Jessie Reeder - The Forms of Informal Empire - Britain, Latin America, and Nineteenth-Century Literature-Johns Hopkins University Press (2020)
Jessie Reeder - The Forms of Informal Empire - Britain, Latin America, and Nineteenth-Century Literature-Johns Hopkins University Press (2020)
Jessie Reeder - The Forms of Informal Empire - Britain, Latin America, and Nineteenth-Century Literature-Johns Hopkins University Press (2020)
Jessie Reeder
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information,
please contact Special Sales at specialsales@press.jhu.edu.
Acknowledgments vii
Coda 227
Notes 231
Bibliography 257
Index 271
This page intentionally left blank
Ac k now l e d g m e n t s
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
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
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
4 The Forms of Informal Empire
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
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
8 The Forms of Informal Empire
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.
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
12 The Forms of Informal Empire
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
16 The Forms of Informal Empire
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
20 The Forms of Informal Empire
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.
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
22 The Forms of Informal Empire
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
26 The Forms of Informal Empire
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
28 The Forms of Informal Empire
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
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,
32 The Forms of Informal Empire
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.
Pro g r e s s a n d I n for m a l
E m pi r e , 1808 –1875
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
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
40 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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-
Sequence, Protagonist, Paradox 43
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
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.
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
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
50 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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
52 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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
56 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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.
58 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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
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
62 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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
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
66 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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
68 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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
Narrative 1 Narrative 2
Latin
British Empire Babylon Rome Great Britain America
United States
as afterlife
World for British
history culture
Chart 1
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.
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:
76 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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
“Dependant Kings” 77
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
78 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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
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
82 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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.
“Dependant Kings” 83
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:
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
84 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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.
“Dependant Kings” 85
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
86 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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
“Dependant Kings” 87
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
88 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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,
92 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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
94 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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
Anthony Trollope and the Collapse of Historical Telos 95
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
Anthony Trollope and the Collapse of Historical Telos 97
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
98 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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
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—
100 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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)
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
102 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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-
Anthony Trollope and the Collapse of Historical Telos 105
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”
106 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
(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
Anthony Trollope and the Collapse of Historical Telos 107
stasis, discontinuity, and synchrony. And if these are threatening to the home-
land, they will be fatal to the mission of the empire.
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,
110 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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)
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
Anthony Trollope and the Collapse of Historical Telos 113
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
114 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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.
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,
116 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
“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
Anthony Trollope and the Collapse of Historical Telos 117
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
118 Progress and Informal Empire, 1808–1875
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
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
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.
Origin, Generation, Relation, Hybridity 123
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
124 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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.
Origin, Generation, Relation, Hybridity 125
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
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.
Origin, Generation, Relation, Hybridity 131
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
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
136 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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.
Vicente Fidel López Re-members the Nation 137
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
138 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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
Vicente Fidel López Re-members the Nation 139
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:
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
marrones are enemies of Spain, he not only comes in peace but will reward
Vicente Fidel López Re-members the Nation 141
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
142 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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:
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
144 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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.
Vicente Fidel López Re-members the Nation 145
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
146 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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
Vicente Fidel López Re-members the Nation 147
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
150 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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
152 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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
154 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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-
Vicente Fidel López Re-members the Nation 155
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
Vicente Fidel López Re-members the Nation 157
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
158 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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
Vicente Fidel López Re-members the Nation 159
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
160 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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
Vicente Fidel López Re-members the Nation 161
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
162 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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
164 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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
166 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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
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
H. Rider Haggard and the Antagonism of Valid Fiancées 169
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,
170 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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
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
172 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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
H. Rider Haggard and the Antagonism of Valid Fiancées 173
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
H. Rider Haggard and the Antagonism of Valid Fiancées 175
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
176 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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-
H. Rider Haggard and the Antagonism of Valid Fiancées 177
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)
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
H. Rider Haggard and the Antagonism of Valid Fiancées 179
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
H. Rider Haggard and the Antagonism of Valid Fiancées 181
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
182 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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”
H. Rider Haggard and the Antagonism of Valid Fiancées 183
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
184 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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.
186 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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.
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
H. Rider Haggard and the Antagonism of Valid Fiancées 191
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
H. Rider Haggard and the Antagonism of Valid Fiancées 193
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
194 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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,
196 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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
198 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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,”
Where Progress and Family (Almost) Meet 199
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
200 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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.
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-
Where Progress and Family (Almost) Meet 203
“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.
Where Progress and Family (Almost) Meet 205
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
206 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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.
Where Progress and Family (Almost) Meet 207
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
208 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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
Where Progress and Family (Almost) Meet 209
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
212 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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
Where Progress and Family (Almost) Meet 213
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
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
Where Progress and Family (Almost) Meet 215
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
216 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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.
Where Progress and Family (Almost) Meet 217
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
218 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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
220 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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
Where Progress and Family (Almost) Meet 223
Woolf ’s The Voyage Out he was even more damning, though for different
reasons:
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
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
224 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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
Where Progress and Family (Almost) Meet 225
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
226 Family and Informal Empire, 1840–1926
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
228 The Forms of Informal Empire
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.
230 The Forms of Informal Empire
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
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
236 Notes to Pages 39–47
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
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.
39. Bolívar, “The Jamaica Letter,” 30.
40. Bolívar to Monteagudo, August 5, 1823, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 389.
41. Lynch, Simón Bolívar, 28.
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.
Notes to Pages 58–64 239
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.
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.
9. White, Content of the Form, 10.
10. Carr, Time, Narrative, and History, 167.
11. Kaul, Poems of Nation, 128.
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
Notes to Pages 77–87 241
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.
13. White, Content of the Form, 21.
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.”
21. Kaul, Poems of Nation, 129.
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.
242 Notes to Pages 87–97
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).
34. Bolívar, “The Jamaica Letter,” El Libertador, 30.
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.
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.
29. Sewell, “Temporalities of Capitalism,” 526.
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.
37. Sewell, “Temporalities of Capitalism,” 526.
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”).
Notes to Pages 109–120 245
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.
11. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 177.
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.
17. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 36.
18. Hobsbawm, On History; Tobin, Time and the Novel.
19. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 45.
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).
27. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 474.
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.
Notes to Pages 129–136 247
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.
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”]
Notes to Pages 142–147 249
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
250 Notes to Pages 148–155
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.
50. Bolívar, “The Jamaica Letter,” El Libertador, 18.
51. Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 15.
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.”]
Notes to Pages 155–163 251
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.”]
76. Gerassi-Navarro, Pirate Novels, 122.
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.
95. Gandhi, Affective Communities, 11.
96. Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 13.
97. Gerassi-Navarro, Pirate Novels, 127.
252 Notes to Pages 165–179
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.
47. Hudson, Far Away, 252.
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.
56. Hudson, Far Away, 200.
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.
61. Schmitt, Memory of the H uman, 135.
62. Hudson, Far Away, 10.
63. 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.
67. Hudson, Far Away, 73.
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.
256 Notes to Pages 222–229
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.
bi bl io g r a ph y
Adelman, Jeremy. Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2006.
Aguirre, Robert. Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture. Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2014. First published 2004 by Routledge (New York).
Alborn, Timothy L. “The Moral of the Failed Bank: Professional Plots in the Victorian
Money Market.” Victorian Studies 38, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 199–226.
Almeida, Joselyn M. Reimagining the Transatlantic, 1780–1890. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.
———, ed., Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010.
Amaral, Samuel. The Rise of Capitalism on the Pampas: The Estancias of Buenos Aires, 1785–
1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Anaya Ferreira, Nair María. “Los hijos de Moctezuma: Ignorancia y prejuicio en las nove-
las inglesas de aventura del siglo XIX.” Anuario de Letras Modernas 7 (1995): 43–61.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 2006. First published 1983 by
Verso.
Anderson-Imbert, Enrique. Spanish-American Literature: A History. Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1969.
Andrade, Susan Z. The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958–1988. Dur-
ham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Bann, Stephen. Romanticism and the Rise of History. New York: Macmillan, 1995.
Barbauld, Anna Laetitia. Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, a Poem. In Selected Poetry and Prose,
edited by William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft, 160–173. Peterborough, ON, Canada:
Broadview Press, 2002.
Barrell, John, and Harriet Guest. “On the Use of Contradiction: Economics and Morality
in the Eighteenth-Century Long Poem.” In The New Eighteenth C entury, edited by Fe-
licity Nussbaum and Laura Brown, 121–143. New York: Methuen, 1987.
Barthes, Roland. “The G reat F
amily of Man.” In Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers,
100–102. New York: Hill and Wang, 1997. First published 1972.
258 Bibliography
Beckert, Jens. Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2016.
Beckman, Ericka. Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age. Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
———. “Jorge Isaacs’s María and the Space-Time of Global Capitalism.” Studies in English
Literature 1500–1900 56, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 539–559.
Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. “The Nineteenth-Century Spanish-A merican Novel.” In The Cam
bridge History of Latin American Literature, vol. 1: Discovery to Modernism, edited by
Roberto Gonzalez Echeverría and Enrique Pupo-Walker, 417–489. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1996.
Bértola, Luis, and José Antonio Ocampo. The Economic Development of Latin America since
Independence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Bethell, Leslie. “Britain and Latin America in Historical Perspective.” In Britain and Latin
America: A Changing Relationship, edited by Victor Bulmer-Thomas, 1–24. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Bhabha, Homi K. “Introduction: Narrating the Nation.” In Nation and Narration, edited
by Homi K. Bhabha, 1–7. London: Routledge, 1990.
———. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” In The Location
of Culture, 121–131. London: Routledge, 1994.
———. “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree
outside Delhi, 1817.” In The Location of Culture, 145–174. London: Routledge, 1994.
Bigelow, Gordon. “Form and Violence in Trollope’s The Macdermots of Ballycloran.” Novel:
A Forum on Fiction 46, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 386–405.
Birns, Nicholas. “ ‘Thy World, Columbus!’: Barbauld and Global Space, 1803, ‘1811,’ 1812,
2003.” European Romantic Review 16, no. 5 (December 2005): 545–562.
———. “Trollope and the Antipodes.” In The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope,
edited by Carolyn Dever and Lisa Niles, 181–195. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011.
Bolívar, Simón. “El 15 de agosto de 1805, desde la cima de una de las colinas que dominan
a Roma [. . .].” In Doctrina del Libertador, edited by Manuel Pérez Vila, 3–4. Caracas:
Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2009.
———. “Artículo Comunicado.” Gazeta de Caracas 39 (February 7, 1814): 154–155.
———. “Los comisionados de la Junta de Gobierno de Caracas ante el Gabinete británico
[. . .].” In Doctrina del Libertador, edited by Manuel Pérez Vila, 5–8. Caracas: Fundación
Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2009.
———. “Comunicación del Libertador fechada en Caracas el 10 de junio de 1814, di-
rigida al Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores de la Gran Bretaña, en protesta por la
ofensa infligida en San Thomas a los agentes diplomáticos de Venezuela.” In Escritos
del Libertador, vol. 6, edited by Cristóbal L. Mendoza, Luis Villalba Villalba, Angel
Francisco Brice, José Antonio Escalona-E scalona, Mario Briceño Perozo, Manuel
Pinto C., and Lino Iribarren-C elis, 333–336. Caracas: Sociedad Bolivariana de Vene-
zuela, 1964.
———. El Libertador: Writings of Simón Bolívar. Edited by David Bushnell. Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2003.
Bibliography 259
———. Obras Completas. Edited by Vicente Lecuna. La Habana, Cuba: Editorial Lex, 1947.
———. “En la oración inaugural del Congreso de Angostura, reunido el 15 de febrero de
1819 [. . .].” In Doctrina del Libertador, edited by Manuel Pérez Vila, 120–147. Caracas:
Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2009.
———. “Un pensamiento sobre el Congreso de Panamá.” In Doctrina del Libertador, ed-
ited by Manuel Pérez Vila, 260–261. Caracas: Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2009.
———. “Reflexiones sobre el estado actual de la Europa, con relación a la América.” Gazeta
de Caracas 74 (June 9, 1814): 293–294.
———. Selected Writings of Bolívar. Compiled by Vicente Lecuna. Edited by Harold A.
Bierck Jr. Translated by Lewis Bertrand. New York: The Colonial Press, 1951.
Bonfiglio, Richard. “Liberal Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of the Heart(h): Mazzini,
Gladstone, and Barrett Browning’s Domestication of the Italian Risorgimento.” Mod
ern Philology 111, no. 2 (November 2013): 281–307.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “Sobre The Purple Land.” In Otras Inquisiciones, 208–215. Madrid:
Alianza, 2002.
Bradshaw, Penny. “Dystopian Futures: Time-Travel and Millenarian Visions in the Poetry
of Anna Barbauld and Charlotte Smith.” Romanticism on the Net 21 (February 2001).
Brennan, Timothy. “The National Longing for Form.” In Nation and Narration, edited by
Homi K. Bhabha, 44–70. London: Routledge, 1990.
Brown, Matthew. Adventuring through Spanish Colonies: Simón Bolívar, Foreign Mercenar
ies, and the Birth of New Nations. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006.
———, ed. Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture, Commerce and Capital. Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2008.
———. “Richard Vowell’s Not-So-Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Adventure in
Nineteenth-Century Hispanic America.” Journal of Latin American Studies 38, no. 1 (Feb-
ruary 2006): 95–122.
Bulmer-T homas, Victor. The Economic History of Latin America since Independence. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Burke, Edmund. “Speeches in the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, Esq.” In The Works
and Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 7, 271–624. London:
Francis and John Rivington, 1852.
Burnard, Trevor. Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–
1820. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Burns, E. Bradford. The Poverty of Progress: Latin America in the Nineteenth C entury. Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1980.
Bushnell, David. “Introduction.” In El Libertador: Writings of Simón Bolívar, edited by Da-
vid Bushnell, xxvii–lii. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Bushnell, David, and Lester D. Langley, eds. Simón Bolívar: Essays on the Life and Legacy of
the Liberator. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008.
Buzard, James. “Trollope and Travel.” In The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope,
edited by Carolyn Dever and Lisa Niles, 168–180. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011.
Bystrom, Kerry. Democracy at Home in South Africa: Family Fictions and Transitional Cul
ture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
260 Bibliography
———. “The DNA of the Democratic South Africa: Ancestral Maps, Family Trees, Ge-
nealogical Fictions.” Journal of Southern African Studies 35, no. 1 (March 2009): 223–235.
Caballero, M. Soledad. “ ‘For the Honour of Our Country’: Maria Dundas Graham and the
Romance of Benign Domination.” Studies in Travel Writing 9, no. 2 (September 2005):
111–131.
Campbell, Neil. The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational,
Global, Media Age. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.
Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, and Enzo Faletto. Dependency and Development in Latin
America. Translated by Marjory Mattingly Urquidi. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1979.
Carr, David. Time, Narrative, and History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
Çelikkol, Ayşe. Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nine
teenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Centner, Charles W. “The Chilean Failure to Obtain British Recognition, 1823–1828.” Re
vista de Historia de América 15 (December 1942): 285–297.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Chandler, James. England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic
Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Chasteen, John Charles. Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence. Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2008.
Cheyette, Bryan. “The Promised Land of Liberalism: Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope
and George Eliot.” In Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial
Representations, 1875–1945, 13–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Claybaugh, Amanda. “Trollope and Americ a.” In The Cambridge Companion to Anthony
Trollope, edited by Carolyn Dever and Lisa Niles, 210–223. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2011.
Coatsworth, John H. “Structures, Endowments, and Institutions in the Economic History
of Latin America.” Latin American Research Review 40, no. 3 (October 2005): 126–144.
Collier, Simon. “Simón Bolívar as Political Thinker.” In Simón Bolívar: Essays on the Life and
Legacy of the Liberator, edited by David Bushnell and Lester D. Langley, 13–34. Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008.
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. 1860. Reprinted with introduction and notes by Mat-
thew Sweet. London: Penguin, 2003. Page references are to the 2003 edition.
Conrad, Joseph. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, vol. 4. Edited by Frederick R. Karl
and Laurence Davies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
———. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, vol. 7. Edited by Laurence Davies and J. H.
Stape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
———. Nostromo. 1904. Reprinted with introduction and notes by Ruth Nadelhaft. Peter-
borough, ON, Canada: Broadview Press, 1997. Page references are to the 1997 edition.
Crocco, Francesco. “The Colonial Subtext of Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and
Eleven.” Wordsworth Circle 41, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 91–94.
Cussen, Antonio. Bello and Bolívar: Poetry and Politics in the Spanish American Revolution.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Bibliography 261
Darwin, John. “Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion.”
The English Historical Review 112, no. 447 (June 1997): 614–642.
Davidson, J. H. “Trollope and the Colonies.” Victorian Studies 12, no. 3 (March 1969):
305–330.
de Groot, Jerome. The Historical Novel. London: Routledge, 2010.
Delany, Paul. “Land, Money, and the Jews in the L ater Trollope.” Studies in English Litera
ture, 1500–1900 32, no. 4 (Autumn 1992): 765–787.
Demory, Pamela H. “Nostromo: Making History.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language
35, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 316–346.
Derrida, Jacques. Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins. London: Verso, 1997.
Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna. “Nostromo and the Writing of History.” In Joseph Conrad: Voice,
Sequence, History, Genre, edited by Jakob Lothe, Jeremy Hawthorn, and James Phelan,
178–195. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008.
Esty, Jed. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton: Prince
ton University Press, 2009.
———. Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development. Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Ewell, Judith. “Bolívar’s Atlantic World Diplomacy.” In Simón Bolívar: Essays on the Life and
Legacy of the Liberator, edited by David Bushnell and Lester D. Langley, 35–54. Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008.
Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1983.
Favretti, Maggie. “The Politics of Vision: Anna Barbauld’s ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven.’”
In Women’s Poetry in the Enlightenment, The Making of a Canon, 1730–1820, edited by
Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain, 99–110. London: Macmillan, 1999.
Felstiner, Mary Lowenthal. “Family Metaphors: The Language of an Independence Revo-
lution.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 25, no. 1 (January 1983): 154–180.
Fernández, Laura. “La pampa de memoria. William H. Hudson,” Ciberletras 9 (2003).
Florescano, Enrique. Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico: From the Aztecs to Independence.
Translated by Albert G. Bork. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.
Ford, Ford Madox. Thus to Revisit: Some Reminiscences. New York: Octagon Books, 1966.
Forman, Ross G. “When Britons Brave Brazil: British Imperialism and the Adventure Tale
in Latin America, 1850–1918.” Victorian Studies 42, no. 3 (1999/2000): 454–487.
Forster, E. M. “The Novels of Virginia Woolf.” The New Criterion 4, no. 2 (April 1926):
277–286.
Franco, Jean. “A Not-So-Romantic Journey: British Travelers to South America, 1818–28.”
In Critical Passions, edited by Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman, 133–146. Dur-
ham: Duke University Press, 1999.
Franey, Laura E. Victorian Travel Writing and Imperial Violence: British Writing on Africa,
1855–1902. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
French, Jennifer. “ ‘Literature Can Be Our Teacher’: Reading Informal Empire in El inglés
de los güesos.” In Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture, Commerce and Capital, ed-
ited by Matthew Brown, 187–207. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008.
Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992.
262 Bibliography
Fulford, Tim. “British Romantics and Native Americans: The Araucanians of Chile.” Stud
ies in Romanticism 47, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 225–252.
Furneaux, Holly. Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009.
Gallagher, Catherine. “Formalism and Time.” Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 1
(March 2000): 229–251.
Gallagher, John, and Ronald Robinson. “The Imperialism of Free Trade.” The Economic His
tory Review 6, no. 1 (1953): 1–15.
Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and
the Politics of Friendship. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
García de Aldridge, Adriana. “Two Latin-A merican Theorists of the Historical Novel.” Clio
4, no. 2 (February 1975): 183–199.
Garrels, Elizabeth. “El ‘espíritu de la familia’ en La novia del hereje de Vicente Fidel López.”
Hispamérica: Revista de Literatura 16, no. 46/47 (April-August 1987): 3–24.
Gellner, Ernest. Nationalism. New York: New York University Press, 1997.
Gerassi-Navarro, Nina. Pirate Novels: Fictions of Nation Building in Spanish America. Dur-
ham: Duke University Press, 1999.
Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1997. First published 1990 in French by Gallimard.
Goodlad, Lauren M. E. “Trollopian ‘Foreign Policy’: Rootedness and Cosmopolitanism
in the Mid-Victorian Global Imaginary.” In The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Real
ism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience, 65–86. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015.
Gottlieb, Evan. “Fighting Words: Representing the Napoleonic Wars in the Poetry of
Hemans and Barbauld.” European Romantic Review 20, no. 3 (July 2009): 327–343.
Haggard, H. Rider. Allan Quatermain. New York: Harper & B rothers, 1887.
———. The Days of My Life: An Autobiography, edited by C. J. Longman. London: Long-
mans, Green, and Co., 1926.
———. Heart of the World. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896.
———. King Solomon’s Mines. London: Cassell & Company, 1886.
———. Montezuma’s D aughter: A Romance. New York: McKinlay, Stone & Mackenzie,
1893.
Hahner, June E., ed. Women through W omen’s Eyes: Latin American W omen in Nineteenth-
Century Travel Accounts. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998.
Hampsten, Elizabeth. “Revisiting a Land That England Lost.” North Dakota Quarterly 61,
no. 2 (Spring 1993): 92–107.
Hanson, Carter F. “Lost among White O thers: Late-Victorian Lost Race Novels for Boys.”
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23, no. 4 (2002): 497–527.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2016.
Hartog, François. Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time. New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 2017.
Hayward, Jennifer. “No Unity of Design: Competing Discourses in Graham’s Journal.” In
Journal of a Residence in Chile during the Year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in
Bibliography 263
Jaffe, Audrey. “Trollope in the Stock Market: Irrational Exuberance and The Prime Minis
ter.” Victorian Studies 45, no. 1 (Autumn 2002): 43–64.
Jameson, Fredric. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social
Text 15 (Autumn 1986): 65–88.
Johnson, John J. Simón Bolívar and Spanish American Independence, 1783–1830. Princeton:
Van Nostrand, 1968.
Katz, Wendy Roberta. Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1987.
Kaul, Suvir. Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000.
Keach, William. “A Regency Prophecy and the End of Anna Barbauld’s Career.” Studies in
Romanticism 33, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 569–577.
Kilroy, James F. The Nineteenth-Century English Novel: Family Ideology and Narrative Form.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Kornbluh, Anna. Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form. New
York: Fordham University Press, 2014.
———. “We Have Never Been Critical: T oward the Novel as Critique.” Novel: A Forum on
Fiction 50, no. 3 (November 2017): 397–408.
Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1985.
———. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 2002.
Kramnick, Jonathan, and Anahid Nersessian. “Form and Explanation.” Critical Inquiry 43
(Spring 2017): 650–669.
Landau, Aaron. “Decolonising Travel in W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land.” Studies in Travel
Writing 10, no. 1 (2010): 27–56.
Lane, Kris E. Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas 1500–1750. New York: M. E. Sharpe,
1998.
Leask, Nigel. “ ‘The Ghost in Chapultepec’: Fanny Calderón de la Barca, William Prescott
and Nineteenth-Century Mexican Travel Accounts.” In Voyages and Visions: T owards a
Cultural History of Travel, edited by Jas Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés, 184–209. London:
Reaktion Books, 1999.
Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2015.
———. “Strategic Formalism: T oward a New Method in Cultural Studies.” Victorian Stud
ies 48, no. 4 (Summer 2006): 625–657.
Litvak, Joseph. “Jewish Geography: Trollope and the Question of Style.” In Nineteenth-
Century Geographies: The Transformation of Space from the Victorian Age to the American
Century, edited by Helena Michie and Ronald R. Thomas, 123–134. New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2003.
López, Vicente Fidel. La novia del hereje: o, La inquisición de Lima. Buenos Aires, 1854.
Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. Translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1983. First published 1962 by Beacon Press (Boston).
Bibliography 265
Lynch, John. “British Policy and Spanish Americ a, 1783–1808.” Journal of Latin American
Studies 1, no. 1 (1969): 1–30.
———. Simón Bolívar: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Lynn, Martin. “British Policy, Trade, and Informal Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.”
In The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume III: The Nineteenth Century, edited
by Andrew Porter, 101–121. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Mallios, Peter Lancelot. “Introduction: Untimely Nostromo.” Conradiana 40, no. 3 (Fall
2008): 213–232.
Mandelbaum, Maurice. History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971.
Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel. El Mundo Maravilloso de Guillermo Enrique Hudson. Rosario:
Beatriz Viterbo, 2001.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Holy F amily, Or, Critique of Critical Criticism: Against
Bruno Bauer and Company. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975.
Maxwell, Richard, and Katie Trumpener. “The Romance of the Outlands: The Fin-de-Siècle
Adventure Story between History and Geography.” Yearbook of English Studies 41, no. 2
(2011): 106–124.
May, Leila. Disorderly S isters: Sibling Relations and Sororal Resistance in Nineteenth-Century
British Literature. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001.
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2008.
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Lon-
don: Routledge, 1995.
McCrea, Barry. In the Company of Strangers: F amily and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle,
Joyce, and Proust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
McFarlane, Anthony. “Identity, Enlightenment and Political Dissent in Late Colonial Span-
ish America.” In Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, vol. 8, 309–335.
Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1998.
Mehta, Uday Singh. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal
Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Meléndez, Mariselle. “Miedo, raza y nación: Bello, Lastarria y la revisión del pasado colo-
nial.” Revista Chilena de Literatura 52 (April 1998): 17–30.
Mellor, Anne K. “The Female Poet and the Poetess: Two Traditions of British Women’s Po-
etry, 1780–1830.” Studies in Romanticism 36, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 261–276.
Mill, James. “Emancipation of Spanish America.” The Edinburgh Review 13 (1809): 277–311.
Mill, John Stuart. “A Few Words on Non-Intervention.” New E ngland Review 27, no. 3 (Sum-
mer 2006): 252–264.
———. On Liberty. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1867.
Miller, J. Hillis. “ ‘Material Interests’: Conrad’s Nostromo as a Critique of Global Capital-
ism.” In Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, edited by Jakob Lothe, Jer-
emy Hawthorn, and James Phelan, 160–177. Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
2008.
———. Victorian Subjects. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
266 Bibliography
Molina, Hebe Beatriz. Como crecen los hongos: la novela argentina entre 1838 y 1872. Buenos
Aires: Teseo, 2011.
Moraña, Mabel. “Ilustración y delirio en la construcción nacional, o las fronteras de la ‘Ciu-
dad letrada.’ ” Latin American Literary Review 25, no. 50 (1997): 31–45.
Morgan, Monique. Narrative Means, Lyric Ends: Temporality in the Nineteenth-Century Long
Poem. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009.
Mörner, Magnus. “European Travelogues as Sources to Latin American History from the
Late Eighteenth C entury until 1870.” Revista de Historia de América 93 (1982): 91–149.
Mufti, Nasser. Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2018.
Nisbet, Robert. History of the Idea of Progress. New York: Basic Books, 1980.
Nkrumah, Kwame. Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. New York: International
Publishers, 1965.
Norcia, Megan A. X Marks the Spot: W omen Writers Map the Empire for British C hildren,
1790-1895. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010.
“A Novel and Two Romances,” Spectator (London), February 17, 1894.
Odden, Karen. “Puffed Papers and Broken Promises: White-Collar Crime and Literary Jus-
tice in The Way We Live Now.” In Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation, edited by
Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore, 135–146. Farnham: Ashgate, 2004.
Onley, James. The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers, and the British in
the Nineteenth-Century Gulf. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Phillips, Richard. Sex, Politics and Empire: A Postcolonial Geography. Manchester: Manches-
ter University Press, 2006.
Poovey, Mary, ed. The Financial System in Victorian Britain. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003.
Porter, Andrew. “Introduction.” In The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume III: The
Nineteenth Century, edited by Andrew Porter, 1–28. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009.
Porter, Bernard. The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain. Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Postone, Moishe. Time, L abor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical
Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1993.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes. London: Routledge, 1992.
Racine, Karen. Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution. Wilm-
ington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003.
———. “Simón Bolívar, Englishman: Elite Responsibility and Social Reform in Spanish
American Independence.” In Simón Bolívar: Essays on the Life and Legacy of the Libera
tor, edited by David Bushnell and Lester D. Langley, 55–72. Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2008.
Ragussis, Michael. “Moses in Egypt: The Secret Jew in E ngland.” In Figures of Conversion:
“The Jewish Question” and English National Identity, 234–290. Durham: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 1995.
Ramirez, Luz Elena. British Representations of Latin America. Gainesville: University Press
of Florida, 2007.
Bibliography 267
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818. Reprinted with introduction and notes by J. Paul Hunter.
New York: Norton, 1996. Page references are to the 1996 edition.
Smith, Verity. Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997.
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Encyclopedia of the Literature of Empire. New York: Infobase, 2010.
Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991.
Southey, Robert. The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey. Edited by Charles Cuthbert
Southey. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855.
Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial
Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Sullivan, Zohreh T. Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1993.
Taylor, Christopher. Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism. Dur-
ham: Duke University Press, 2018.
Thompson, Andrew. “Afterword: Informal Empire: Past, Present, and F uture.” In Informal
Empire in Latin America: Culture, Commerce, and Capital, edited by Matthew Brown,
229–241. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008.
Tobin, Patricia Drechsel. Time and the Novel: The Genealogical Imperative. Princeton: Prince
ton University Press, 1978.
Trifilo, S. Samuel. “Early Nineteenth-Century British Travelers in Chile: Impressions of San-
tiago and Valparaíso.” Journal of Inter-American Studies 11, no. 3 (July 1969): 391–424.
Trollope, Anthony. Australia and New Zealand. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1873.
———. An Autobiography. 1883. Reprinted with introduction and notes by P. D. Edwards.
Edited by Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Page references are to the 2008 edition.
———. The Prime Minister. 1876. Reprinted with preface and notes by Nicholas Shrimp-
ton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Page references are to the 2011 edition.
———. The Way We Live Now. 1875. Reprinted with introduction and notes by John Suther-
land. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Page references are to the 2008 edition.
———. The West Indies and the Spanish Main. London: Chapman and Hall, 1860.
Van, Annette. “Ambivalent Speculations: America as E ngland’s Future in The Way We Live
Now.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 39, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 75–96.
Vergès, Françoise. Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Métissage.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
Waddell, D. A. G. “British Neutrality and Spanish-A merican Independence: The Problem
of Foreign Enlistment.” Journal of Latin American Studies 19, no. 1 (May 1987): 1–18.
———. Gran Bretaña y la Independencia de Venezuela y Colombia. Caracas: Ministerio de
Educación, 1983.
———. “International Politics and Latin American Independence.” In The Independence of
Latin America, edited by Leslie Bethell, 195–226. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987.
Wagner, Tamara S. Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Plotting Money and the Novel
Genre, 1815–1901. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010.
Bibliography 269
Walker, John. “Home Thoughts from Abroad: W. H. Hudson’s Argentine Fiction.” Cana
dian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 10,
no. 3 (September 1983): 333–376.
White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
———. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.
White, Richard. The M iddle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Re
gion, 1650–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Wilson, A. N. The Elizabethans. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012.
Wong, J. Y. “The Building of an Informal British Empire in China in the Middle of the
Nineteenth C entury.” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 59, no. 2 (March 1977):
472–485.
Wood, Ellen Meiskins. Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Young, Richard, and Odile Cisneros. Historical Dictionary of Latin American Literature and
Theater. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011.
Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. London: Routledge,
1995.
Zepeda, Alexis. “Argentina.” In Britain and the Americas: Culture, Politics and History, vol.
1, edited by W
ill Kaufman and Heidi Slettedahl MacPherson, 100–103. Santa Barbara:
ABC-CLIO, 2005.
This page intentionally left blank
I n de x
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