In the previous two chapters we have charted the development of Romantic-era Britain's principal strategy for asserting its right to Spanish America, a fundamentally proprietary rhetoric constructed around the figure of affective and cultural British-Spanish American similitude. As I have argued, this assertion of entitlement through similarity – however contrived or duplicitous – functioned to allay late eighteenth-century Britain's anxiety regarding its increasingly aggressive Spanish American activities by representing them as natural, benevolent, and desirable to the Spanish Americans themselves. As Britain moved toward more overtly colonialist designs on Spanish America in the years following the outbreak of war with Spain in 1796, the rhetorical repertoire supporting claims of British-Spanish American similitude predictably expanded. Less foreseeable, however, were the self-implicating ways in which this repertoire developed, and the apparently nihilistic ends to which the resemblances between Britain and the American victims of the Spanish conquest would be taken. The purpose of the present chapter is to analyze the ways in which the discourse of British-Spanish American identity was both deployed and critically strained in Robert Southey's transatlantic poem Madoc (1805), a work that presents a powerful critique of colonial violence yet ultimately asserts Britain's claim to Spanish America in much more extreme terms than those employed by earlier writers such as Helen Maria Williams or Richard Brinsley Sheridan.