Spanish 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 dealings'Britain. 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.
InThe 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 empire'progress and family'grew strained under the contradictory logic of an informal empire. By reading a variety of texts in English and Spanish'including Simon Bolívar's letters and essays, poetry by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and novels by Anthony Trollope and Vicente Fidel Lopez- Reeder challenges the conventional wisdom that informal empire was simply an extension of Britain's vast formal empire. In her compelling formalist account of the structures of imperial thought, informal empire emerges as a divergent, intractable concept throughout the nineteenth-century Atlantic world.
The Forms of Informal Empiregoes where previous studies of informal empire and the British nineteenth century have not, offering nuanced and often surprising close readings of British and Latin American texts in their original languages. Reeder's comparative approach provides a new vision of imperial power and makes a forceful case for expanding the archive of British literary studies.
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Freedom and Empire in the Nineteenth CenturyPart I. Progress and Informal Empire, 1808-1875: Sequence, Protagonist, Paradox1. (In)dependence: Simón Bolívar and the Forms of Romantic Progress2. ""Dependent Kings"": Anna Barbauld and a Paradox Emerging3. The Collapse of Historical Telos: Anthony Trollope and Victorian Informal EmpirePart II. Family and Informal Empire, 1840-1926: Origin, Relation, Hybridity4. Re-membering the Nation: Vicente López and the Consolidation of Informal Empire5. The Antagonism of Valid Fiancées: Haggard and Informal Empire at the Fin de Siècle6. Where Progress and Family (Fail to) Meet: William Henry Hudson and the Industrialization of the PampasCodaNotesBibliographyIndex
Sharply written, lucidly argued, and intellectually confident, The Forms of Informal Empire will help us to resituate the British world and its cultural forms in their full, properly global framework.Nathan K. Hensley,author of Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty
