An ambitious comparative study of British and Latin American literature produced across a century of economic colonization. Winner of the Sonya Rudikoff Prize by the Northeast Victorian Studies Association Spanish colonization of Latin America came to an end in the early nineteenth century as, one by one, countries from Bolivia to Chile declared their independence. But soon another empire exerted control over the region through markets and trade dealings—Britain. Merchants, developers, and politicians seized on the opportunity to bring the newly independent nations under the sway of British financial power, subjecting them to an informal empire that lasted into the twentieth century. In The Forms of Informal Empire, Jessie Reeder reveals that this economic imperial control was founded on an audacious conceptual paradox: that Latin America should simultaneously be both free and unfree. As a result, two of the most important narrative tropes of empire—progress and family—grew strained under the contradictory logic of an informal empire. By reading a variety of texts in English and Spanish—including Simón Bolívar's letters and essays, poetry by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and novels by Anthony Trollope and Vicente Fidel López—Reeder challenges the conventional wisdom that informal empire was simply an extension of Britain's vast formal empire. In her compelling formalist account of the structures of imperial thought, informal empire emerges as a divergent, intractable concept throughout the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. The Forms of Informal Empire goes where previous studies of informal empire and the British nineteenth century have not, offering nuanced and often surprising close readings of British and Latin American texts in their original languages. Reeder's comparative approach provides a new vision of imperial power and makes a forceful case for expanding the archive of British literary studies.

Informal empire is a key mechanism of control that explains much of the configuration of the modern world. This book traces the broad outline of westernization through elite formations around the world in the modern era. It explains why the world is western and how formal empire describes only the tip of the iceberg of British and American power.

Based on five years of archival research, this book offers a radical reinterpretation of Britain and Spain’s relationship during the growth, apogee and decline of the British Empire. It shows that from the early nineteenth century Britain turned Spain into an ‘informal’ colony, using its economic and military dominance to achieve its strategic and economic ends. Britain’s free trade campaign, which aimed to tear down the legal barriers to its explosive trade and investment expansion, undermined Spain’s attempts to achieve industrial take-off, demonstrating that the relationship between the two countries was imperial in nature, and not simply one of unequal national power. Exploring five key moments of crisis in their relations, from the First Carlist War in the 1830s to the Second World War, the author analyses Britain’s use of military force in achieving its goals, and the consequences that this had for economic and political policy-making in Spain. Ultimately, the Anglo-Spanish relationship was an early example of the interaction between industrial power and colonies, formal and informal, that characterised the post-World War Two period. An insightful read for anyone researching the British Empire and its colonies, this book offers an innovative perspective by closely examining the volatile relationship between two European powers.

Volume two of the acclaimed three-volume series on modern Japanese colonialism and imperialism This book brings together essays by leading experts on the history of Japan to examine the period from 1895 to 1937 when Japan’s economic, social, political, and military influence in China expanded so rapidly that it supplanted the influence of competing Western powers. They discuss how Japan’s informal empire emerged in China after Japan entered the Treaty Port system in 1895 and how it shaped Japan’s own internal development. How did Japan’s informal empire expand in size and importance so that Japanese economic and security interests became heavily dependent on China? What influence did Japanese business groups, China experts, and military have on their government’s China policy? How did the Japanese in China deal with the threatening rise of Chinese nationalism? Exploring these and other questions, these essays show how the pursuit of an informal empire in China played a profound role in the emergence of modern Japan. The contributors are Banno Junji, Barbara J. Brooks, Alvin D. Coox, Peter Duus, Albert Feuerwerker, Kitaoka Shin’ichi, Sophia Lee, Mizoguchi Toshiyuki, Ramon H. Myers, Nakagane Katsuji, Mark R. Peattie, Douglas R. Reynolds, and William D. Wray. This is the second volume of a series on modern Japanese colonialism and imperialism. Volume one is The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945. Volume three is The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945.

This volume is an interdisciplinary interrogation of the concept of British 'informal empire' in Latin America. It builds upon recent advances in the historiography of imperialism and studies of the nineteenth-century modern world, most obviously the work of Ann Stoler, Catherine Hall and C.A. Bayly. Combining a comparative perspective with the juxtaposition of political economy, cultural history, gendered and postcolonial approaches, and by proposing and debating alternative explanatory models, the book breathes new life into the flagging concept of 'informal empire'. It illuminates the study of British imperialism, from which Latin America is usually conspicuous only by its absence, and provides a broad and sound basis for interpreting the complex processes of nation-building and state-formation in Latin America. The book includes essays by scholars who have been shaping the debate for several decades, alongside work by a younger generation of researchers keen to re-conceptualise and re-assess the roles of capital, commerce and culture in shaping informal empire.

This book explores French imperialism in Latin America in the nineteenth century, taking Mexico as a case study. The standard narrative of nineteenth-century imperialism in Latin America is one of US expansion and British informal influence. However, it was France, not Britain, which made the most concerted effort to counter US power through Louis-Napoléon’s military intervention in Mexico, begun in 1862, which created an empire on the North American continent under the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian. Despite its significance to French and Latin American history, this French imperial project is invariably described as an “illusion”, an “adventure” or a “mirage”. This book challenges these conclusions and places the French intervention in Mexico within the context of informal empire. It analyses French and Mexican ideas about monarchy in Latin America; responses to US expansion and the development of anti-Americanism and pan-Latinism; the consolidation of Mexican conservatism; and, finally, the collaboration of some Mexican elites with French imperialism. An important dimension of the relationship between Mexico and France, explored in the book, is the transatlantic and transnational context in which it developed, where competing conceptions of Mexico and France as nations, the role of Europe and the United States in the Americas and the idea of Latin America itself were challenged and debated.

As economic, social and environmental connections among states have grown stronger and denser in the last decades, new levels and types of governance have emerged. The process of globalization, while not entirely new, has created new challenges for policymakers attempting to reap its benefits and manage its effects. This volume pulls together work on global governance that examines these challenges and looks at the patterns of governance that emerge. The work is organized into six sections. The first introduces concepts crucial to the analysis of global governance, including representation, efficiency, and hierarchy. The next two sections turn to specific patterns of governance in two realms, security and economic affairs respectively. The fourth section examines legal dimensions of governance. The fifth section concentrates on the impact of global governance on domestic politics, while the sixth looks at how concepts of norms and legitimacy structure our understanding of governance. Overall, this collection reveals a rich scholarly understanding of globalization, governance, and institutions that builds on deep theoretical roots while shedding light on major policy issues.

Although empires have shaped the political development of virtually all the states of the modern world, "imperialism" has not figured largely in the mainstream of scholarly literature. This book seeks to account for the imperial phenomenon and to establish its importance as a subject in the study of the theory of world politics. Michael Doyle believes that empires can best be defined as relationships of effective political control imposed by some political societies--those called metropoles--on other political societies--called peripheries. To build an explanation of the birth, life, and death of empires, he starts with an overview and critique of the leading theories of imperialism. Supplementing theoretical analysis with historical description, he considers episodes from the life cycles of empires from the classical and modern world, concentrating on the nineteenth-century scramble for Africa. He describes in detail the slow entanglement of the peripheral societies on the Nile and the Niger with metropolitan power, the survival of independent Ethiopia, Bismarck's manipulation of imperial diplomacy for European ends, the race for imperial possession in the 1880s, and the rapid setting of the imperial sun. Combining a sensitivity to historical detail with a judicious search for general patterns, Empires will engage the attention of social scientists in many disciplines.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.

Shows how domestic politics creates incentives for political actors to surrender sovereignty to outside powers.