The sources in this volume focus on Great Britain’s moral, financial, and diplomatic interventions and ambitions in Latin America. It begins during the wars of independence spanning 1810-1825, when Foreign Secretary George Canning prematurely declared, "Spanish America is free; and if we do not mismanage our affairs sadly, she is English." The independence movements of the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies, as well as their ancient past, inspired Romantic writers such as Anna Letitia Barbauld and spurred British military support and political debate, as attested by mercenary Richard Vowell’s Campaigns and Cruises in Venezuela and James Mill's "Emancipation of Spanish America."

The first full-length survey of Britain's role in Latin America as a whole from the early 1800s to the 1950s, when influence in the region passed to the United States. Rory Miller examines the reasons for the rise and decline of British influence, and reappraises its impact on the Latin American states. Did it, as often claimed, circumscribe their political autonomy and inhibit their economic development? This sustained case study of imperialism and dependency will have an interest beyond Latin American specialists alone.

Covers British trade with the republics of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay.

How the legacy of monarchical empires shaped Britain, France, Spain, and the United States as they became liberal entities Historians view the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a turning point when imperial monarchies collapsed and modern nations emerged. Treating this pivotal moment as a bridge rather than a break, The Imperial Nation offers a sweeping examination of four of these modern powers—Great Britain, France, Spain, and the United States—and asks how, after the great revolutionary cycle in Europe and America, the history of monarchical empires shaped these new nations. Josep Fradera explores this transition, paying particular attention to the relations between imperial centers and their sovereign territories and the constant and changing distinctions placed between citizens and subjects. Fradera argues that the essential struggle that lasted from the Seven Years’ War to the twentieth century was over the governance of dispersed and varied peoples: each empire tried to ensure domination through subordinate representation or by denying any representation at all. The most common approach echoed Napoleon’s “special laws,” which allowed France to reinstate slavery in its Caribbean possessions. The Spanish and Portuguese constitutions adopted “specialness” in the 1830s; the United States used comparable guidelines to distinguish between states, territories, and Indian reservations; and the British similarly ruled their dominions and colonies. In all these empires, the mix of indigenous peoples, European-origin populations, slaves and indentured workers, immigrants, and unassimilated social groups led to unequal and hierarchical political relations. Fradera considers not only political and constitutional transformations but also their social underpinnings. Presenting a fresh perspective on the ways in which nations descended and evolved from and throughout empires, The Imperial Nation highlights the ramifications of this entangled history for the subjects who lived in its shadows.

http://dx.doi.org/10.12946/gplh3 http://www.epubli.de/shop/buch/48746 "Spanish colonial law, derecho indiano, has since the early 20th century been a vigorous subdiscipline of legal history. One of great figures in the field, the Argentinian legal historian Víctor Tau Anzoátegui, published in 1997 his Nuevos horizontes en el estudio histórico del derecho indiano. The book, in which Tau addressed seminal methodological questions setting tone for the discipline’s future orientation, proved to be the starting point for an important renewal of the discipline. Tau drew on the writings of legal historians, such as Paolo Grossi, Antonio Manuel Hespanha, and Bartolomé Clavero. Tau emphasized the development of legal history in connection to what he called “the posture superseding rational and statutory state law.” The following features of normativity were now in need of increasing scholarly attention: the autonomy of different levels of social organization, the different modes of normative creativity, the many different notions of law and justice, the position of the jurist as an artifact of law, and the casuistic character of the legal decisions. Moreover, Tau highlighted certain areas of Spanish colonial law that he thought deserved more attention than they had hitherto received. One of these was the history of the learned jurist: the letrado was to be seen in his social, political, economic, and bureaucratic context. The Argentinian legal historian called for more scholarly works on book history, and he thought that provincial and local histories of Spanish colonial law had been studied too little. Within the field of historical science as a whole, these ideas may not have been revolutionary, but they contributed in an important way to bringing the study of Spanish colonial law up-to-date. It is beyond doubt that Tau’s programmatic visions have been largely fulfilled in the past two decades. Equally manifest is, however, that new challenges to legal history and Spanish colonial law have emerged. The challenges of globalization are felt both in the historical and legal sciences, and not the least in the field of legal history. They have also brought major topics (back) on to the scene, such as the importance of religious normativity within the normative setting of societies. These challenges have made scholars aware of the necessity to reconstruct the circulation of ideas, juridical practices, and researchers are becoming more attentive to the intense cultural translation involved in the movement of legal ideas and institutions from one context to another. Not least, the growing consciousness and strong claims to reconsider colonial history from the premises of postcolonial scholarship expose the discipline to an unseen necessity of reconsidering its very foundational concepts. What concept of law do we need for our historical studies when considering multi-normative settings? How do we define the spatial dimension of our work? How do we analyze the entanglements in legal history? Until recently, Spanish colonial law attracted little interest from non-Hispanic scholars, and its results were not seen within a larger global context. In this respect, Spanish colonial law was hardly different from research done on legal history of the European continent or common law. Spanish colonial law has, however, recently become a topic of interest beyond the Hispanic world. The field is now increasingly seen in the context of “global legal history,” while the old and the new research results are often put into a comparative context of both European law of the early Modern Period and other colonial legal orders. In this volume, scholars from different parts of the Western world approach Spanish colonial law from the new perspectives of contemporary legal historical research."

From the Preface by Bradford Burns:If this essay succeeds, it will open an interpretive window providing a different perspective of Latin America's recent past. At first glance, the view might seem to be of the conventional landscape of modernization, but I hope a steady gaze will reveal it to be far vaster and more complex. For one thing, rather than enumerating the benefits accruing to Latin America as modernization became a dominant feature of the social, economic, and political life of the region, this essay regards the imposition of modernization as the catalyst of a devastating cultural struggle and as a barrier to Latin America's development. Clearly if a window to the past is opened by this essay, then so too is a new door to controversy. After most of the nations of Latin America gained political independence, their leaders rapidly accelerated trends more leisurely under way since the closing decades of the eighteenth century: the importation of technology and ideas with their accompanying values from Western Europe north of the Pyrenees and the full entrance into the world's capitalistic marketplace. Such trends shaped those new nations more profoundly than their advocates probably had realized possible. Their promoters moved forward steadfastly within the legacy of some basic institutions bequeathed by centuries of Iberian rule. That combination of hoary institutions with newer, non-Iberian technology, values, and ideas forged contemporary Latin America with its enigma of overwhelming poverty amid potential plenty. This essay emphasizes that the victory of the European oriented ruling elites over the Latin American folk with their community values resulted only after a long and violent struggle, which characterized most of the nineteenth century. Whatever advantages might have resulted from the success of the elites, the victory also fastened two dominant and interrelated characteristics on contemporary Latin America: a deepening dependency and the declining quality of life for the majority.

The British Empire, wrote Adam Smith, 'has hitherto been not an empire, but the project of an empire' and John Darwin offers a magisterial global history of the rise and fall of that great imperial project. The British Empire, he argues, was much more than a group of colonies ruled over by a scattering of British expatriates until eventual independence. It was, above all, a global phenomenon. Its power derived rather less from the assertion of imperial authority than from the fusing together of three different kinds of empire: the settler empire of the 'white dominions'; the commercial empire of the City of London; and 'Greater India' which contributed markets, manpower and military muscle. This unprecedented history charts how this intricate imperial web was first strengthened, then weakened and finally severed on the rollercoaster of global economic, political and geostrategic upheaval on which it rode from beginning to end.