The Forms of Informal Empire by Jessie Reeder )

The Forms of Informal Empire by Jessie Reeder )

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.

The history of the informal British empire as recounted by Jessie Reeder is an exciting narration of the intense, complex and original work of persuasion – and self-persuasion – vis-à-vis the possibility that Latin America could be both free and dependent, a persuasion which involved all the main actors, albeit in different ways
—Laura Fotia, Journal of European Economic History

Jessie Reeder is an assistant professor of English at Binghamton University.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781421438078
ISBN 10	1421438070
Title	The Forms of Informal Empire
Author	Jessie Reeder )
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Johns Hopkins University Press
Year published	2020-08-18
Number of pages	288
Prizes	Winner of Sonya Rudikoff Prize 2021 (United States)
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.