Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘An Empire in Men's Hearts:’ The Liberal Conquest of Spanish America
- 1 Naturalizing Empire: Helen Maria Williams’s Peru and the British Ascendancy in Spanish America
- 2 Creole Patriotism and the Discourse of Revolutionary Loyalism, 1792–9
- 3 The Allure of the Same: Robert Southey's Welsh Indians and the Rhetoric of Good Colonialism
- 4 ‘Thy World, Columbus, shall be free:’ Visions of Spanish America during the Peninsular War
- 5 Lord Byron's ‘South American Project:’ Aristocratic Radicalism and the Question of Venezuelan Settlement
- 6 The Spanish American Bubble and Britain's Crisis of Informal Empire, 1822–6
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Lord Byron's ‘South American Project:’ Aristocratic Radicalism and the Question of Venezuelan Settlement
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘An Empire in Men's Hearts:’ The Liberal Conquest of Spanish America
- 1 Naturalizing Empire: Helen Maria Williams’s Peru and the British Ascendancy in Spanish America
- 2 Creole Patriotism and the Discourse of Revolutionary Loyalism, 1792–9
- 3 The Allure of the Same: Robert Southey's Welsh Indians and the Rhetoric of Good Colonialism
- 4 ‘Thy World, Columbus, shall be free:’ Visions of Spanish America during the Peninsular War
- 5 Lord Byron's ‘South American Project:’ Aristocratic Radicalism and the Question of Venezuelan Settlement
- 6 The Spanish American Bubble and Britain's Crisis of Informal Empire, 1822–6
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
There can be no field of enterprise so magnificent in promise, so well calculated to raise sanguine hopes, so congenial to the most generous sympathies, so consistent with the best and the highest interests of England, as the vast continent of South America. He must indeed be more than temperate, he must be a cold reasoner, who can glance at those regions and not grow warm.
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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Spanish America and British Romanticism 1777–1826Rewriting Conquest, pp. 158 - 182Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010