Paradoxical Imperialism: A New Reading of Informal Empire

Jessie Reeder. The Forms of Informal Empire: Britain, Latin America, and Nineteenth-Century Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2020. 277 pp. ISBN 978-1-4214-3807-8

The story of the Latin American nineteenth century is, in many ways, a British one, just as the story of British capitalism is in many ways a Latin American one. After the wars of independence, the commercial links between Great Britain and the former Spanish colonies, long pursued clandestinely, grew deeper and more formalized. Though Britain had offered only unofficial support for Latin American independence, going forward, Britain would enthusiastically supply experts, investors, eager buyers for Latin American raw materials, and protection for Latin American shipping. While the opening of vast new markets alongside new governments in need of British capital presented an obvious opportunity for British capitalists, the dream of a partnership with Britain was equally seductive to creole elites. These leaders saw in Britain a source of capital, a key trading partner offering to replace Spain, and a beacon of liberalism, parliamentary government, and the rule of law; in short, a bearer of a tradition of rationalism and economic success. Beyond engaging in commercial trading, British investors financed large projects like mining concerns and railroads (some successful, others almost entirely fictitious, to the dismay of their disappointed investors), and sent a steady stream of adventurers, diplomats, and scientists to Latin America.

Such links left their mark on every aspect of culture and society, and this was especially true of literature. What is surprising about Jessie Reeder's book, The Forms of Informal Empire, then, is not that exists, but that it joins so few other comparative, systematic explorations of the literary links between Britain and Latin America undertaken in the discipline of English studies. Reeder takes the idea of informal empire as her main organizing principle, arguing that while this unique practice governed Britain's relations with Latin America throughout the nineteenth century, it was essentially formulated as a paradox: in order to effectively practice informal empire, Britons had to relate to Latin Americans both as citizens of free and sovereign nations whose independence brought them into the international community as equals, and also as subject peoples whose proper place was under the yoke of British commercial domination. Mapping the operations of these contradictory beliefs and grappling with their implications is the main work of Reeder's book, which offers a valuable contribution to scholarship on informal empire as a political and economic phenomenon and to cultural histories of British-Latin American relations more generally.

Reeder divides her book into two sections examining two master narratives of nineteenth century culture: the first, progress, the diachronic and linear view of history that became hegemonic in the wake of the enlightenment, and the second, family, both the actual and metaphorical structures of relation and filiation that governed nineteenthcentury social and political relations. Reeder's aim, as she explains in her coda to the book, is to demonstrate that while accounts of informal empire from both British and Latin American studies have tended to naturalize the eventual success of the informal imperialist project, this move depends on an unexamined presentism that reads the British commercial hegemony and the subsequent neocolonialism of the second half of the twentieth century, as inevitable. Critics of informal empire have tended to ascribe to the project a totalizing power. For Reeder, the antidote to this presentism is a return to critiques of informal empire written not by its historical inheritors but by its contemporaries: viewed in this way, the concept takes on a new contingency, appearing less inevitable and shot through with inconsistencies ripe for unsettling and strategically exploiting.

Reeder's approach owes a great deal to New Formalist methods, and is particularly indebted to the work of Caroline Levine, whose 2015 book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network posited not only literary form but also social form as available to narrativizing and discursive methods of literary critique. Echoing Levine, Reeder...