Contacts, Collisions, and Relationships

Britons and Chileans in the Independence Era, 1806-1831

Bibliographic Data

ID2839036
AuthorsDavid Rock (0000-0003-4919-1023, University of Cambridge, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume100
Issue4
Pages717-718
Publication date2020-11-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-8647131
OpenAlexW3097705155
LanguageEN
Citations received8

During the era of Latin American independence, up to 20,000 British mercenaries and adventurers continent-wide participated in the overthrow of the Spanish colonial empire, while hundreds of British merchants joined Latin American liberal reformers in destroying the colonial commercial system. As Andrés Baeza Ruz recounts, in Chile Lord Thomas Cochrane, the radical Scottish aristocrat, brilliant naval commander, and founder of the Chilean Navy, overshadowed the fighting personnel of British origin. Merchants remained lesser known but were scarcely less active. Navigating Cape Horn or the Strait of Magellan, they sailed cargoes of textiles, ceramics, and hardware into Chile and took silver, when they could obtain it, back to Europe. Several noted British travel writers, pioneering miners, and engineers explored the high Andes in vain pursuit of a Chilean El Dorado.In Chile, the British presence remained primarily maritime, naval, and mercantile, although from 1815 a small and notoriously unruly community of shopkeepers, usually lower on the social scale than merchants, developed in Valparaíso, mostly plying Lancashire mill cloth. As the author describes, educators formed modest schools in Santiago and elsewhere using the monitorial system created by Joseph Lancaster. Missionaries too, who commonly doubled as educators, trafficked Bibles and British Protestantism among outlying towns and rural districts. Baeza Ruz focuses extensively on Cochrane's contribution to the Chilean Navy and on the activities of James Thomson, a famous Scottish missionary, in education and proselytization.Except for the unique figure of Cochrane, the British in Chile at the time of independence largely comprised the same type of people settling elsewhere in Latin America, lower middle-class artisans and former rural tenants mostly originating in the Lancashire textile districts and Lowland Scotland. The themes of “contact” and “collision,” and the synthesis emerging from them, are explored in different ways throughout the book. Baeza Ruz might have emphasized more strongly that with only small numbers of British women migrating to Chile, the necessary conditions for the emergence of a British ethnic community remained absent, unlike in other parts of the continent. In early republican Chile, British culture and British genes underwent near-total absorption, with their residues confined to only a small number of elite Anglo-Chilean families retaining direct contact with the United Kingdom through trade.Baeza Ruz discusses various aspects of Chile's relative low standing in British eyes, including its tardy diplomatic recognition in 1831 as opposed to 1825, when Foreign Secretary George Canning conferred recognition on several Spanish American states. This step became a prerequisite to drawing up a trade treaty and safeguarding the liberty of British residents. As yet, Chile attracted modest British interest because of its political instability and because the discovery of exploitable precious metals proved insufficient to prompt a more developed connection. With an even smaller internal market than neighboring states and having little success in developing new trade in the Pacific, Chile remained a relative backwater. The salience of the Chilean landed interest and the weaknesses of local liberal factions produced a conservative version of the independent Spanish American republics. As another indicator of its relatively marginal position, Chile appeared immune to the pronounced trade cycle of the 1820s that in more commercially developed Buenos Aires fostered an initially stronger British connection. Baeza Ruz distinguishes between British “state” and “non-state” interactions with Chile. The former included the short period following the death of William Pitt the Younger in 1806, when members of the 1806–7 Ministry of All the Talents endorsed plans for an invasion of Chile. In this period, British strategic planners sought ties between South America and the British East India Company, an avid purchaser of the American silver used in trade with China. Chile was thus seen as a potential component of the global mercantile empire linking Britain and India

Adventure · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art history · Colonialism · Economic history · Empire · Independence (probability theory) · Latin Americans · Navy · Political science · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Law

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