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The Forms of Informal Empire: Britain, Latin America and nineteenth-century literature by Jessie Reeder

2021; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cch.2021.0018

1532-5768

Matthew Brown,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Reviewed by: The Forms of Informal Empire: Britain, Latin America and nineteenth-century literature by Jessie Reeder Matthew Brown The Forms of Informal Empire: Britain, Latin America and nineteenth-century literature By Jessie Reeder. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. It has taken me quite a while to review this book, and I apologise for that. A pandemic happened, that's my excuse. But also, the ideas developed in The Forms of Informal Empire took a while to filter through so that I could make sense of them. Initially I struggled to get a handle on the author's close reading of a select corpus of texts spanning the nineteenth century, roughly united around the "contorted rhetoric" (34) of the "recalcitrant discourse" (33) of informal empire. At first, I couldn't quite grasp the point of the argument about how literary form and informal empire were related. Some of the technical vocabulary of literary criticism jarred against my historian's ear. Nevertheless, with time I have come to appreciate just how impressive this book is, casting new light onto the nature of the relationship between Latin America and the rest of the world in the nineteenth century, the period when British influence was felt most strongly in Spain and Portugal's former colonies in the Americas. In the volume I edited in 2008, Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture, commerce and capital, which grew out of a conference in Bristol whose discussions continue to inform my thinking today, the participants agreed that "culture" was by far the least studied of what Alan Knight called the key parts of a workable definition of "informal empire" structured around gold, God, guns and glory, and that it would be a good idea to remedy this. Jennifer French, Charles Jones and Fernanda Peñaloza each wrote excellent chapters on Benito Lynch, Vicente Fidel López and travel writing about Patagonia respectively. Henceforth I went off to study the history of sports in South America, perplexed at their absence from studies of Britons abroad. Jessie Reeder's knowledgeable and astute book goes far beyond what we hoped to achieve. Reeder's close readings demonstrate that cultural products like letters, novels and memoirs have the depth through which we can get closer to the ideological underpinnings of the concept of informal empire. The book hangs an analysis of literary renderings of place, time, family and history upon six case studies: Venezuelan soldier hero and national icon Simón Bolívar, "elder stateswoman of British literature" Anna Laetitia Barbauld, British novelist and civil servant Anthony Trollope, Argentinian politician and novelist Vicente Fidel López, adventurer and author H. Rider Haggard and migrant and author of The Purple Land William Henry Hudson. The aspiration of this selection is to capture something of the diversity of, and transnational nature of, some of the writing produced by and through informal empire. Reeder argues that the influence of Great Britain in post-independence Latin America in the financial, commercial, political and cultural spheres has for too long been viewed as a binary, either "formal" or "informal." Instead, Reeder suggests, "assumptions of continuity between territorial and economic imperialism conceal the audacious way that informal empire actually operated: it could operate only within and around the discourses of liberation and anti-imperialism" (13). Because of this, informal empire is itself "internally conflicted" (11)—at once about power and freedom, and about difference and belonging. Each chapter of the book unpicks the conflicts and contradictions of "formalism," posing interesting questions about the relationship of literature to power. It "makes it possible to see how informal empire disrupted the very foundations of nineteenth-century thought" (27). All of this I found intriguing. The book demonstrates fantastic research, analysis and interpretation, and it opened my eyes to new ways of thinking about a subject about which I had thought myself well informed. It made me pick up Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now again, and the analysis of family and lineage is particularly wonderful, a really useful development of the argument advanced by Doris Sommer in Foundations Fictions. I would take issue around some of the historical generalizations that appear in the work. Some...