeley’s Expansion of E
ngland, in which he argues
against Turgot’s famous 1750 maxim that the colonies, like fruit, “cling to the [imperial] tree
only until they ripen.” By contrast, Seeley held that the Empire would and should never dis-
solve (Expansion of E ngland, 296–297).
46. Trollope, West Indies, 84, 85. Hereafter parenthetical citations.
47. For more on Trollope’s views about the independence of America, see Buzard, “Trol-
lope and Travel,” 168, and Claybaugh, “Trollope and America,” 214.
48. This reminds us of the surface/depth model of informal empire that some scholars
have recently espoused (discussed extensively in the introduction to this book)—t he idea
that informal empire’s structure is one of a false outward support for Latin America mask-
ing Britain’s true desire to profit at its expense. That Trollope’s Mexican railway board op-
erates this way would seem to suggest that he shares this vision of informal empire, but
whereas critical accounts cast the surface/depth structure as a functional, effective model of
imperial power, Trollope’s version is of course precisely and pointedly dysfunctional. Its con-
tradictions leave it hollow and lead to its undoing.
49. Wood, Democracy against Capitalism, 147.
50. Gordon Bigelow argues that Trollope’s novel The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847)
locates a similar misalignment between “capitalist economic relations” and “liberal models
of development” in the Irish imperial zone (“Form and Violence,” 401). This further corrobo-
rates my claim that Trollope saw capitalism as a potentially corrupting influence on the
moral imperatives of imperial rule. Such corruption would of course be all the more present
in the arena of informal empire, where profit was the explicit, primary motivation. Bigelow
is interested in how this corruption distorts Trollope’s own narrative form, whereas I am
tracking the ways Trollope perceives it to distort the forms of progress itself.
51. Miller, Victorian Subjects, 87.
52. Van, “Ambivalent Speculations,” 44 (citing Conrad’s Imagining America, 91).
Part II • Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
1. Brennan, “National Longing for Form,” 45.

2. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, viii.
3. Kilroy, Family Ideology, 8.
4. For more on France’s transition from a patriarchal to a fraternal social model, see
Hunt, Family Romance. For more on the domestic as European political discourse, see Bon-
figlio, “Liberal Cosmopolitanism,” 285.
5. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 176.
6. See for instance, Norcia’s study of geography primers by w omen writers, which she
uses as evidence that the “family of man” trope appeared long before midcentury (X Marks
the Spot).
7. Heinowitz, Spanish America.
8. For more on this duality, see May, Disorderly Sisters, 16.
9. See, for instance, Furneaux’s study of queer relations in Dickens (Queer Dickens), as
well as McCrea (Family and Narrative) and Schaffer (Romance’s Rival), each of whom argues
that the Victorian novel stages a conflict between competing family structures.
10. Bonfiglio, “Liberal Cosmopolitanism,” 287.
12. May, Disorderly Sisters, 200.
13. That this was so is rendered all the clearer by the ways in which writers separated
from Victorian thinking, either by time or distance, expressed their skepticism of Victo-
rian politics as a rejection of Victorian family structures. See for instance, Esty (Unseason
able Youth) on how twentieth-century writers no longer relied on the narrative of youth
development.
14. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 45.
15. See especially Seeley, Expansion of E ngland, 296–297.
16. McClintock (Imperial Leather) discusses this at some length. See also Phillips, Sex,
Politics and Empire; Stoler, Carnal Knowledge.
18. Hobsbawm, On History; Tobin, Time and the Novel.
20. For a brief discussion of how the image of Queen Victoria as imperial “mother” was
used by both imperialists and separatists in India, see S ullivan, Narratives of Empire, 3.
21. See, for instance, Bystrom, “Democratic South Africa”; Renk, Caribbean Shadows.
22. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 28–29.
23. I especially like, and follow, Bystrom’s method of reading for relation, which she de-
scribes this way: “Relation . . . is here a flexible signifier meant to draw attention to the
threads—emotional and rational, real and imagined—that link us to other people. It directs
our gaze to family matters and asks us to consider carefully the way we live with relatives
and others with whom we share domestic space, without losing sight of how t hese intimate
relationships connect to wider social norms” (Democracy at Home, 3).
24. Glissant, Poetics of Relation.
25. Bonfiglio, “Liberal Cosmopolitanism,” 287.
26. See May for a discussion of how Victorian sororal relations emphasize the “syn-
chronic, horizontal familial crosscut” (Disorderly Sisters, 18).
28. Derrida, Politics of Friendship; Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities; Haraway, Stay
ing with the Trouble, 2.
29. Gandhi, Affective Communities, 6.
30. As I w ill detail in the chapters that follow, it is not my claim that marriage rela-
tions, in the nineteenth c entury or now, are inherently more equitable (or less patriar-
chal) than parental ones. Rather, I explore the ways that authors used an image of equitable
marriage as a way to think about and sometimes idealize certain kinds of international
relations.
31. McCrea, Family and Narrative, 8. For more on the overlap between nineteenth-
century narrative and family form, see Hirsch, Mother/Daughter Plot; Schaffer, Romance’s
Rival; and Tobin, Time and the Novel.
32. “Family romance”: see Hirsch, Mother/Daughter Plot, and May, Disorderly Sisters.
“Genealogical plot”: see McCrea, Family and Narrative. “National romance”: see Sommer,
Foundational Fictions. “Colonial family romance”: see Verges, Monsters and Revolutionaries.
33. Felstiner, “Family Metaphors.”
34. Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 18.
35. Anderson, Imagined Communities; Brennan, “National Longing for Form.”
36. Jameson, “Third-World Literature,” 69.
37. Both Sommer (Foundational Fictions, 43–50) and Andrade (Nation Writ Small, 34–
39) use a similar method of reading the complex interplay between literal and allegorical in
their analyses of family plots in national contexts.
Chapter 4 • Vicente Fidel López Re-members the Nation

2. The novel was not published until 1854, but in the prologue to the complete version,
López claims to have written it fourteen years e arlier while he was exiled in Chile from the
authoritarian Rosas regime. The fact that several chapters were published in Santiago in 1843
would seem to corroborate this claim. (See Gerassi-Navarro, Pirate Novels, 204n13.)
3. Gerassi-Navarro, Pirate Novels, 74.
7. Garrels, in Sarmiento, Provincial Past, 277n28.
8. Young and Cisneros, Historical Dictionary, 270.
9. For more on this, see Smith, Encyclopedia, 422.
10. See Sommer for a discussion of how López’s political and academic disagreements
may have led his novel to become less favored than t hose by his peers (Foundational Fictions,
110–111); García de Aldridge, “Two Latin-A merican Theorists,” 196–197; Shaw, Modern
Spanish American Fiction, 14; Anderson-Imbert, Spanish-American Literature, 231; Benítez-
Rojo, “Spanish-A merican Novel,” 448. Benítez-Rojo places José Mármol’s novel Amalia—
also written from exile—first in this list.
11. See Gerassi-Navarro, Pirate Novels, 170.
12. García de Aldridge, “Two Latin-A merican Theorists,” 197.
14. García de Aldridge, “Two Latin American Theorists,” 186–188.
15. [“It seemed to me then that a series of [historical] novels . . . was a project worthy of
the purest patriotism; because I believed that people who lack clear knowledge and aware-
ness of their national traditions are like men deprived of home and f amily, who waste their
lives in sad, obscure ventures without anyone being bound to them by respect, by love, or
by gratitude. . . . This is perhaps the reason that Walter Scott and Cooper are unique in the
modern world: it is a fact at least that the nations for whom they wrote are the only ones
where national traditions are respected as inviolable belief.”] López, La novia del hereje. Here-
after parenthetical citations.
16. Smith, Encyclopedia, 57.
17. [“to cast a glance at the past, from the clamor of the revolution, in order to conceive
the line of generation that brought about events, and to orient ourselves t oward the purpose
of our course”]
18. [“a prehistory of the national present.”] Ianes, “Arquetipo narrativo,” 154. Lukács uses the
same phrase to describe Scott’s novels, arguing that they revive the past as a “prehistory of the
present” (Historical Novel, 53). If Ianes draws his phrasing from Lukács, he does not say so.
19. [“the capable novelist can use his imagination to recreate what’s lost, freely creating
the family life and fastening himself closely to historical life, using the combination of the
two to recreate the whole truth.”] Emphasis in the original.
20. It may seem that I am slipping between the concept of national identity for Argen-
tina and the continental concept of Latin American identity. This slippage is a purposeful
reflection of a scalar overlap that López was well attuned to. While Argentina, Chile, Peru,
and o thers w ere involved in establishing their separate identities a fter independence, their
centuries of shared colonial history also provided a deep sense of connection and led to sig-
nificant Pan-A merican political and cultural movements. This is one reason López could
simultaneously speak of the historical novel as integral to the project of Argentina’s national
identity formation, while also setting his own historical novel in Peru. The two nations w ere
easily analogized through their shared history of conquest, language, religion, and complex
racial makeup, and belonging as they did to a larger, self-conscious Pan-A merican identity.
For more on this, and how other nineteenth-century Latin American novelists made simi-
lar moves, see Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 23–24.
21. See Gerassi-Navarro, Pirate Novels, for more on the ways that López and other mem-
bers of the Generación del ’37 advocated for the anglicization of Latin America.
22. “Creole” or criollo refers to t hose of Spanish ancestry who w ere born in the Ameri
cas. Creoles typically could not achieve the power and wealth in the Americas that Span-
iards born in Spain could. Ultimately, this was a major f actor in the Creole-led independence
movement at the turn of the nineteenth century. López uses María’s Creole status to set her
apart from the Spaniards and help establish a new, separate “American” identity.
23. [“The immense, opulent city now lay ruined around the hillside on which it used to
show off its grandeur, watching, so to speak, from the sadness of its tomb, the vain graces
with which Lima r ose young and flourishing just a few miles away in the same valley. Pacha-
camac had been for Peruvians as Jerusalem for the Christians and Mecca for Muslims, the
object of pilgrimages by the devout. . . . The worship of Pachacamac and Viracocha had ex-
cited all the indignation and greed of the Spanish. Hernando Pizarro came first, destroyed
the idols, sacked the temples and the houses, and caused the city to be abandoned so that
in a few years it lost its roofs and lay in ruins.”]
24. [“subjugate”]
25. [“the first nation of the world.”] The word “nación” in Spanish may equally mean
both the specific political entity “nation” and also more generally a “people.”
26. [“in peace or in war”]
27. [“in a matter of moments the two chiefs understood one another”]
28. [“be your friend”; “I see that you send arrows into the hearts of your friends, and I
open my breast to them so that they may enter.”]
29. [“exemplary generosity and integrity”]
30. [“Upon seeing him she could not contain the ‘ay!’ of admiration that the young man’s
loveliness wrenched from her. It seemed like a dream to her; and her inexpert and innocent
glances revealed more and more the dominance that this man’s beauty and gentility had over
her spirit. ‘Oh! My God! He’s Christian like us!’ ”]
31. [“an inexplicable force”; “an internal emotion more powerf ul than her will”]
32. [“was even then already becoming the famous American Babel”]
33. This heterogeneous population is one way that the novel signals that Lima represents
Latin America more broadly. As one critic puts it, La novia is “the first Spanish American his-
torical novel with a cosmopolitan setting” (Benítez-Rojo, “Spanish-A merican Novel,” 449).
34. [“the same cause!”]
35. [“The pirate, the bandit, the thief, the adventurer, the Indian, in the end all t hose
who wish to raise arms against the king of Spain, may count me among their allies; for this
reason I have served your master [Drake], who by my faith well deserves it on his merits!”]
36. [“The organization of the h ouse rested entirely on the despotism and capriciousness
of the father. The axis of domestic society was not love, which is the only moralizing ele
ment of domesticity; its forms lacked tenderness, which is nothing less than the genuine and
educational expression of this love; and all of its resources w ere concentrated in fear. . . . Let
us call on history to ratify our observations. Whosoever takes up the work of inquiring into
the domestic status of t hose countries and those epochs where great barbaric tyranny has ap-
peared, where society has been plunged into corruption, will find that the principal char-
acteristic is paternal despotism in household relations.”]
37. For more on how López presents the overlap between f amily and nation, particularly
from the point of view of how piracy intervenes in both, see Gerassi-Navarro, Pirate Novels.
38. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 7.
39. Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 31, 48.
40. [“vengeance against the oppressors of your country and your family”]
41. [“My father welcomed him into his home with an infinite goodness of heart: it was
the work of an instant to procure him the clothes of an Indian; and guarding him in our
home with inviolable secrecy was easy for us because, our race being isolated from intimate
dealings with the Spaniards, a fraternal association had been established among our mem-
bers: the affair of one was the affair of all, and there was no need for an explicit promise in
order to have this agreement. This is how our guest came to be hidden by the entire village
of the oppressed, who, even though they were weak, were dragging themselves along between
the land of their ancestors and the soles of their oppressors.”]
42. This pledge of dual belonging—both to marry an indigenous woman and to fight
for indigenous freedom from the Spanish—will recur with striking similarity in H. Rider
Haggard’s Montezuma’s Daughter (1893), discussed in the next chapter.
43. When Mercedes reveals that Padre Andrés’s d aughter is still living, she leaves it un-
clear w
hether that daughter is María, or María’s servant, Juana, both of whom are already
imprisoned under Padre Andrés’s authority. We learn for certain only at the end of the novel
that Juana was his biological daughter.
44. Hirsch, Mother/Daughter Plot, 43.
45. López is remixing history h
ere, since at this time Drake and Oxenham w ere both in the
Pacific but captaining separate expeditions. Both did raid Spanish ships, and Oxenham was
imprisoned in Lima in 1578 and executed, but it was punishment for his pirateering, not for at-
tempting to liberate American w omen from the Inquisition, as López tells it. Exploring the na-
ture of López’s historical revisions would be a fascinating pursuit, but it is beyond my scope here.
46. [“you could show me the very throne of E ngland as the price of my deed, but you
may rest assured that even then I would resist.”]
47. [“flag and . . . country.”] “Pabellón” has the dual meaning of a ship’s standard and
a national flag.
48. [“has a weakness for nobility”]
49. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 8.
52. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 47.
53. Said, World, Text, Critic.
54. See Hirsch (Mother/Daughter Plot) for more on how narratives based in patriarchal
family structures erase and exclude w omen.
55. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 144; Said, Beginnings, xiii.
56. [“a fundamentally aristocratic country”; “an injustice”]
57. Benítez-Rojo, “Spanish-A merican Novel,” 449.
58. [“worse condition”]
59. [“make a fortune in order to enjoy it as I please when I return to Spain”]
60. Benítez-Rojo, “Spanish-A merican Novel.”
61. Garrels, “Espíritu de la familia,” 14.
62. McCrea, Family and Narrative; Schaffer, Romance’s Rival.
63. Gerassi-Navarro, Pirate Novels, 170. See also Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 15.
64. López worked in various capacities for at least four Chilean periodicals, collaborat-
ing closely with Sarmiento in this work. See Molina, Como crecen los hongos, 73.
65. [“progressive”; “affection, tenderness, intimacy, and a smooth, harmonious order.”]
Garrels, “Espíritu de la familia,” 16.
66. Çelikkol, Romances of Free Trade, 19, 18.
67. See Çelikkol, Romances of Free Trade, Sommer, Foundational Fictions.
68. Çelikkol, Romances of Free Trade, 19.
69. There are ethical issues grouping Creoles together with indigenous, black, and mixed
people, since even though Creoles were below Spaniards in the social hierarchy, they had
significantly greater social advantages than these other groups, both u nder Spanish colonial
rule and a fter independence. However, López, like many other Latin American liberals,
works to craft a specifically “American” identity by separating the Spaniards from everyone
else, suggesting that anyone not born in Spain suffers u nder colonialism.
70. [“essentially American at its core, and lacking . . . in foreign styles, which so contrib-
ute to stripping away our knowledge and awareness of the societies we are part of ”]
71. [“Limeña by race, María was the ideal of the American w oman, like that En
glishwoman by race, Esther, with her golden curls draped on her swanlike neck, and with
the languid look of her sky blue eyes, is, when she passes through the ruins of Rome or the
splendid monuments of Florentine art, the ideal of the European w oman.”]
72. This novel would go on to be published u nder the title Esther (1858), though when
López was writing La novia, he had read only fragments of the as yet unfinished work.
73. [“mutual.”] Molina, Como crecen los hongos.
74. [“[he] is a Creole pur sang, in his vivacity, in his frankness, his self-confidence, and
a certain refinement of bearing and soul, which I do not find in the pure Spaniard, though
I am of course biased, since I have a Creole rib.”] Emphasis in the original.
75. [“In the accounts of the earthquake, the unprec edented audacity of the heretics
emerged as the headline.”]
77. Wilson, Elizabethans, 184.
78. Lane, Pillaging the Empire, 41 (emphasis mine).
79. Anderson-Imbert, Spanish-American Literature, 232. Gerassi-Navarro argues that
some nineteenth-c entury Latin American writers portrayed the pirate in this way, while
others focused on the terror of his lawlessness, and she suggests that that t hese divergent
representations highlight the uncertain work of postcolonial nation-building (Pirate
Novels, 4).
80. Gerassi-Navarro, Pirate Novels, 84, 83.
81. See López, La novia del hereje, 30, 77.
82. [“the habit of being received, and imposing himself, in the most important houses”]
83. [“a position without rival, which put the intimacy of the families at his disposal”]
84. [“is today the only one with the flag of war raised [against Spain] a fter all others have
fallen”]
85. [“as saviors”]
86. [“God has brought you, Milord!”]
87. [“in this muzzle.”] Emphasis in the original.
88. For more on the way that the novel’s ending in E ngland both expands the bound
aries of American family and invites a problematic loss of American identity, see Gerassi-
Navarro, Pirate Novels, 78, 152.
89. [“the innovations that shook the Christian world and prepared the new features of
our current civilization”]
90. [“contrast of two ideological, cultural, and economic poles . . . the backwardness of
the rigid Spanish colonial monopoly, and free trade liberalism as a symptom of progress.”]
Ianes, “Arquetipo narrativo,” 164.
91. [“enormous feats . . . g lorious steps for humanity on the path to civilization and
knowledge of the globe”]
92. According to Lukács, famous or “world-historical figures” like Drake appear as mi-
nor characters in the historical novel, where they “render visible the generally progressive
features of the whole of society, of the w hole age” (Historical Novel, 47).
93. [“spreading well-being and wealth along their route”]
94. Heinowitz, Spanish America.
Chapter 5 • H. Rider Haggard and the Antagonism of Valid Fiancées
1. Aguirre, Informal Empire, 146.

2. [“ingeniously employs the history of the conquest of Mexico in order to proclaim the
greatness of the British Empire.”] Anaya Ferreira, “Hijos de Moctezuma,” 52.
3. Ramirez, British Representations, 2, 48.
4. See Aguirre, Informal Empire, 140.
5. Haggard, Montezuma’s Daughter. Hereafter parenthetical citations.
6. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 187–188. On this topic, see also de Groot, Historical
Novel; Hanson, “Lost among White O thers”; Sanders, Victorian Historical Novel.
7. McClintock, Imperial Leather.
9. See, for example, Anaya Ferreira, “Hijos de Moctezuma”; Franey, Victorian Travel
Writing; Katz, Rider Haggard.
10. Snodgrass, Encyclopedia, 128.
11. Ramirez, British Representations, 48; Aguirre, Informal Empire, 139.
12. Cardoso and Faletto, Dependency and Development.
14. Haggard, Days of My Life, 40.
16. Haggard, Days of My Life, 39–40. Emphasis in the original.
18. Though I do not have space in this chapter to discuss it, Haggard’s Peru novel, Vir
gin of the Sun, bears out t hese arguments in similar ways.
20. Haggard, Allan Quatermain, 22, 176.
21. Hanson, “Lost among White O thers,” 507.
23. Forman, “When Britons Brave Brazil,” 462–463.
24. Heinowitz, Spanish America, 15. See also Fulford, “British Romantics.”
25. This makes him a striking parallel to Padre Andrés in López’s La novia del hereje, who
likewise allies strategically with the cause of indigenous sovereignty only a fter the fallout of
a personal fight. Both novels link this dynamic to imperialism (see discussion of pragmatic
familial form in the previous chapter). Padre Andrés, of course, remains unreformed.
26. [“even though he appears to assimilate entirely into Aztec society, at his core he never
integrates, forever retaining his Christian faith, his gentleman’s conduct and his innate pu-
ritan moral virtues, ‘qualities’ that in the final instance make him superior to the indige-
nous.”] Anaya Ferreira, “Hijos de Moctezuma,” 54.
27. Haggard, Allan Quatermain, 250.
28. Haggard, Allan Quatermain, 213. A similar subordination occurs between Good and
the Kukuana woman Foulata in King Solomon’s Mines. Though they do not marry—Foulata
is killed before that possibility can arise—the young woman asserts her willing subordina-
tion to Good’s desires, saying “whither thou goest, there will I go also” (Haggard, King Solo
mon’s Mines, 261).
29. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man.”

30. May, Disorderly Sisters, 38–39.
31. By “politico-family,” I mean the dense structural overlap between individual fami-
lies and the various familial forms marshalled in service of national identity. I define this
term in chapter 4, and a more detailed discussion of it can be found t here.
32. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion. See especially chapter 6.
33. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 181–182.
35. Gandhi, Affective Communities, 29, quoting Marios Constantinou.
36. McCrea, Family and Narrative, 7–9.
41. McCrea, Family and Narrative, 7.
46. Haggard, Heart of the World, 1. Hereafter parenthetical citations.
47. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 187–188.
49. Hanson, “Lost among White O thers,” 521.
50. Fulford, “British Romantics,” 249.
51. Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, 241.
Chapter 6 • Where Progress and F

amily (Almost) Meet
1. Shelley, Frankenstein, 99.

2. Collins, Woman in White, 198.
3. Other authors continued to use South America as a blank offstage site. For instance,
Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) sends Angel Clare to Brazil to experience
nondescript hardships and return changed, in much the same way Collins dispatches Wal-
ter Hartright to Honduras in The Woman in White.
4. Hampsten, “Revisiting,” 92.
5. Esty, Shrinking Island, 122.
6. One doubts w hether Hudson, no g reat admirer of the wealthy, would be pleased to
know that the town of Guillermo Hudson features a gated community named a fter his
family’s ranch and walled off from the surrounding, much poorer community.
7. Ford, Thus to Revisit, 69.
8. Borges, “Sobre The Purple Land,” 211.
9. [“true creators of the g reat Argentine literature”; “compass.”] Martínez Estrada,
Mundo Maravilloso, 160, 159.
10. Hudson, Far Away, 313.
11. Hudson to Lady Grogan, November 5, 1910, Unpublished Letters, vol. 2, 444.

12. Maxwell and Trumpener, “Romance of the Outlands,” 107.
13. On empire: “[The] cry should be ‘hands off,’ in Ireland as well as in Asia and Africa”
(Hudson to Garnett, January 21, 1912, 153 Letters, 108). On the rich: “The Philanderers,” he
writes to Garnett, “is all about p eople of the class which I detest more e very day—the up-
per class—the p eople who devote their time and talents to their own selfish enjoyment—
motorists, golfers, sportsmen” (Hudson to Garnett, August 19, 1908, 153 Letters, 96). On prog
ress: see various quotes in the remainder of this chapter.
14. Maxwell and Trumpener, “Romance of the Outlands,” 107; Huberman, Gauchos and
Foreigners, 38.
15. [“that appears gaucho but is written in English”; “prodigal son, the most creole of the
writers born on the shores of La Plata, British but also man of our plains, true appreciator
of the pampas, English writer, gaucho devoid of any purely external ornaments and acces-
sories, Anglo-A rgentine, autodidact, contemplative nomad, romantic interpreter of the new
world, Englishman from Chascomús and man of universal science, inveterate traveler, first
Argentine reader of The Origin of Species, established romantic, fallow field of Nordic vines
irrigated with water from the pampas.”] Fernández, “Pampa de memoria,” np.
16. [“deep down as much Argentine as British.”] Hazelton, “Otras lenguas,” 169.
17. Hudson, Far Away, 272 (emphasis mine).
18. Huberman, Gauchos and Foreigners, 53.
19. Amaral, Capitalism on the Pampas, 227–229.
20. Zepeda, “Argentina,” 102.
21. Beckman, “Global Capitalism,” 541, 545.
22. White, Middle Ground.
23. Campbell, Rhizomatic West.
25. Hudson, Far Away, 151–153.
26. Franco, “Not-So-Romantic Journey”; Pratt, Imperial Eyes.
27. Brown, “Not-So-Imperial Eyes,” 98–99. For more on British soldiers in Bolívar’s
armies, see Hampsten, “Revisiting,” 94; Waddell, “British Neutrality.” For more on Brown’s
claims about the region’s British migrants, see Brown, Adventuring.
28. Walker, “Home Thoughts,” 338.
29. Hudson to Lady Grogan, November 5, 1910, Unpublished Letters, vol. 2, 444.
34. For more on this history, see Young, Colonial Desire.
35. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders.”
37. Bakhtin, Dostoevsky’s Poetics.
38. Hudson, Far Away, 251–252.
39. Hudson, Far Away, 252. It is important to note that “native” for Hudson means Cre-
ole, a problematic erasure of indigenous status made possible by postcolonial independence.
40. I read and cite the 1885 version of the novel, which differs from the 1904 version only
in having a longer title and an additional prefatory chapter.
41. Hudson, Purple Land, I.22. The book is divided into two volumes. Hereafter paren-
thetical citations.
42. [“happy Creolization.”] Borges, “Sobre The Purple Land,” 210.
43. Landau, “Decolonising Travel,” 28, 44.
44. Almeida, Reimagining the Transatlantic, 223. This echoes Gandhi’s more general ar-
gument that the hybrid colonial subject is not an agent of resistance but rather a privileged,
desiring accessory to global capitalism (Affective Communities).
45. Hudson to Phillips, July 7, 1902, Landscapes and Literati, 122.
46. Bhabha, “Narrating the Nation”; White, Content of the Form.
48. Hudson to Hubbard, February 8, 1905, Unpublished Letters, vol. 1, 384.
49. Hudson himself figures a difference in English and South American historical
narratives. Within the narrative of British literary history he fits into a particularly fin-de-
siècle world-weariness, a skepticism of progress, and a modernist fear that the best of na-
ture and man had gone from the world. But in the land of his birth Hudson exemplifies
costumbrismo and gauchesque literature and stands as a forerunner of the emergent Ar-
gentine national style—in that story, he faces toward the f uture, not the past. The same
man with the same body of work helps produce two entirely differently formed narratives
of history.
50. Hudson, Green Mansions, 101, 220–221.
51. Landau, “Decolonising Travel,” 37.
52. Landau, “Decolonising Travel,” 44.
53. Hazelton, “Otras lenguas.”
54. [“Everyt hing tends to come apart, to fragment, to dissolve.”] Martínez Estrada,
Mundo Maravilloso, 221.
55. Bakhtin, Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 79–80.
57. Hudson to Graham, November 2, 1915, W. H. Hudson’s Letters, 97.
58. Hudson, Far Away, 224, 11.
59. Hudson to Garnett, July 2, 1919, 153 Letters, 168.
60. Schmitt, Memory of the H uman, 135.
64. Conrad to Graham, June 2, 1911, Collected Letters, vol. 4, 447.
65. Ford, Thus to Revisit, 69–70.
66. Hudson to Graham, January 26, 1906, W. H. Hudson’s Letters, 89.
68. Conrad to J. M. Dent & Sons, September 12, 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 7, 519.
69. Conrad to Graham, August 25, 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 7, 514.
70. Ford, Thus to Revisit, 72.
71. Hudson to Hubbard, November 3, 1904, Unpublished Letters, vol. 1, 367.
72. Hudson to Hubbard, November 3, 1904, Unpublished Letters, vol. 1, 367; Hudson to

Gissing, November 10, 1904, Landscapes and Literati, 65.
73. Hudson to Curle, June 7, 1914, Unpublished Letters, vol. 2, 493.
74. Hudson to Garnett, June 12, 1915, 153 Letters, 130.
75. E. M. Forster, although he praised Woolf’s The Voyage Out overall, agreed with Hud-
son that its setting was particularly nondescript, calling it “a South America not found on
any map” (Forster, “Novels,” 277). It is perhaps relevant to Hudson’s frustration that neither
Conrad nor Woolf wrote from personal experience of South America.
76. Hudson to Baird, May 20, 1867, Unpublished Letters, vol. 1, 7; Hudson to Baird, Au-
gust 5, 1869, Unpublished Letters, vol. 1, 15.
77. Hudson, Unpublished Letters, vol. 1, 25.
78. Hudson to the Ranee of Sarawak, March 13, 1916, Unpublished Letters, vol. 2,
532–533.
79. Respectively: Hudson to Garnett, June 2, 1920, 153 Letters, 179; Hudson to Phillips,
March 10, 1901, Unpublished Letters, vol. 1, 210; Hudson to the Ranee of Sarawak, 1919; Hud-
son, Unpublished Letters, vol. 2, 651.
80. Hudson to Hating, January 2, 1917, Unpublished Letters, vol. 2, 567.
81. Ford, Thus to Revisit, 76–77.
Coda
1. Barthes, “Great F
amily of Man.”
2. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion.
3. As Adelman puts it: “The commercial interests that motivated the recognition of state
power in South America at the end of the cycle of Atlantic revolutions changed the historic
relationship between interests and institutions that once dovetailed under empire. . . . There-
after, the relations between capital and public power, private interests and public institu-
tions, had to be negotiated on different terms” (Sovereignty and Revolution, 349).
4. A number of critics describe it this way. John Lynch, for instance, writes that in the
years leading up to the Spanish-A merican revolutions, “British policy towards Spanish
America was diffident in its approach and vague in its intent,” and he characterizes British
activity in Latin America as “improvisation” (“British Policy,” 1, 21). Matthew Brown argues
that “British enterprise in northern South America [at the turn of the nineteenth c entury]
was generally informal, short-termist, improvised and reliant upon pre-existing networks.”
(Adventuring, 17). On how this dynamic continued into the Victorian period, see Darwin,
“Imperialism and the Victorians,” 617–620; and Aguirre, Informal Empire, xvii.
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I n de x
acceleration: of progress, 39; and temporality, Bakhtin, Mikhail: on hybridity, 203–4,

37, 39–40, 98 218
accumulation: and development projects, 111, Bann, Stephen: on history becoming
115; and temporality, 95, 103–7, 117, 244n30; self-conscious, 37
treadmill of, 43, 96, 103–4, 112 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 10, 91, 93, 229; and
Adelman, Jeremy: on quest for sovereignty, Columbus, 242n36; Eighteen Hundred and
45, 256n3 Eleven, 2, 11, 24, 26, 28, 33, 67–90,
affordance, 23–24, 27–28, 153; vs. deterrence, 240n12, 241n22; on informal empire, 68,
27, 55, 81–82 161; and prog ress narrative, 32, 43, 96,
Aguirre, Robert, 4; on informal empire, 20; 117–18, 194, 225. See also Eighteen
on Montezuma’s Daughter, 165, 167 Hundred and Eleven
Ahmed, Sara: on love and exclusion, 183; on Barrell, John: on eighteenth-century long
underpinnings of twenty-first-century poems, 22
white nationalist ideologies, 228 Barthes, Roland: on 1950 “The F amily of
Alberdi, Juan Bautista: on Anglo-Argentine Man” photo exhibition, 228
marriage, 135, 152; and Generación del ’37, 133 Beckert, Jens: on past data u nder capitalism,
Alborn, Timothy: on Victorian financial 243n25
crises and the novel, 95 Beckman, Ericka: on Colombia, 200;
allegory, 144, 247n37; as way to describe on Latin American literature and
national family, 123–24, 129, 132 capitalism, 28; on (non-)independence
Almeida, Joselyn: on “monolingual transat- of new nations, 10
lanticism,” 32; on The Purple Land, 208–9 Bello, Andrés: on Latin American freedom, 49
altruism: and commercialism, 49–53 Benitez-Rojo, Antonio: on mutual benefit in
Amaru, Túpac, 138 La novia del hereje, 150
Anaya Ferreira, Nair María: on Montezuma’s Bentham, Jeremy: and Mexico, 3
Daughter, 165, 176 Bethell, Leslie: on “the British century,” 1, 7
Anderson, Benedict: on concept of national- Bhabha, Homi: on colonizers and hybridity,
ism, 3, 65, 129–30 203–4, 216; on mimicry, 180; on national-
antagonism: as inherent to informal empire, ism and narrative form, 23, 210
31, 51, 192; in marital plot of Montezuma’s Bigelow, Gordon: on The Macdermots of
Daughter, 180–89 Ballycloran, 245n50
Arendt, Hannah: on nation-a s-family trope, binary model of informal empire, 11–12, 29.
120; on progress, 236n14; on tyranny and See also dialectical model of informal
terror, 127 empire; surface/depth model of informal
Auchmuty, General Samuel, 205 empire
272 Index
Birns, Nicholas: on Britain’s cultural civilizing mission, 51, 96, 108–10, 114, 118, 121,
imperialism, 78; on Eighteen Hundred and 220; sequence problem of, 40–41
Eleven, 70 Collier, Simon: on Bolívar, 242n33
Black, John: as translator of Humboldt’s Columbus, Christopher, 79, 82–83, 125,
writing, 20 242n36
Bolívar, Simón, 1–3, 10–11, 18, 26, 29, 31–33, Congress of Panama, 48–49, 60–62, 64
45–67, 87–91, 93, 148–49, 161, 229; and Conrad, Joseph: and Hudson, 196, 221–23;
ancient Rome, 45, 53, 236n2; and duality, Nostromo, 17–20, 24, 27–28, 84, 93, 221–23
49–53; and the Enlightenment, 47, 56, Cortés, Hernando: as invoked in Montezu
242n33; Jamaica Letter, 50–53, 55, 58–59, ma’s Daughter, 170
88, 237n20, 238n21, 242n36; and progress Crocco, Francesco: on Britain’s cultural
narrative, 32, 43, 45–67, 87–90, 96, 110, imperialism, 78
117–18, 159, 194, 225; relations with British, Cullen, Henry: and Bolívar’s Jamaica
2–3, 46–49, 62–63, 79–81, 191–92, 239n69; Letter, 50
and United States, 237n14; and “Universal cultural imperialism, 78–80
Equilibrium,” 60, 63, 88, 238n21. See also
Congress of Panama Darwinism, 119–21, 199, 254n15
Borges, Jorge Luis: on The Purple Land, 196, Davidson, J. H.: on Trollope’s rejection of
208–9, 214 “so-called colonies,” 97
Brennan, Timothy: on concept of national- Derrida, Jacques: on expression of nation in
ism, 3, 129–30 familial terms, 120; on filiation in politics,
Brown, Matthew: on British travelers to 183; on friendship relations, 127, 162,
South America, 11, 201–2, 207; on nations 183–84
as consequence of wars of independence, 58 dialectical model of informal empire, 12–13,
Burke, Edmund: on East India Company, 8; 29, 169, 183, 218. See also binary model of
on liberty as generational inheritance, 120 informal empire; surface/depth model of
Burns, E. Bradford: on Latin American informal empire
elites, 7 Díaz, Bernal: as invoked in Montezuma’s
Byron, Lord: and Venezuela, 3 Daughter, 176, 178
Bystrom, Kerry: on relation, 246n23 Drake, Francis: and Cacafuego, 139, 156;
invoked in La novia del hereje, 139–42,
Cané, Miguel, 155 147–52, 155–61, 249n45
Canning, George: on informal empire, 2–3,
10–11, 79, 81, 161 East India Company, 8
capitalism: and colonialism, 108–9; and end Echeverría, Esteban: and Generación del ’37,
of history, 244n36; and progress, 114; and 133
temporality, 103–4, 107, 244n30 Egaña, Mariano: and ties between sover-
Carr, David: on nationalism and narrative eignty and f ree trade, 6
form, 23, 87; on scalar levels of historical Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (Barbauld), 2,
narrative, 72 11, 24, 26, 28, 33, 67–90, 240n12, 241n22;
Castlereagh, British Foreign Secretary: and anaphora in, 28, 74
Bolívar, 49 Eliot, George: on choice between family and
Çelikkol, Ayşe: on British fears about f ree citizenship in Antigone, 181; tension in
trade, 5, 153 novels of, 31
Chakrabarty, Dipesh: on progress narrative, Esty, Jed: on Bildungsroman, 19; on temporal
28, 40; on “waiting room of history,” 49, paradox of empire, 41; on Tolkien and
149 Eliot, 196
Chasteen, John: on Bolívar, 242n33 evolution. See Darwinism
Index 273
Ewell, Judith: on Bolívar’s failure to see Latin Gallagher, Catherine: on Russian Formalists
America join international community, 63; vs. structuralists, 28
on Great Britain as logical ally for Spanish Gallagher, John: on informal empire, 7, 9, 11,
America, 50 57, 193, 232n14, 244n42
Galsworthy, John: and Hudson, 196
Fabian, Johannes: on temporal relativity in Gandhi, Leela: on critique of imperial
western intellectual tradition, 40 thought, 16; on friendship relations, 127,
family, 14–16, 118–226; vs. citizenship, 181; 162–63, 184; on hybridity, 127, 203
“Family of Man,” 118, 121–28, 144, 148–49, Garnett, Edward: and Hudson, 222
161–62, 166, 171, 180, 187, 228; and Gellner, Ernest: on nationalism and narrative
historical novels, 137, 194; and history, 134, form, 23
137, 174; and informal empire, 118–226; and genealogical consciousness, 14–16, 25, 119,
national stability, 152; nations as, 24, 57, 121–22, 124, 134, 137, 172, 184, 194. See also
110, 120–29, 149, 193; politico-family, family
144–53, 157, 162, 181, 253n31; and power, Generación del ’37, 133–35
126–27, 144; and temporality, 122, 126. generation, 124–26, 128; and Montezuma’s
See also genealogical consciousness; Green Daughter, 184–89. See also family
Mansions; La novia del hereje; Montezuma’s Gerassi-Navarro, Nina: on La novia del
Daughter; Purple Land, The hereje, 151–52, 157, 163
Favretti, Maggie: on Eighteen Hundred and Glissant, Édouard: on filiation (“root
Eleven’s condemnation of Britain’s trade identity”), 126, 149–50
policies, 68 Goodlad, Lauren: on Trollop’s views of the
Fernández, Laura: on Hudson’s hybridity, English, 98, 101
198–99 Gottlieb, Evan: on subversive logic of
Ford, Ford Madox: and Hudson, 196, 222, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, 84
224–25 Graham, R. B. Cunninghame: and Hudson,
formalism, 20–25, 29–31, 40, 81 220, 222
Forman, Ross: on isolation and British Green Mansions (Hudson), 214–15
Empire, 173 Guest, Harriet: on eighteenth-century long
Forster, E. M.: on The Voyage Out, 256n75 poems, 22
Franco, Jean: on British travelers to South
America, 11, 201, 218 Haggard, H. Rider, 16, 32–33, 130–31, 165–94,
Frankenstein (Shelley), and South America, 209, 225; Allan Quatermain, 166, 172,
20, 195 179–80, 185–86, 188, 227; The Days of My
freedom: and commerce, 49–50; as finan- Life, 169; and empire, 166; on family and
cially valuable, 238n37; as generational national belonging, 26–27; Heart of the
inheritance (Burke), 120; Latin America as World, 165, 167, 170–71, 186, 189–94; King
symbol of, 2, 9–10, 42, 77, 93; and Solomon’s Mines, 166–67, 172, 185–88, 191;
unfreedom, 2–3, 10–14, 29–30, 46, 53–55, Montezuma’s Daughter, 165–94; and
82, 89, 93, 128, 130 origins, 172, 185; She, 166; titles of, 188. See
free trade, 229; duality of, 53; and informal also Montezuma’s Daughter
empire, 5–9, 29, 42–43, 64, 89; and Hahner, June: on British travelers to South
national identity, 153 America, 11
French, Jennifer: on literature, language, and Haraway, Donna: on “oddkin,” 30, 127
politics, 28 Hartog, François: on “regimes of historic-
frontier, the, 200 ity,” 36
Fulford, Tim: on colonial guilt in Romantic Hazelton, Hugh: on Hudson’s hybridity, 199;
writings, 234n60; on informal empire, 193 on The Purple Land, 217–18
274 Index
Heinowitz, Rebecca Cole, 4; on Eighteen Ianes, Raúl: on López’s desire to emulate

Hundred and Eleven, 84; on freedom vs. Walter Scott, 136
domination, 29–30, 161–62; on Romantic independence. See freedom
texts of informal empire, 12–13, 20, 120, informal empire: material and economic
148, 175, 193 history of, 4–9, 62, 89, 93–94, 169,
Hensley, Nathan K.: on “cycles of anti- 199–200; models of, 11–13, 29, 148, 169,
teleological historical motion,” 19; on 175–83, 193–94, 218, 245n48
paradox of violence and peace, 14
Hirsch, Marianne: on patriarchal figures in Jamaica Letter (Bolívar), 50–53, 55, 58–59, 88,
western novels, 147 237n20, 238n21, 242n36
historical consciousness, 14–16, 25, 36–37, Jameson, Fredric: on allegorizing national
42–43, 45, 58, 71, 119, 122, 124, 134, 137, 172, destinies in “third-world literature,” 132
184, 194. See also history Jebb, J. Gladwyn: and nobility of failure
history: and America (Van), 116; as anti- (according to Haggard), 169–71, 190
progressive, 114–17; and capitalism, 104,
107; as created (López), 136; as cyclical, 36, Kaul, Suvir: on Eighteen Hundred and Eleven,
39, 69, 71, 75–77, 80–86; and Eighteen 82; on political criticism, 21
Hundred and Eleven, 69–90, 240n12; end Kornbluh, Anna: on financial transactions as
of, 36, 39, 244n36; erasure of, 174, 184; proleptic, 105; on form in novels, 26,
and family, 134, 137, 174; metahistory, 235n96; on The Way We Live Now, 100, 105
85–87; as progress, 35–37, 39–40, 54, 95–98; Koselleck, Reinhart: on “events” vs.
protagonist of, 15, 23, 32, 41–43, 58–60, 69, “structures,” 85; on narrative and notion of
72–79, 89, 96, 111–12, 115, 117. See also republic, 23; on present u nder industrial
historical consciousness modernity, 243n25; on progress and
Hobsbawm, Eric: on “invention of tradition,” history, 37
58; on past as genealogy, 122; on utopia and
progress, 39 Lancaster, Joseph: and Bolívar, 48
Huberman, Ariana: on Hudson’s hybridity in Landau, Aaron: on The Purple Land, 208–9,
Far Away and Long Ago, 199 217
Hudson, William Henry, 26, 33, 131, 195–226, Lane, Kris: on the English’s pragmatic
254n15; and birds, 131, 196, 199, 202, 208, relationship with Americans, 157
214, 219–20, 223, 254n13, 254n15, 255n49; La novia del hereje (López), 24, 133–64,
and Conrad, 196, 221–23; Far Away and 171–72; and English pirates, 157–59; and
Long Ago, 199, 201–2, 210, 214, 219–21; family, 24, 137; and hybridity, 137, 154–57;
Green Mansions, 214–15; and hybridity, 131, and marriage, 144–54; and origin, 137–43;
197–220, 226; on A Little Boy Lost, 213; and and paradox, 156–61; and relation, 137,
progress, 219–21; The Purple Land, 131, 143–54; and strangers, 151
195–226; and racism, 221; and Woolf, La Plata, British invasion of, 2, 70, 83; in The
222–23 Purple Land, 196, 205
Humboldt, Alexander von, 20 Levine, Caroline: and “collision,” 27; on form
hybridity, 124–25, 127–28, 131; vs. amalgama- and affordance, 23, 81; on “the forms of the
tion, 216–18; and choice, 204; and Hudson, content,” 28
131, 197–220; and La novia del hereje, 137, Locke, John: on f amily as “the very model for
154–57; and Montezuma’s Daughter, 175–80. civic governance,” 120
See also family López, Vicente Fidel, 16, 26, 32–33, 130–64,
Hyslop, Maxwell: correspondence with 193–94, 209, 223, 225, 227; in Chile, 152,
Bolívar, 59, 61–62 247n2; and historical novels, 135–37, 194,
Index 275
248n20; and history, 134–37, 194; La novia Meléndez, Mariselle: on paradoxes in

del hereje, 24, 133–64, 171–72; on marriage nineteenth-century Latin American
(and choice), 152; and Walter Scott, 136. essay, 53
See also La novia del hereje Mellor, Anne: on Eighteen Hundred and
Lukács, Georg: on Scott’s work, 243n16, Eleven’s condemnation of Britain’s trade
248n18; on “world-historical figures” in policies, 68
historical novels, 251n92 Mill, James: on informal empire, 2–3, 11, 52,
Lynch, Benito: El inglés de los güesos, 28 70, 79, 82, 161
Lynch, John: on Bolívar’s interest in ancient Mill, John Stuart: on progress, 15, 18
history, 53; on Jamaica Letter, 237n20 mimicry, 180
Lynn, Martin: on term “informal empire,” mining, 62, 83–84, 165–66, 168, 189–90; and
233n43 British leverage over Latin America, 6;
Haggard on, 169–70, 192
Mansfield Park (Austen), nation and f amily Miranda, Francisco de: and Britain, 47–49;
in, 124 view of Atlantic world, 60
María (Isaacs), 200 Mitre, Bartolomé: and Generación del ’37,
Mármol, José: and Generación del ’37, 133 133; and history, 134
marriage, 246n30; and economics, 152; as Monteagudo, Bernardo de: correspondence
exploitative, 150, 188; in La novia del hereje, with Bolívar, 55
144–54; and national belonging, 174–75, Montezuma’s Daughter (Haggard),
181–82; relation between Latin America 165–94; and generation, 184–89; and
and Britain as one of, 128, 188, 227. See also hybridity, 175–80; and oaths, 174–78,
family 182–83; and origin, 172–75; and relation,
Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel: on Hudson, 196, 184–89
218 Montezuma’s treasure: Haggard’s interrupted
Marx, Karl: on “endless accumulation of search for, 171; in Heart of the World,
capital,” 244n30; on progress, 65 190–92; in Montezuma’s Daughter, 165–66,
Marxism, 21–23 168, 177, 188
Maxwell, Richard: on Hudson, 196 Morgan, Monique: on meta-awareness of
May, Leila: on choice between family and structure in nineteenth-century narrative
citizenship in Antigone, 181 poems, 85
McClintock, Anne: on “Family of Man,” 121, Mörner, Magnus: on British travelers to
144, 161, 166; on fantasy of colonial South America, 11
discovery, 125; on Haggard’s Africa novels, Mufti, Nasser: on Nostromo, 17
166–67, 185; on Haggard’s preoccupation
with origins, 172; on Haggard’s views on Napoleonic Wars: as catalyst for the British
mining capitalists, 170; on “the white invasion of La Plata, 2; in Eighteen
economic order of mining capital,” 168, Hundred and Eleven, 67, 84; and Latin
189. See also family: “Family of Man” American independence, 47, 51
McCrea, Barry: on adding stranger to f amily nation: as constructed, 85–86; and f amily,
structure, 151; on nineteenth-century 120–36, 143–54, 175; and novels, 134.
novel’s relationship with f amily form, 129, See also family: nations as; national
185, 187 identity; nationalism
Mehta, Uday Singh: on imperial narratives, national identity: blurring of, 59–60, 248n20;
38, 84, 101; on progress’s relentless crafting of, 58–59, 149; and f ree trade, 153;
teleology, 28; on sequence problem of and marriage, 174–75, 181–82. See also
civilizing mission, 40–41 nation; nationalism
276 Index
nationalism, 3, 65, 74–75, 80–81, 239n53; as Queen Elizabeth I: invoked in Montezuma’s

authored concept, 23. See also nation; Daughter, 165–71, 188, 191
national identity Queen Victoria: as imperial “mother,”
New Criticism, 21 246n20; invoked in Heart of the World, 191
Nkrumah, Kwame: on neocolonialism and
economic imperialism, 12, 193, 232n14 Racine, Karen: on strange bedfellows
Nostromo (Conrad), 17–20, 24, 27–28, 84, 93, produced by idea of Latin American
221–23 independence, 50
racism, 121; and Hudson, 221; and Trollope,
oaths: and honor (in Montezuma’s Daughter), 96, 115
176–78, 182–83; and rebirth (in Montezu Ramirez, Luz Elena: on Heart of the World,
ma’s Daughter), 174–75 167; on Montezuma’s Daughter, 165
origin, 124–26, 128; and La novia del hereje, relation, 124–28, 131, 246n23; and La novia
137–43; and Montezuma’s Daughter, 172–75. del hereje, 137, 143–54; and Montezuma’s
See also family Daughter, 184–89. See also family
Oxenham, John: invoked in La novia del Revenga, José Rafael: correspondence with
hereje, 147–48, 152, 156–57, 249n45 Bolívar, 54–55, 61
Rivas Rojas, Raquel: on Bolívar’s Jamaica
Panama Congress, 48–49, 60–62, 64 Letter, 58–59
paternalism, 15, 56, 120–24, 128, 130–31, 138, Robinson, Ronald: on informal empire, 7, 9,
143–53, 161, 209 11, 57, 193, 232n14, 244n42
Pizarro, Gonzalo: invoked in La novia del Roosevelt, Theodore: and Hudson, 224
hereje, 156 Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 133–34, 135, 223–24
Porter, Bernard: on The Way We Live Now Russian Formalism, 21, 28
and empire, 108
Postone, Moishe: on “treadmill effect,” 103–4 Said, Edward: on filiation, 149–50, 162; on
power, 29–33, 230; economizing of, 57; and Nostromo, 19; on quest tale genre as
family, 126–27, 144 inherently imperial, 166, 192
Pratt, Mary Louise: on British travelers to Santander, Francisco de Paula: correspon-
South America, 11, 201; on “imperial eyes,” dence with Bolívar, 63–64
11, 224 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino: Facundo, 136;
presentism, 230 and Generación del ’37, 133; on historical
progress, 14–16, 18, 119, 229; acceleration of, novels, 135–36; on marriage and choice, 152;
39; and capitalism, 114; in Eighteen and Walter Scott, 136
Hundred and Eleven, 76–77; and freedom, Sartre, Jean-Paul: on neocolonialism and
15; and Generación del ’37, 133, 135; history economic imperialism, 12–13
as, 35–37, 40, 54, 95–98; and Hudson, Schaffer, Talia: on adding stranger to f amily
219–21; and informal empire, 35–118; and structure, 151; on spousal relations within
La novia del hereje, 160–61; Latin America Britain, 127
as signifying, 42; protagonist of, 15, 23, 32, Schmitt, Cannon: on Hudson, 220–21; on
41–43, 58–60, 69, 72–79, 89, 96, 111–12, 115, portrayal of Latin America in British
117; reversed, 111, 115, 220; and sequence, literature, 20
53–61, 80–85; and temporality, 38–43, Schwarz, Roberto: on “aesthetic formalization”
104–6, 113; and utopia, 39, 65; as zero-sum, of contradictions in social experience, 22
80, 82, 88 Scott, Walter, 136, 243n16, 248n18
Purple Land, The (Hudson), 131, 195–226; Seeley, J. R.: on colonies, 245n45
British settlers in, 205–7; magical realism Sewell, William H., Jr.: on capitalism, 103,
in, 214; storytelling in, 209–19 244n30
Index 277
Shalev, Eran: on Britain’s toleration of its translatio imperii, 76, 88–89

imperial nature, 84 Trollope, Anthony, 16, 26, 91–118, 169, 229;
Shand, Alexander Innes: on boom of An Autobiography, 94, 101; on capitalism,
English-led rail projects, 109 245n50; on empire, 96–97, 109–10, 123, 193;
Smith, Charlotte: tension in sonnets of, 31 and F amily of Man, 123; The Macdermots of
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen: on Haggard as Ballycloran, 245n50; on progress, 41, 43,
canonical imperial author, 167 109–115, 117; The Prime Minister, 91–92, 95,
Sommer, Doris: on “national novels,” 134; on 101, 111, 243n23; and racism, 96, 115; The
“national romances,” 129, 131, 144 Way We Live Now, 33, 43, 91, 94–119, 195,
Southey, Robert: on England as “mad” about 227–28; The West Indies and the Spanish
South America, 1 Main, 95, 109–115. See also Way We Live
Spanish Conquest: in British literature, 20, Now, The
69, 234n72; in La novia del hereje, 138–40, truth, and narrative, 209–19
142–43; and Latin American postcolonial
identity, 58; in Montezuma’s Daughter, 170, Van, Annette: on America as a temporal
173–74, 176 paradox, 116
speculation, financial, 93–95, 102, 105–7; and
development, 115; and temporality, 113, 116 Waddell, D. A. G.: on British soldiers and
Steer, Philip: on “cycles of anti-teleological informal empire, 11
historical motion,” 19 Walker, John: on Hudson as “sympathetic
Stoler, Ann: on “the affective grid of colonial observer,” 202, 224
politics,” 144 Way We Live Now, The (Trollope), 33, 43, 91,
structuralism, 21, 25, 28 94–119, 195, 227–28; silence (as statement)
surface/depth model of informal empire, in, 107; temporality in, 95, 97–108, 113
12–13, 29, 148, 175–83, 193–94, 245n48. Wellesley, Marquis of, 47–51, 88
See also binary model of informal empire; White, Hayden, 28; on “events” vs.
dialectical model of informal empire “structures,” 85; on history, 23, 37, 58, 77;
“narrative center,” 71–72, 77; on nationalist
telos, 39–40, 44, 69, 77–80, 84, 210–21; implications of storytelling, 210
collapse of, 91–118 Whitelocke, General John, 205
Thompson, Andrew: on informal empire as a Wilberforce, William: and Bolívar, 48
continuum, 8 Woman in White, The (Collins): and Latin
time/temporality: and acceleration, 37, America, 20, 195
39–40, 98; and accumulation, 95, 103–7, Wood, Ellen Meiskins: on idea(s) of progress,
117, 244n30; and America, 116; and 113–14
capitalism, 103–4, 107; and empire, 41; and Woolf, Virginia: The Voyage Out, 221–23,
family, 122, 126; as perpetual present, 38, 256n75
103–4; and progress, 38–43, 104–6, 113; and
rootlessness, 100–101; and speculation, 113, Yeats, William Butler: on history, 39
116; in The Way We Live Now, 95, 97–108,
113 zero-sum: belonging as, 174; history as, 88;
Tobin, Patricia: on “the genealogical imperialism as, 140; love/marriage as,
imperative,” 122 180–83; progress as, 80, 82, 88; power as, 88

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The Forms of Informal Empire

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Johns Hopkins University Press

Johns Hopkins University Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Reeder, Jessie, 1982– author.

Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials,

Introduction. Freedom and Empire in the Nineteenth ­Century 1

part i Pro­g ress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875:

part ii ­Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926:

I was on an overnight bus somewhere in Patagonia when I first conceived of

in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture 1500–1900 56, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 561–581. I am grate-

Freedom and Empire in the

Amid this outbreak of new transatlantic, transhemispheric, translingual

Some Historical Context

archaeological exploration. Given the scale and heterogeneity of Latin Amer­

Informal Empire as an Idea

contention among historians ­whether foreign investment in Latin Amer­i­ca in

depictions, however, do we see informal empire as internally conflicted; rather

Models specific to British informal empire in Latin Amer­i­ca imply a simi-

and constitutive feature of ­subjugation. I argue, therefore, that this duality at

Pro­gress and ­Family

or w­ hether they both “belonged” to an enlightened Atlantic community of

Informal Empire in Lit­er­a­ture

Eu­ro­pean capital as an iteration of the wars of in­de­pen­dence, a new but cog-

Informal Empire as Form

approach, though methodologically kin, is to suggest that form can be or

belonging to a larger totality of oppressive imperial ideology, my readings re-

vocabulary that in turn newly illuminates literary engagements with histori-

be for more scholarship to interrogate oppressive po­liti­cal structures through

Formalism, Comparativism, and Power

The Forms of the Book

author before moving to British authors, as a reminder that Latin American

Sequence, Protagonist, Paradox

­ eople ­were able to think of themselves in time. As Reinhart Koselleck puts

narrative form(s). It is the very recognizability of the pro­gress narrative—­its

a describable fulfillment. Teleology provides a purposiveness to pro­gress that

colonization—­empire, in other words, ­will eventually produce its own obso-

novation, and culture that was in real­ity an instrument of in­equality and

In the midst and aftermath of in­de­pen­dence, revolutionary leader Simón

Bolívar and Britain

bia,” an early experiment in Latin American nation-­formation covering the

an outright declaration of support,10 Bolívar was undaunted. In a report to the

Bolívar is d­ oing a bit of close reading h­ ere, interpreting Wellesley’s “tone of

freedom.”19 The double notion of liberty and industry is so intertwined in his

British. In an essay in the brand new Gazeta de Caracas, he urged Venezue-

Amer­i­ca carries the legacy of a number of tensions, including “regionalismo/

Sequence: Linearity and Increase

el término nosotros, desde el cual se intenta definir lo identitario latinoamer-

manos el fiel de este balanza.” Tellingly he concludes by admitting that “la

[Los ingleses] exigen para reconocernos que sacrifiquemos algunos de nuestros

aislados ni reunidos en federación sino con el beneplácito de la Inglaterra. . . . ​

[w]hose merchants (such the state that commerce brings)

This compact couplet perfectly captures the mechanisms of informal empire.

rhetorical solutions to this paradox ­because he urgently wanted both Latin

Barbauld and Historical Narrative

as when British military squadrons invaded Buenos Aires and Montevideo in

­ hether the poem is Eu­ro­pean or American, national or global, present-­or

Introduction. Freedom and Empire in the Nineteenth Century 1

part i Prog ress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875:

part ii Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926:

in English Literature 1500–1900 56, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 561–581. I am grate-

archaeological exploration. Given the scale and heterogeneity of Latin Amer

contention among historians whether foreign investment in Latin America in

Models specific to British informal empire in Latin America imply a simi-

and constitutive feature of subjugation. I argue, therefore, that this duality at

Progress and Family

or w hether they both “belonged” to an enlightened Atlantic community of

Informal Empire in Literature

European capital as an iteration of the wars of independence, a new but cog-

be for more scholarship to interrogate oppressive political structures through

eople were able to think of themselves in time. As Reinhart Koselleck puts

narrative form(s). It is the very recognizability of the progress narrative—its

a describable fulfillment. Teleology provides a purposiveness to progress that

colonization—empire, in other words, will eventually produce its own obso-

novation, and culture that was in reality an instrument of inequality and

In the midst and aftermath of independence, revolutionary leader Simón

bia,” an early experiment in Latin American nation-formation covering the

Bolívar is d oing a bit of close reading h ere, interpreting Wellesley’s “tone of

America carries the legacy of a number of tensions, including “regionalismo/

aislados ni reunidos en federación sino con el beneplácito de la Inglaterra. . . .

rhetorical solutions to this paradox because he urgently wanted both Latin

hether the poem is European or American, national or global, present-or

This speaker uses a formal invocation and possessive diction—“O my

Oft shall the strangers turn their eager feet

There walks a Spirit o’er the peopled earth,

The geographic particularity,17 sublime rhetoric, and sense of historic moment

By invoking translatio imperii, both authors think beyond the nation-state

abiding concern is that “society as a w hole . . . is no longer moving in a grad-

the informal empire, or “so-called colonies,” which J. H. Davidson argues that

Carbury’s f amily history is distinguished most by its diachronic continuity—it

In a stark contrast to Carbury’s presentation as embodied narrative, this pas-

is neither retrogressive nor deviant; it c an’t be realigned because it simply

anything should be said. . . . “I understood that we w

The “record” presumably contains company history, but narrative disjuncture

Drawing on the classic childhood-to-adult metaphor for civilizational

distance-shattering travel technologies like the railway to the progress narra-

English narratives overseas to become corrupted, Trollope is willing to sim-

rise of evolutionary theory and British expansionism made family a focaliz-

heteronormative, nuclear, patriarchal families might be the substrate for—and

amily is both a network and a narrative. Of the four formal categories I

Stories of generation matter tremendously in imperial contact zones, where

archical, and based on assumptions of unity and structure. Politic al allies,

The nineteenth-century novel leveraged these inherent connections between

saw this convergence as central to Argentina’s earliest national self-fashioning,

bolized Spanish intolerance and conquest becomes a symbol of British-led

be used in their Spanish husbands’ pursuit of power, and American daughters,

María’s marriage “endors[es] Juan Bautista Alberdi’s project to incorporate the

ently quintessential or “ideal” Americanness: “La Limeña de raza, La María,

to British liberatory politics—this did nothing to shake the foundation of

her 2010 Encyclopedia of the Literature of Empire, Mary Ellen Snodgrass

Jebb, we learn, commands the respect of a plural community. The Jewish

imperial origin.”21 Scholars of British informal empire in Latin America have