Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777-1826: Rewriting Conquest

Robert Southey wasn't exaggerating when he described his fellow British citizens as being "South American mad." In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Spain began to lose hold of its colonies, prompting thousands of British scientists, soldiers, entrepreneurs, and settlers to take advantage of Spanish America. Britain's fascination with the region displayed itself in poems, plays, operas, political tracts, news reportage, travel narratives, and stock market quotations. Creole patriots such as Francisco de Miranda and Andr?s Bello gathered in London to solicit aid for their revolutions while ministers debated tactics for liberating both the peoples and the untapped wealth of Spain's colonies. Through critical reconsiderations of both canonical and lesser-known Romantic texts, from Helen Maria Williams's Peru to Samuel Rogers's The Voyage of Columbus and Byron's The Age of Bronze, Heinowitz reveals the untold story of Britain's Spanish American obsession. Although historians have traditionally characterized Britain's relationship with Spanish America as commercial rather than colonial, this book explores the significant rhetorical overlap between formal and informal strategies of rule. In the absence of a coherent imperial policy regarding Spain's colonies, Britain struggled to justify its actions by asserting that British primacy was authorized by a political, cultural, ethical, and even historical identification with the peoples of Spanish America. By examining the ways in which this discourse was deployed and increasingly interpreted throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Heinowitz demonstrates how British literature about Spanish America redefined the anxieties, ambivalences, and contradictions that characterized Romantic imperialism.