“An Open Field and Fair Play” the Relationship Between Britain and the Southern Cone of America Between 1808 and 1830. Marc
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“An Open Field and Fair Play” The relationship between Britain and the Southern Cone of America between 1808 and 1830. Marcelo Somarriva History Department UCL PhD in History 1 “I, Marcelo Somarriva, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis.” 2 Abstract This thesis explores the relationship between Great Britain and the Southern Cone of America between 1808 and 1830, from the perspective of the cultural representations which both regions developed about themselves and about each other. In order to do so, this work consulted newspapers, journals, pamphlets, prospectuses and books published in Great Britain and in the United Provinces, Chile and Perú between 1808 and the 1830’s. This work analyses the way in which cultural representations affected the possibilities for commercial and political relations between Great Britain and the Southern Cone, studying the formation and impact that some economic discourses, particularly about commerce, had in the mindscape of British explorers and South American elites. It also examines the consequences they had in the entangled relationships between Great Britain and the Southern Cone in the first stages of the arrival of global capitalism The work is divided into five chapters. The first deals with the initial stage of the relationship between the Southern Cone and Great Britain during the wars of independence. The second intends to answer the question of what did the elites in the Southern Cone think about foreign commerce and the opening of their countries to commercial expansion. The third chapter shows how British reformists, such as Jeremy Bentham and Francis Place, and British travellers in South America viewed the Southern Cone as a newly opened market and as an ideological laboratory. The fourth chapter studies the process in which South American agents contracted foreign loans in the British market and later organized mining companies to develop South American mines, exposing the interests that shaped them. The fifth chapter analyses the public campaign developed in London against these foreign loans and mining companies. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 5 I. A NEW WORLD, A NEW MARKET 15 II. COMMERCE, CIRCULATION AND CIVILIZATION 44 III. REFORMISM, PHILANTHROPY AND PROFIT 82 IV. LOANS AND MINES 125 V. THE CAMPAIGN 159 CONCLUSION 205 BIBLIOGRAPHY 214 4 INTRODUCTION This thesis explores the relationship between Great Britain and the Southern Cone of America during the first three decades of the nineteenth century from the perspective of the cultural representations which both regions developed about themselves and about each other between 1808 and 1830. That relationship was eminently commercial, even before it became political as the independence of the region was consolidated and the new republics tried to obtain diplomatic recognition from Great Britain. It was also a relationship profoundly shaped by culture, in which, from the British point of view, travel books and private letters published in newspapers were often the most valuable sources of information available for the public about regions which were becoming increasingly attractive. From the perspective of the Southern Cone, Great Britain became a powerful reference point and in relation to which many of their political, economic and cultural aspirations were modelled. Most of the existing historical studies about early connections between Great Britain and the Southern Cone are based on diplomatic and economic history. Among the first, there is a robust and fruitful bibliography, from the pioneering work of William Kauffman to the more recent contributions of Klaus Gallo, which describes the intricate diplomatic efforts to build a relationship between these nations, analysing evidence which mainly comes from official documents.1 Economic history during these first decades, on the other hand, has proved to be a harder task, because of the lack of official sources. D.C.M. Platt, for instance, argues that statistics on exports and imports give contradictory and inconclusive evidence,2 and Leslie Bethell states, more eloquently, that “the measurement of foreign investment in Latin America in the nineteenth century is a historical minefield”,3 suggesting that this scarcity of sources had produced radically divergent interpretations of the character of British involvement in the region during that century. Moreover, existing statistics had proved to be seriously incomplete, considering, as Rory Miller observes, that British import figures before 1859 omit any mention of precious metals, whether they were un-minted 1 William Kaufmann, British policy and the independence of Latin America, 1804-1828 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951); Frederic L. Paxson, The independence of the South American republics: a study in recognition and foreign policy (Philadelphia: Ferris & Leach, 1903); Charles Kingsley Webster, ed. Britain and the Independence of Latin America, 1812-1830. (London: 1938); Robert A. Humphreys, ed., British consular reports on the trade and politics of Latin America, 1824-1826 (London: Offices of The Royal historical Society, 1940); Klaus Gallo, Great Britain and Argentina: from invasion to recognition, 1806-26 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, Oxford, 2001). 2 Desmond C. M. Platt, ed., Business imperialism, 1840-1930 : an inquiry based on British experience in Latin America (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p.17. 3 Leslie Bethell, ‘Britain and Latin America in historical perspective’, in Victor Bulmer Thomas, ed., Britain and Latin America: a changing relationship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press in association with the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1989), p.7. 5 bullion or coined metals. Such an omission seriously compromised the reliability of statistics to evaluate the magnitude of British trade with the region during this period in which such metals played a crucial part in the economic life of the Southern Cone, attracting British attention to that region.4 The fact that most of British trade with South America during and before the independence period was mainly contraband or “secret trade”, which by its nature avoids leaving any traces,5 is another factor that contributes to turn the first three decades of British contact with the Southern Cone into an obscure period from the perspective of economic historiography. Jay Kinsbruner, in a more specific account, claims that existing analyses of commercial relations between Great Britain and Chile, during the 1820’s, are at best “speculative” or “largely inadequate”.6 However, even if we do not have reliable trade figures to sustain a rigorous analysis from the perspective of economic history there are many other sources to study the relations between these regions through other approaches. The analysis of the cultural representations and discourses developed reciprocally between Great Britain and the Southern Cone is a rather underexplored field of study, especially given that most of the works available deal almost exclusively with British perspectives, devoting little attention to views from the Southern Cone or to the interplay of representations.7 This thesis hopes to contribute towards filling that gap by studying the cultural representations of each other that were projected both in Britain and in the Southern Cone during this period, not only inside the closed quarters of power, but among the wider public. In order to do so, I have drawn upon a wide range of primary sources, regardless of their objectivity or factual accuracy, in an attempt to reconstruct the cultural context of their exchanges. The primary sources consulted were the newspapers, journals, pamphlets, proclamations, manifestos, prospectuses and books published in Great Britain and in the 4 Rory Miller, Britain and Latin America (London: Longman, 1993), p.73. 5 Adrian J. Pearce, British Trade with Spanish America, 1763-1808 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), pp. 109, 218, 219, 237, 246-7. 6 Jay Kinsbruner, ‘The Political Influence of the British Merchants Resident in Chile During the O'Higgins Administration, 1817-1823’, The Americas, 29, (1972), p.56. 7 Some exceptions are: Eugenia Roldań Vera, The British Book Trade and Spanish American Independence: Education and Knowledge Transmission of Knowledge in Transcontinental Perspective (Ashgate Publishing, 2003); Karen Racine, ‘Nature and Mother: Foreign residence and the evolution of Andrés Bello American identity London 1810- 1829’ in Ingrid Elizabeth Fey, Karen Racine, eds., Strange Pilgrimages: Exile, Travel, and National Identity in Latin America, 1800-1990's (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.); Karen Racine, ‘A community of purpose: British cultural influence during the Spanish American wars of independence’ in Oliver Marshall ed. English-Speaking Communities in Latin America. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) More recently Karen Racine, ‘ “This England and This Now”: British Cultural and Intellectual Influence in the Spanish American Independence Era’, Hispanic American Historical Review. 90 (2010); Adolfo Prieto, Los viajeros ingleses y la emergencia de la literatura argentina (1820-1850), (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica 2003); From a social approach, see Beatriz Dávilo ‘La élite de Buenos Aires y los comerciantes ingleses: espacios de sociabilidad compartidos.1810-1825’ in Graciela Batticuore, Klaus Gallo, Jorge Myers, eds., Resonancias Románticas. Ensayos sobre la historia de la cultura