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A Matter of Speculation: British Representations of Argentina, Chile and Perú during the Wars of Independence
Abstract
This article examines how newspapers, periodicals and books represented the southern part of America between 1810 and 1820. Although the region made up of Argentina, Chile and Perú was important for British trade, this article proposes that there was a considerable lack of first-hand information about it during that decade. Most of the material then printed in Britain regarding these countries was speculative or propagandistic, while at the same time British trade carried out in the area was mostly by ‘speculators’, who profited from general ignorance about the actual situation of those markets. This article suggests that speculation is a word that is key to understanding these representations.
This article focuses on work published by British travelers to Chile and Rio de la Plata who inspected mining association holdings in the region in the wake of the financial crisis of 1825–26. The travelers sought to determine whether it proved prudent to continue to direct British men, money, know-how, and equipment to the mines. They drew on the work of political economists to help establish the credibility of their observations and accounts, particularly with respect to the relationship between the lack of the division of labor and population in La Plata and Chile and prospects for future speculative investments in the mines. However, while political economists blamed the financial crisis on the uncertainty generated by the actions of the Bank of England and private banks, the commercial travelers focused on other sources of observational and representational error: principal-agent problems in the joint-stock mining associations, and the travelers’ ignorance and prejudices about the region.
The upsurge of press titles in eighteenth-century Britain provided unprecedented public arenas to discuss socio-political issues within a global context. Imperial sovereignty became an item of debate infusing as much the commentaries on current affairs as the fictional pieces that contributed to the popularity of newspapers and magazines. This article explores a selective stock of press narratives where Britain's imperial aspirations are set against the backdrop of the fall of the Inca Empire, a theme that became increasingly popular in the wider literary spectrum. This corpus is examined in light of the transnational circulation bearing on the Andean utopia discourses.
The Friends of Peace is a study of the war-opposition in England during what has usually been presented as the great patriotic struggle against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Protest against the wars was led by liberal writers, professionals and businessmen. Dr Cookson argues that the importance of these anti-war liberals has never been sufficiently acknowledged. They were often a power in their local communities and were strongly linked through religious (especially Unitarian) Dissent and the activities of the press. By means of comprehensive and systematic use of the provincial press, the main manuscript sources, printed collections and the extensive pamphlet literature which this articulate minority generated, Dr Cookson has identified them as perhaps the first of the nonconformist pressure groups operating on the flanks of the Whig party, and demonstrated that they played a significant part in making it liberal and popular. In the face of the conservative and Anglican reaction of the 1790s, they became the chief opponents of the oligarchical society, greatly hastening the development of a middle-class ideology.
William Walton (?1783–1857) was British agent at Santo Domingo (Haiti), one of the two states on the island of Hispaniola, over which the British had briefly fought with the French before it proclaimed its independence in 1804. Returning to England in 1809 he began to write on Spanish and South American affairs. This work was published in two volumes in 1810. Volume 2 examines the Spanish settlements on the American mainland, in California, Texas, Mexico and particularly in South America. Walton first considers the administration of these colonies. He discusses the origins of the native peoples, and the impact on them of colonization; having studied their culture, he believed that in some respects they were more advanced than Europeans. He then discusses the Spanish and Creole inhabitants of South America, and its climate and resources. Walton's object was to encourage the growth of trade between Britain and the region.
This is the first work on British textile exports to South America during the nineteenth century. During this period, textiles ranked among the most important manufactures traded in the world market and Britain was the foremost producer. Thanks to new data, this book demonstrates that British exports to South America were transacted at very high rates during the first decades after independence. This development was due to improvements in the packing of textiles; decreasing costs of production and introduction of free trade in Britain; falling ocean freight rates, marine insurance and import duties in South America; dramatic improvements in communications; and the introduction of better port facilities. Manuel Llorca-Jaña explores the marketing chain of textile exports to South America and sheds light on South Americans' consumer behaviour. This book contains the most comprehensive database on Anglo-South American trade during the nineteenth century and fills an important gap in the historiography.
‘going native’;‘passive’;‘rare and wonderful in her beauty’;‘The Problem of Thor Bridge’;‘it is not because she is mad I hate her’
‘The liberation of South America’, wrote Castlereagh in 1807, ‘must be accomplished through the wishes and exertions of the inhabitants; but the change can only be operated…under the protection and with the support of an auxiliary British force’. The argument, familiar in political debate, was rare in official policy. Britain, it is true, had long regarded Spanish America as a source of strength for her rivals and a potential market for her manufactures. After the Peace of 1783 interest became more intense as British observers, impressed by the vulnerability of empires, claimed to see signs of rapid decline in the empire of Spain. Intelligence reports on Spanish America accumulated in government departments; plans for British attacks flowed from official and private sources; and a section of merchant opinion increased its agitation for military intervention in the area. Yet, apart from the conquest of Trinidad in 1797 and the attempted conquest of the Río de la Plata in 1806–7, British policy towards Spanish America was diffident in its approach and vague in its intent. There were, indeed, compelling reasons why Spanish America should remain on the margin of British policy. Britain's existing European and imperial interests necessarily dominated her policy and absorbed her resources. Until 1806, moreover, existing channels of trade in Europe and the rest of the world were sufficient to take the bulk of British industrial production. And military resources were usually insufficient to release troops either from Europe or the West Indies for major operations in a new theatre of war.
This was a transformative period in English history. In 1783 the country was at one of the lowest points in its fortunes, having just lost its American colonies in warfare. By 1846 it was once more a great imperial nation, as well as the world's strongest power and dominant economy, having benefited from what has sometimes (if misleadingly) been called the 'first industrial revolution'. In the meantime it survived a decade of invasion fears, and emerged victorious from more than twenty years of 'war to the death' against Napoleonic France. But if Britain's external fortunes were in the ascendant, the situation at home remained fraught with peril. The country's population was growing at a rate not experienced by any comparable former society, and its manufacturing towns especially were mushrooming into filthy, disease-ridden, gin-sodden hell-holes, in turn provoking the phantasmagoria of a mad, bad, and dangerous people. It is no wonder that these years should have experienced the most prolonged period of social unrest since the seventeenth century, or that the elite should have been in constant fear of a French-style revolution in England. The governing classes responded to these new challenges and by the mid-nineteenth century the seeds of a settled two-party system and of a more socially interventionist state were both in evidence, though it would have been far too soon to say at that stage whether those seeds would take permanent root. Another consequence of these tensions was the intellectual engagement with society, as for example in the Romantic Movement, a literary phenomenon that brought English culture to the forefront of European attention for the first time. At the same time the country experienced the great religious revival, loosely described under the heading 'evangelicalism'. Slowly but surely, the raffish and rakish style of eighteenth-century society, having reached a peak in the Regency, then succumbed to the new norms of respectability popularly known as 'Victorianism'.
The wars which raged almost continuously from 1792 to 1815 and which are generally, but not quite properly, called in English the Napoleonic wars, are the longest period of warfare which Europe has known since the early eighteenth century, and as they took place at a crucial stage of economic development, when the Industrial Revolution had just taken off in England and when its preliminary stirrings were showing in various places of the Continent, their impact upon the growth of industry in Continental Europe was quite serious. Unlike the twentieth-century world wars, the Napoleonic wars were not marked by large-scale physical destruction; though the productive potential of some towns or districts suffered from military operations or civil disturbances, such destruction was quite limited in space and time. On the other hand, most European countries suffered during the wars from bouts of paper-money inflation, which had undoubtedly serious consequences—especially in France during the Revolution, when the working capital of many merchants and manufacturers was destroyed through the combination of a sharp rise in their costs, of price control under the maximum , and of payment of government orders in depreciated assignats . Also, the diversion of resources to military purposes and the heavy burden of taxation and exactions must not be underestimated.
The impact of the french wars on the british economy
Any attempt at isolating the economic impact of the Wars from the process of the Industrial Revolution and other factors runs into serious difficultes, since it implies counterfactual statements about what would have happened if peace had been maintained. The most obvions effect was the dislocation of international trade ; British trade, however, even though it suffered some major slumps, was able to rebound sharply after each ol them. Another aspect of the war period was a strong and protracted inflation ; « supply shocks », corresponding to harvest failures, were the direct origin of most upward jumps, but war was the basic factor of the rising trend, through the mobilisation, the outburst of military expenses and foreign remittances, inconvertibility, floating exchange rates and lax monetary policier ; the monetarist explanation of inflation retains its basic validity. Agricultural production benefited from rising prices and irnproving terms of trade, but at the expense of the rest of the economy. The impact of the war on the development of British industries is much more difficult to ascertain and ambivalent, but the accumulation of industrial capital undoubtedly suffered at least sorne « crowding ont » by heavy government borrowing. Overdramatic views of the period should be dismissed. War did not jeopardize the process of the Industrial Revolution, neither was it an aecelerator of economic progress. It strengthened, however, the British advantage in relation to the Continent. England was to remain the only super-power during the 19th centnry, but she was already an « advanced » and « rich » country betore the Wars.
A la cabeza del título: Archivo Nacional Ley 7367, de 20 de noviembre de 1942
In this volume, Albert Hirschman reconstructs the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to illuminate the intricate ideological transformation that occurred, wherein the pursuit of material interests--so long condemned as the deadly sin of avarice--was assigned the role of containing the unruly and destructive passions of man. Hirschman here offers a new interpretation for the rise of capitalism, one that emphasizes the continuities between old and new, in contrast to the assumption of a sharp break that is a common feature of both Marxian and Weberian thinking. Among the insights presented here is the ironical finding that capitalism was originally supposed to accomplish exactly what was soon denounced as its worst feature: the repression of the passions in favor of the "harmless," if one-dimensional, interests of commercial life. To portray this lengthy ideological change as an endogenous process, Hirschman draws on the writings of a large number of thinkers, including Montesquieu, Sir James Steuart, and Adam Smith. Featuring a new afterword by Jeremy Adelman and a foreword by Amartya Sen, this Princeton Classics edition of The Passions and the Interests sheds light on the intricate ideological transformation from which capitalism emerged triumphant, and reaffirms Hirschman's stature as one of our most influential and provocative thinkers.
"Catalogue of books of voyages and travels": v. 17, p. [1]-255.
The Rights of Man / Thomas Paine Note: The University of Adelaide Library eBooks @ Adelaide.
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