In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture
  • Paul Edison (bio)
Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture, by Robert D. Aguirre; pp. xxix + 198. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, $67.50, $22.50 paper.

What are we to make of the sizeable presence of pre-Columbian antiquities in the British Museum? How and why were these objects transported across the ocean, and what did their presence in London signify? Robert Aguirre's book addresses these questions by situating cultural appropriations and representations of ancient and modern Mexico and Central America in the context of Britain's "informal empire" of commerce and investment in the region. Slim, engaging, and nicely illustrated, Informal Empire is a welcome and significant addition to a neglected dimension of the modern Atlantic world.

Aguirre organizes the book's four chapters around distinct cultural projects. By presenting Mexico, its resources, and cultures as "available for inspection and control," William Bullock's Mexican Gallery of 1824–25 demonstrated the "empire's extractive reach and epistemological mastery" (2). British and American panoramas of Mexico City "suggested the idea of an expanding, limitless empire that was capable . . . of mobilizing the periphery for consumption at home" (41). Aguirre's greatest archival find, the British government's concerted efforts to acquire Mayan antiquities in the 1840s and 1850s, shows that Mayan ruins were coveted not only by scholars at the British Museum but by foreign secretary Palmerston himself, and "served as symbolic markers of the larger influence sought by competing empires in the region" (77). Meanwhile, the two microcephalic "Aztec children" from El Salvador who were brought to Europe as a "freak show" in the 1850s came to stand for Spanish America's racial degeneracy. A coda on "imperial nostalgia" and novelist H. Rider Haggard in the 1890s reflects on the demise of Britain's influence in the region in the face of the growing presence of the United States. [End Page 711]

One of the book's many virtues is its weaving together of elite and mass forms of culture. The author argues, for example, that Bullock's exhibitionary practices straddled "curiosity" (13) and science, while harnessing patriotic enthusiasm (at least in the case of Napoleon's captured carriage). Aguirre analyzes the panorama as both an "instrument of power" (36), much like Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, and a form of mass entertainment. In the chapter on race, he insightfully distinguishes between the maternal handling of the "Aztec children" through "unwanted—and frequently proprietary—touches" (119) in the theater, and their clinical subjection to the cold gaze of medical doctors and anthropologists. Through solid research in the contemporary press, Aguirre gives a vivid sense of the wider reception of these episodes. He moves skillfully among a range of reinforcing discourses within each chapter. For example, he links panoramic vision to travelers' accounts of the Valley of Mexico and to the blind US historian William Prescott's description (1843) of the first conquerors' views of Tenochtitlan, filtered through the conventions of eighteenth-century landscape representation and the sublime. In several chapters, he shows how the British fashioned their own imperial identity by reimagining the Spanish conquest and contrasting its barbarity with their own enlightened and "civilized" methods.

Drawing on the ideas of Bruno Latour and others, Aguirre goes still deeper into the mechanics of culture and empire by asking how objects got translated into discourses of science and power and how information was relayed to and accumulated in the metropole. He therefore investigates such mundane genres as museum catalogues and the diplomatic dispatch. While his argument that imperial overreach resulted in information overflow is not entirely convincing, he makes original and compelling connections between the management of empire (including Palmerston's obsession with punctuation), the "homosocial" (84) world of diplomatic and colonial personnel, and the ultimately unsuccessful bid to acquire Mayan antiquities. Finally, in addition to pointing out that these cultural representations were not "unfailingly hegemonic" and that "the empire could be bungling to the point of failure" (xvii), Aguirre strives to include evidence of Mexican and Central American resistance to this culture of appropriation and display, including the implementation of laws prohibiting the export of...

pdf

Share