Abstract
European naval and military intervention in the Rio de la Plata in 1845–8 led to forms of ‘experiencing imperialism’ in South America, an area almost devoid of formal colonialism after the early nineteenth-century wars of emancipation. The British hesitated to use force in Latin America, realising that it would meet sharp resistance and that its material costs likely outweighed its probable gains.1 From the 1890s, the rising power of the United States became an additional deterrent to the use of coercion by European powers, including Britain.2
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Notes
My thanks to Colin Lewis for comments on a draft of this chapter. The assessment of costs versus benefits in Spanish America first occurred in the Castlereagh Memorandum of 1807. See C.K. Webster (1908) Britain and the Independence of Latin America, 1812–1830. Select Documents from the Foreign Office (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 9.
W.W. Kaufmann (1951) British Policy and the Independence of Latin America 1804–1828 (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 44.
M. Hood (1975) Gunboat Diplomacy 1895–1905: Great Power Pressure in Venezuela (London: Allen and Unwin).
J-D. Avenel (1998) L’Affaire du Rio de la Plata (1838–1852) (Paris: Economia).
P. O’Donnell (2010) La gran epopeya. El combate de la Vuelta de Obligado (Buenos Aires: Editorial Norma). Vuelta de Obligado may be translated as ‘Obligado’s Twist’.
Opponents of ‘informal empire’ included H.S. Ferns (1960) Britain and Argentina in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press), a book that mentions the intervention of 1845 only in passing.
J. Gallagher and R.E. Robinson (1953) ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review, 6:1, 1–15.
D. McLean (1995) War, Diplomacy and Informal Empire. Britain and the Republics of La Plata, 1836–1853 (London: British Academic Press).
David Rock (2008) ‘The British in Argentina: From Informal Empire to Postcolonialism’, in M. Brown (ed.) Informal Empire in Latin America. Culture, Commerce and Capital (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing), pp. 49–77.
J.F. Cady (1929) Foreign Intervention in the Rio de la Plata 1838–1850. A Study of French, British, and American Policy in Relation to the Dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).
J. Darwin (2009) The Empire Project: the Rise and Fall of the British World System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 3.
J. Lynch (1981) Argentine Caudillo. Juan Manuel de Rosas (New York: Oxford University Press).
G. Di Meglio (2007) jMueran los salvajes unitarios! La Mazorca y la política en tiempos de Rosas (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana).
Quoted in P.I. Cain and A.G. Hopkins (2002) British Imperialism, 1688–2000, 2nd edn (Edinburgh and London: Longman), p. 100.
Jürgen Schneider (1977) ‘Le commerce français avec l’Amérique Latine pendant l’âge de l’independance’, Revista de Historia de América, 84, 63–87.
Sir Woodbine Parish (1839) Buenos Ayres, and the Provinces of the Rio de la Plata; Their Present State, Trade, and Debt; with Some Account from the Original Documents of the Progress of Geographical Discovery in Those Parts of South America During the Last Sixty Years (London: J. Murray), p. 396 passim.
V.B. Reber(1979) British Mercantile Houses in Buenos Aires, 1810–1880 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
D. Rock (2013) ‘Porteño Liberals and Imperialist Emissaries in the Rio de la Plata: Rivadavia and the British’, in M. Brown and G. Paquette (eds.) Connections after Colonialism: Europe and Latin America in the 1820s (Alabama: University of Alabama Press).
W. MacCann (1853, 1971) Two Thousand Miles’ Ride Through the Argentine Provinces (New York: Ams Press), Vol. I, pp. 6–100.
Maxine Hanon places Los Veinte Cinco Ombúes on land owned by John Davidson, a Scots immigrant who arrived in 1832. M. Hanon (2005) Diccionario de britanicos en Buenos Aires. (Primera epoca) (Buenos Aires), p. 256. The ombú is the large evergreen bush of the Argentine pampas.
J. Robson (2000) ‘Faith Tried Hard’, in I.A.D. Stewart (ed.) From Caledonia to the Pampas: Two Accounts by Early Scottish Emigrants to the Argentine (East Lothian, Scotland: Tuckwell Press).
Enclosure in Ouseley to FO 30 May, 1845 FO 6/123. The anonymous memorandum to the British envoy is reproduced in Wilbur Devereux Jones (February 1960) ‘The Argentine British Colony in the Time of Rosas’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 1, 90–7.
R.D. Keynes (ed.) (1988) Darwin’s Beagle Diary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 88.
F. Arocena (2003) William Henry Hudson: Life, Literature, and Science (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Co.), p. 8 refers to Hudson living on ‘cultural frontiers’.
W.H. Hudson (1945) Far Away and Long Ago. Foreword by John Galsworthy (London: T.M. Dent and Sons), pp. 112, 126.
Quoted in D. Miller (1990) W.H. Hudson and the Elusive Paradise (New York: St Martin’s Press), p. 108. Expressions anglicising platense Spanish are ‘no caste or class difference divides them’ and ‘warm current of sympathy’.
Dennis Shrubsall and Pierre Coustillas (2007) W.H. Hudson. The First Literary Environmentalist: 1841–1922. A Critical Survey (Lewiston: E. Mellen Press).
W.H. Hudson (2002) The Purple Land. Being the Narrative of One Richard Lamb’s Adventures in the Banda Oriental, in South America as Told by Himself (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), p. 244.
R. Curle (ed.) (1941) W.H. Hudson’s Letters to R.B. Cunninghame Graham (London: The Golden Cockerel Press), p. 71.
Peter Winn (1994) Inglaterra y la Tierra Purpúrea 1806–1880 (Montevideo: Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación), pp. 66–70.
P. Sims (2001) ‘Crisis and Speculation: British Merchants and the Uruguayan Civil war, 1839–1851’, Paper presented at the European Historical Economics Conference, Dublin.
José Luis Bustamante (1849, 1942) Los cinco errores capitales de la intervención anglo-francesa en el Plata (Buenos Aires: Solar).
L.B. Mackinnon (1848) Steam Warfare on the Parana: a Narrative of Operations, by the Combined Squadrons of England and France, in Forcing a Passage up that River (London: Charles Ollier), Vol. I, p. 1.
T. Baines (1845) Observations on the Present State of the Affairs of the River Plate (Liverpool: Liverpool Times Office), pp. 9–10.
K. Warren (1998) Steel, Ships and Men: Cammell Laird, 1824–1993 (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press), pp. 30–1.
On the impact of the intervention on Urquiza, see B. Poucel (1864) Les Otages de Durazno. Souvenirs du Rio de la Plata pendant l’Intervention Anglo-Française de 1845–1851 (Paris: Achille Faure), p. 68.
T. Whigham (1991) The Politics of River Trade. Tradition and Development in the Upper Plata., 1780–1870 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press), p. 62.
B. Bosch (1970) Urquiza y su tiempo (Buenos Aires: Editorial de la Universidad de Buenos Aires).
The view presented here opposes the claim that trade from the upper Paraná (Corrientes and Paraguay) ‘increased’ in the aftermath of the forcing of the Rio Paraná. For that argument, see D. McLean (September 2007) ‘Trade, Politics and the Navy in Latin America: The British in the Paraná, 1845–1846’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 35:3, 351–37.
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Rock, D. (2013). British Communities and Foreign Intervention in Nineteenth-Century South America: The Rio de la Plata in the 1840s. In: Farr, M., Guégan, X. (eds) The British Abroad Since the Eighteenth Century, Volume 2. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304186_9
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