The Forms of Informal Empire: Narrating British and Latin American Relations, 1810-1900

"The Forms of Informal Empire: Narrating British and Latin American Relations, 1810-1900" expands beyond traditional empire studies to reveal transformative interactions between Great Britain and the southern Americas. When Latin America broke free from Spain at the turn of the nineteenth century it was re-subjugated to British financial imperialism, or informal empire, radically redrawing the Atlantic networks of commerce, travel, and power. I argue that the early discourses of informal empire relied on a paradoxical notion of freedom: Britain had to argue for Latin America to be free in order to re-subject it to financial control. Competing discourses---the clamor to make Latin America simultaneously more free and less free---thus emerged as the very structure of British-Latin American relations and of British informal empire itself. By reading canonical British authors such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Anthony Trollope, and H. Rider Haggard alongside prominent Latin American thinkers Simon Bolivar and Vicente Lopez in their native Spanish, I show that writers of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry encountered formal challenges in telling this paradoxical story, which seemed to both progress toward freedom and regress toward dependence. I argue that they deployed experimental and strained narrative forms as they struggled to re-conceptualize "freedom" in a new Atlantic world defined by both postcolonial liberation and the subjugating forces of global capital. This project makes an interdisciplinary intervention in transatlantic studies, which has typically been defined by monolingual approaches. I use literary methods to study financial imperialism as it takes on narrative forms and becomes visible in the narrative forms of literature. My methods therefore build on theoretical work in new formalism as well as the classic arguments of Homi Bhabha and Hayden White, who show that political formations are made legible via narrative. Although many humanist critics have viewed the progress of capital as totalizing and inevitable, my focus on the dual---and dueling---narratives of informal empire shows that an Atlantic community of British and Latin American authors developed complex narrative techniques to expose an outside to the terms of this imperial discourse.