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.

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

Published in conjunction with an exhibition held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Sept. 16, 2013-Jan. 5, 2014.

2017 Bentley Book Prize, World History Association Linking four continents over three centuries, Selling Empire demonstrates the centrality of India--both as an idea and a place--to the making of a global British imperial system. In the seventeenth century, Britain was economically, politically, and militarily weaker than India, but Britons increasingly made use of India's strengths to build their own empire in both America and Asia. Early English colonial promoters first envisioned America as a potential India, hoping that the nascent Atlantic colonies could produce Asian raw materials. When this vision failed to materialize, Britain's circulation of Indian manufactured goods--from umbrellas to cottons--to Africa, Europe, and America then established an empire of goods and the supposed good of empire. Eacott recasts the British empire's chronology and geography by situating the development of consumer culture, the American Revolution, and British industrialization in the commercial intersections linking the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. From the seventeenth into the nineteenth century and beyond, the evolving networks, ideas, and fashions that bound India, Britain, and America shaped persisting global structures of economic and cultural interdependence.

This book presents the unpublished intelligence report “South America”, written in 1822 by Woodbine Parish, clerk at the Foreign Office, Castlereagh's private secretary and later the first British Consul to Buenos Aires. The document is transcribed, analysed and fully contextualised in order to foreground its decisive historical significance. The aim of Parish’s report was to outline British foreign policy and political strategy towards the South American revolutions at the final Congress of the Holy Alliance, held in Verona. Its publication contributes to the ongoing debates on Informal Empire, providing new empirical evidence that will enable us to better understand the social content of the political, economic and cultural relationships established between Britain and Latin America in the first half of the 19th century. The history of the document and of its author introduce the reader to the early stages of British intelligence and diplomacy with respect to an Independent Latin America, revealing the Foreign Office’s powers and limitations. Likewise, they offer an overview of the information about the South American revolutions circulating in London at the time, as well as the mechanisms used by the British government to obtain, classify and publicize this intelligence for political purposes. In this sense, the report makes evident the importance for the British government of knowing a specific historical and geographical reality in order to develop a foreign policy and political strategy. The book reflects on how this knowledge was mediated by class antagonisms and social relations (on a national and international scale) and was shaped by the stages of development of the productive forces in the regions involved. In this sense, studying the Parish family will allow us to more fully understand the role played by the increasingly influential social classes, in particular the merchants and manufacturers, in the development and implementation of a British foreign policy for Latin America.

How did Western imperialism shape the developing world? In Imperialism and the Developing World, Atul Kohli tackles this question by analyzing British and American influence on Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America from the age of the British East India Company to the most recent U.S. war in Iraq. He argues that both Britain and the U.S. expanded to enhance their national economic prosperity, and shows how Anglo-American expansionism hurt economic development in poor parts of the world. To clarify the causes and consequences of modern imperialism, Kohli first explains that there are two kinds of empires and analyzes the dynamics of both. Imperialism can refer to a formal, colonial empire such as Britain in the 19th century or an informal empire, wielding significant influence but not territorial control, such as the U.S. in the 20th century. Kohli contends that both have repeatedly undermined the prospects of steady economic progress in the global periphery, though to different degrees. Time and again, the pursuit of their own national economic prosperity led Britain and the U.S. to expand into peripheral areas of the world. Limiting the sovereignty of other states-and poor and weak states on the periphery in particular-was the main method of imperialism. For the British and American empires, this tactic ensured that peripheral economies would stay open and accessible to Anglo-American economic interests. Loss of sovereignty, however, greatly hurt the life chances of people living in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. As Kohli lays bare, sovereignty is an economic asset; it is a precondition for the emergence of states that can foster prosperous and inclusive industrial societies.

Governance in South America is signified by strategies pursued by state and non-state actors directed to enhancing (some aspect of) their capabilities and powers of agency. It is about the spaces and the practices available, demanded or created to ‘make politics happen’. This framework lends explanatory power to understand how governance has been defined and practiced in South America. Pía Riggirozzi and Christopher Wylde bring together leading experts to explore what demands and dilemmas have shaped understanding and practice of governance in South America in and across the region. The Handbook suggests that governance dilemmas of inequitable and unfulfilled political economic governance in South America have been constant historical features, yet addressed and negotiated in different ways. Building from an introduction to key issues defining governance in South America, this Handbook proceeds to examine institutions, actors and practices in governance focusing on three core processes: evolution of socio-economic and political justice claims as central to the demands of governance; governance frameworks foregrounding particular issues and often privileging particular forms of political practice; and iterative and cumulative processes leading to new demands of governance addressing recognition and identity politics. This Handbook will be a key reference for those concerned with the study of South America, South American political economy, regional governance, and the politics of development.