Redefining Empire

Robert Southey did not exaggerate when he described the England of his day as ‘South American mad.’ From the loss of Britain's North American colonies to the first Spanish American debt crisis and the ensuing London stock market crash of 1825-6, a deep fascination with Spanish America pervaded all aspects of British society. As Spain's hold on its colonies weakened under the weight of domestic pressures and ultramarine revolts, British merchants, miners, scientists, and traders rushed to exploit the mineral wealth and raw materials of Spanish America. Thousands of British soldiers enlisted to aid the colonial independence movements. Travelers flooded the British press with vivid accounts of everything from the famed silver mines of Potosí to the medicinal ‘Jesuits Bark’ of Peru, the social customs of Chile, the fatal earthquakes of Caracas, and the cultivation of logwood on the Mosquito Coast and cochineal in New Spain. The figure of Spanish America displayed itself in poems, plays, operas, cabinets of curiosity, political tracts, news reportage, reviews, stock market quotations, and even in the fashionable ladies' magazines that announced the arrival in London of the ‘Bolivar hat.’ Creole patriots gathered in England to solicit aid for their revolutions, and ministers debated tactics for liberating both the peoples and the untapped wealth of Spain's colonies. The cause of Spanish American independence bridged political gaps, galvanizing ‘intellectual alliances between revolutionaries and reactionaries, mercantilists and proponents of free trade, and champions of colonial expansion together with their detractors.’

Spectacular Projections

During the years 1822–5, Britain experienced a veritable mania for speculation in the newly independent states of Spanish America. An astonished Princess Lieven, wife of the Russian Ambassador in London, exclaimed, ‘You cannot imagine how mad everyone here has gone over the companies in South America. Everybody is buying shares. Everybody, from the lady to the footman, is risking pinmoney or wages in these enterprises.’ This was no exaggeration. In only three years, the new Spanish American governments floated approximately £20 million in bonds while British capitalization of Spanish American mining companies reached over £30 million. As Giorgio Fodor notes, ‘For centuries the silver of Mexico and Peru had inflamed [the] European imagination; now these riches seemed open to British enterprise and capital.’ The reading public was whipped up to a fever pitch by contemporary periodicals' reports of easy and spectacular profits. Encouraging articles followed the transaction of every loan. Information on the potential risks to investors was slim. Foreign works on Spanish America such as those of the Abbé de Pradt and Alexander von Humboldt were translated, republished, and avidly discussed in prominent periodicals such as the Annual Register, the Quarterly Review, and the Edinburgh Review. British newspapers such as The Times, the Morning Chronicle, and the Courier carefully followed the Spanish American independence movements, including in their pages details of each military victory, character descriptions of the revolutionary leaders, projections about the commercial benefits to come, and – what was new for British readers – regular stock and bond quotes.

In 1808, Britain's longstanding rivalry with Spain was interrupted by Napoleon's invasion of the Iberian Peninsula and the forced abdication of both King Charles IV and his heir, Ferdinand VII. For more than a decade, Spain had effectively functioned as a French satellite in the war against Britain. But with Napoleon's invasion, the collapse of the Spanish government, and the formation of loyalist provincial juntas, British-Spanish relations entered a new era. The juntas were immediately embraced by Britain as allies against the French and, suddenly, it served British interests to maintain the Spanish empire intact in order to finance the costs of a war in the mother country and to prevent the colonies from falling into Napoleon's hands. British troops under the command of Arthur Wellesley, poised to sail for Spanish America, were rapidly diverted to the Peninsula. Much to the frustration of Francisco de Miranda and other Spanish American patriots who had long been campaigning in London, official British plans to aid their independence movements seemed to have reached an impasse.

Whereas early nineteenth-century poems such as William Lisle Bowles's The Spirit of Discovery (1804) had frequently asserted ‘British righteousness at the expense of criminalising the Spanish,’ literary works that celebrated the unity of Britain and Spain were now the order of the day.

When Helen Maria Williams embarked on the composition of her ‘epic romance’ Peru (1784), she drew on a formidable tradition of Enlightenment-era writing about Spanish America. Works such as the Abbé Raynal's Histoire philosophique et politique des Deux Indes and William Robertson's History of America had done much to shift eighteenth-century discourse about Spanish America from one that emphasized the moral depravity and greed of the Spanish conquerors to one that defined Spanish America as a site of commercial promise. While both historians sharply criticized the bullionist economy of the Spanish empire, they lauded Bourbon reforms aimed at the opening of trade and the reduction of taxes. Thanks to Spain's recent adoption of more liberal imperial practices, Spanish America was destined to become a principle hub in the spread of universal improvement, thereby proving the moral and political compatibility of free trade and colonialism. This conjunction of liberal economy and rational empire, Raynal and Robertson projected, would not only extend ‘universal benevolence’ to the Spanish colonies, it would also bring a corrupted Europe closer to the social unity and natural sensibility of earlier times, thereby compensating, on both sides of the Atlantic, for the ravages of conquest.

In addition to her acknowledged debt to Raynal and Robertson, Williams's Peru was deeply influenced by Jean-François Marmontel's Les Incas. One sees Marmontel's influence in the names of Williams's characters, in the poem's elevated sentimental tone, and in its attention to the intimate inter-relationships linking each aspect of the Inca empire, from its religion to its laws, and from the emotions of its subjects to Peru's flora and fauna.

The Attraction to Spanish America

In 1811, Venezuela made history as the first Spanish viceroyalty to declare independence. As Spain's hold on its colonies continued to weaken during the following decade and a half, British merchants, miners, scientists, and traders rushed to exploit the mineral wealth and raw materials of Spanish America. Thousands of British soldiers enlisted to aid the revolutionary movements. Travelers flooded the British press with vivid accounts of everything from the famed silver mines of Potosí to the medicinal ‘Jesuits Bark’ of Peru, the fatal earthquakes of Caracas, and the cultivation of logwood on the Mosquito Coast. The figure of Spanish America displayed itself in poems, plays, operas, cabinets of curiosity, political tracts, news reportage, reviews, bond prospectuses, and stock market quotations. Creole patriots gathered in England to solicit aid for their revolutions, ministers debated tactics for liberating both the peoples and the untapped wealth of Spain's rebellious colonies, joint stock companies formed to exploit Spanish America's gold, silver, and pearls, and prominent firms such as Herring, Graham, and Powles contracted loans to the new republics.