Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (review)

In this brief work, Aguirre makes a compelling case for how Mexico and Central America operated in the Victorian imagination: as sites of conquest, as sites of informal empire. Admirably seeking to widen the spectrum of materials available to the literary critic beyond novels and poetry to anything found in an archive – newspapers, travelogues, scientific tracts, dispatches, and advertisements, for starters – Aguirre delivers a rich historical narrative of how Britons, private citizens and public servants alike, sought out and transported ancient artifacts to London for display in museums, private collections and exhibitions. This series of movements worked a vicious cycle of imperial desire: entrepreneurs turned their imperial/capitalist gaze towards Mexico, they procured items and sponsored London exhibitions to invite interest in investment, curious metropolitan spectators coveted these ancient artifacts because they fed into a vision of Britons as conquerors, this encouraged further exploitation of the area. An opening chapter about ancient Mexican pieces on display at the Egyptian Hall in 1824 showcases this pattern, and it is more or less applied for the remaining chapters: one on panoramas and the visualization of conquest, another on the culture of imperial bureaucracy and a failed attempt to transport a large Mayan structure to London in the 1850s, one on racial theory and two undersized “Aztec” children who were exhibited in London on and off for thirty years, and finally a short conclusion on H. Rider Haggard and imperial nostalgia in the 1890s. The author also highlights moments when Mexican elites sought to impede the flow of artifacts to Europe by means of legal intervention, using British legalistic discourse against the informal colonizers as it were. The text is punctuated with close to thirty diagrams and photographs depicting spectaculars and museum displays; they compliment the material very well and if Aguirre had spent time performing “deep” readings of these images alongside his written-text analysis this would have cemented his case, to be sure.

There is an irksome teleology and periodism operating throughout the piece that, among other things, works to flatten out shifts in imperial ideology and culture that occurred between 1824 and 1894. It is as if British imperialism was fully-formed by the 1820s, able to distinguish between formal and informal technologies of rule, and operated seamlessly over the course of the nineteenth century. Scholars interested in tracking cultural hybridity not only in colonial sites but also in the metropole will likely be somewhat disappointed by the author’s characterization of the relationship between Mexican goods and imperial desire as a complete imposition of one (imperial) set of meanings over another (indigenous) set (35) instead of an appropriation of artifact and meaning, however incomplete the translation. We do not get a rich sense of how Victorian culture was made, challenged, and remade as a result of contact with Central America (or any other colonial or semi-colonial site, for that matter); instead, Aguirre shows, in ways that those who have been reading works like Annie Coombes’ Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) will already be comfortable with, that Mexico was definitely a part of what is by now a familiar reading of the British imperial imagination. There are two important exceptions to this rule. One occurs within the “Freak Show” chapter when the author briefly discusses how knowledges about the mestizo and racial hybridity in Central America challenged racist thinkers such as Robert Knox, J.B. Davis and James Hunt. The second is a less-engrossing discussion of how discourse shifted from viewing Mexico as a site of potential investment to one of lost opportunity vis-à-vis the rise of American influence in the area. Many will be heartened by Aguirre’s introductory promises to shed new light on the relationship between British and American imperialisms, as undoubtedly the two put pressure on one another in the nineteenth century, but his vague depiction of this relationship later in...