Description
Book SynopsisAn ambitious comparative study of British and Latin American literature produced across a century of economic colonization. Winner of the Sonya Rudikoff Prize by the Northeast Victorian Studies AssociationSpanish colonization of Latin America came to an end in the early nineteenth century as, one by one, countries from Bolivia to Chile declared their independence. But soon another empire exerted control over the region through markets and trade dealingsBritain. Merchants, developers, and politicians seized on the opportunity to bring the newly independent nations under the sway of British financial power, subjecting them to an informal empire that lasted into the twentieth century. In The Forms of Informal Empire, Jessie Reeder reveals that this economic imperial control was founded on an audacious conceptual paradox: that Latin America should simultaneously be both free and unfree. As a result, two of the most important narrative tropes of empireprogress and familygrew strained unde
Trade ReviewThe history of the informal British empire as recounted by Jessie Reeder is an exciting narration of the intense, complex and original work of persuasion – and self-persuasion – vis-à-vis the possibility that Latin America could be both free and dependent, a persuasion which involved all the main actors, albeit in different ways.
—Laura Fotia,
Journal of European Economic History Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction. Freedom and Empire in the Nineteenth Century
Part I. Progress and Informal Empire, 1808-1875: Sequence, Protagonist, Paradox
Chapter 1. (In)dependence: Simón Bolívar and Revolutionary Forms of Progress
Chapter 2. "Dependant Kings": Anna Barbauld and a Paradox Deterred
Chapter 3. Anthony Trollope and the Collapse of Historical Telos
Part II. Family and Informal Empire, 1840-1926: Origin, Generation, Relation, Hybridity
Chapter 4. Vicente Fidel López Re-members the Nation
Chapter 5. H. Rider Haggard and the Antagonism of Valid Fiancées
Chapter 6. Where Progress and Family (Almost) Meet: William Henry Hudson and the Industrialization of the Pampas
Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index
