British Lions and Mexican Eagles

Paul Garner, Cowdray Professor of Spanish at the University of Leeds, has written a rich and much overdue business biography of Weetman Pearson, the British engineer and oil magnate who became Lord Cowdray in 1910 and viscount in 1917. Although his career involved engineering projects worldwide, Pearson’s work and fortune is linked to Mexico. In recognition of that fact, Pearson endowed a professorship at Leeds for the study of Spanish. It is befitting, then, that Garner decided to examine Pearson’s career in light of a historiography that treats him as the embodiment of Britain’s “informal” empire in Mexico (p. 21). Garner concludes that the historiography, nationalist and with a structuralist bent, misses the trees by focusing on the forest. He argues instead that Pearson was an agent of Mexican development, in its late nineteenth-century Liberal version.Garner gives plenty of credit and historical agency to Mexican actors. It was the Porfirian elite who designed the development plans and hired Pearson in 1889. Pearson worked for them, not for the British. He worked for himself when he struck oil in the twentieth century. By then he was in Parliament (Essex MP from 1895 to 1910). The Mexican Revolution (1910 – 20) and World War I (1914 – 18), however, meant that despite Pearson’s enormous wealth, he could not count on the support of Her Majesty’s government — not what one would expect of the epitome of imperialism. The book follows Pearson’s trajectory in Mexico, meticulously attending to the three actors in question: Pearson, the Mexican elite, and imperial Britain.Garner makes masterful use of the primary sources offered by the Pearson archives and the Foreign Office to track Pearson’s career. With massive public works projects in his resume, Pearson was eminently qualified to eradicate the flooding of Mexico City via the Gran Canal. Pearson was hired in 1889 and finished the drainage in 1897, a feat that won him a contract to rebuild the Tehuantepec Railroad. Garner makes an excellent case that it was President Porfirio Díaz and his minister of finance, José Yves Limantour, who conducted the projects. Garner also does a wonderful job of describing what he terms Mexican “business etiquette” and the “culture of friendship” involved in the process. Those practices would be called graft and corruption by the revolutionaries who exploded in discontent in 1910. Until then, however, it is clear that the Porfirians were much more worried about US imperialism than any threat from Britain. Yet Garner also confirms that the British were not involved in Mexico for charity’s sake: Pearson negotiated with English banks the multimillion-pound loan Mexico needed to pay him for the drainage works, facilitated by the rapprochement in diplomatic relations between the two countries. Such collaboration between a private entrepreneur, the banking system, and the state may not fit the definition of classic imperialism, but it is the kind of arrangement that Mexican historians probably have in mind when they refer to Britain’s relationship to Mexico in that era as “dominion.”The case of oil is similar. Pearson felt abandoned by the British government by 1917. The denouement evolved in stages, however. Britain stuck with Pearson through early 1914, recognizing Victoriano Huerta’s government despite the coup he carried out against Francisco Madero in 1913. Furthermore, when Pearson’s oilmen felt threatened by rebels in early 1914, the British ambassador, Lionel Carden, made gunboats available for their rescue. Although Carden was disgraced for corruption and Pearson distrusted him, facts that Garner uses to distance Carden from Pearson and the government, it is inconceivable that he dispatched gunboats without express consent from London. Military mobilization on behalf of countrymen and women may be within the purview of consular services for nationals abroad, but they may also be interpreted as imperialistic by the host country and its historians.It was World War I, however, that changed the relationship between Pearson and the government he was part of. Not wishing to upset its American allies, the British withdrew support for Pearson when revolutionaries began regulating the oil industry and the United States rushed to aid American companies. The British decided that good relations with the United States were more important than a viscount’s oil company in Mexico — especially when Her Majesty had secured ownership of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. Pearson was affronted further when another man was appointed to head the British air forces in 1917 despite Pearson’s position as interim minister. The imperial connection was definitively waning and would do so further when Pearson sold his Mexican companies to Royal Dutch Shell. No wonder the viscount would be seen as the “Member for Mexico” rather than an agent of imperialism. By focusing on the individual, Garner reached the same conclusion. Yet the structural need not be dismissed altogether. Pearson operated in the context of imperial politics and benefited from them as much as Britain benefited from his entrepreneurship in Mexico. One does not negate the other

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