While the Spanish and Portuguese colonized Latin America, the British have played a significant role in slavery, wars of independence, politics, lending, investment, railways and football in the region. These have been brought out by the author of the book who has done extensive research and travelled through the South American countries which had been impacted by the British.
Under the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, Spain granted Britain a license to transport African slaves to its Latin American colonies. The London-based South Sea Company bought the contract from the British government for £9.5 million. Under the agreement, the firm could transport 4,800 enslaved Africans a year for the next three decades to Latin American ports. Working with the Royal African Company and protected by the Royal Navy, the South Sea Company trafficked about 42,000 Africans—7,000 of whom died en route.
The defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 left Britain awash with unemployed soldiers—as many as half a million, according to some estimates. Thousands of them decided to fight for the aspirant nations in Spanish-controlled South America. Many were simply mercenaries; others sought adventure or a sense of purpose; and some regarded themselves as freedom fighters. In 1817, a representative of Simón Bolívar, known as the Liberator of South America "(El Libertador) visited London on a recruitment drive. Over the following two years, more than 6,000 men sailed from Britain to fight in Bolivar’s army. They carried supplies of arms and military equipment provided on credit by British merchants.
Bernardo O’Higgins, the Chilean independence leader and the first Head of State, was of Irish origin from his father’s side. He had studied in London and wanted “to make Chile the England of South America”, and he advocated English and Irish immigration as the best guarantee of progressive political institutions in South America.’ O’Higgins championed the adoption of a British-style constitutional system but was ousted in 1823, after a controversial £1 million loan he secured from the British government that came—predictably enough—with decidedly unfavourable repayment terms. He set sail from Valparaíso on a British ship, spending the rest of his days in exile in Peru.
Admiral Thomas was a British naval officer who accepted the invitation to found Chile’s first navy and command it against Spanish forces. The nascent Chilean fleet was modelled on the Royal Navy and heavily staffed with British officers and sailors.
Officially, Britain was neutral during the wars of independence but nevertheless sought to prevent other European nations from militarily aiding Spain. The British government was quick to recognise the independence of the new nations and signed commercial treaties with them to advance British business interests.
In the 1850s, the British South American missionary society set up the first European settlement in Ushuaia to convert the local Yagan tribes into christianity. They had even brought some young members of the tribe to England to teach them English and the local culture and sent them back to their tribes to spread their new faith. The missionaries studied local languages and published dictionaries and books. The Argentine naval ships came much later to Ushuaia in 1884 to claim the region as part of their country.
In the 1880s, Argentina attracted 40–50 per cent of British foreign investment, most of which went into railways, ports, utilities, meat packing and trading. Between 1857 and 1920, more than 60,000 people from Britain came to Argentina. By the 1910s, British railway firms dominated the sector and were among the most valuable companies in Argentina. Opening in 1915, Retiro station in Buenos Aires city was once the hub of the biggest railway network in South America, extending across more than 27,000 miles of track at its peak in the 1940s. The Anglo-Argentine Tramways company built in 1913 Subte, the oldest underground railway in Latin America in Buenos Aires city. But many Argentines regarded railway companies as agents of imperialism and believed the country was being drawn into Britain’s ‘informal empire’.
The first overseas branch of Harrods opened in Buenos Aires in 1914 and once virtually spanned an entire block. It was subsequently sold to a local retailer but retained the iconic name; It closed in 1998, blighted by debts. Despite various attempts to re-open it over the years since, and the occasional temporary exhibition, it remains closed and near derelict.
The British firm Barings gave an exploitative £1 million loan in 1824 to the government in Buenos Aires to operate the city’s water and sewage system, which was originally designed by engineers from Ireland and Britain. The company was later criticized for political and economic meddling, scheming to topple governors and even promoting the 1864–70 War of the Triple Alliance, a devastating conflict between Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay on one side and Paraguay on the other.
Alexander Watson Hutton, brought over the first footballs to Argentina, created the country’s first football pitch and encouraged his pupils to play the game. In 1893, he founded the Argentine Football Association (AFA), one of the oldest in the world outside of the UK. Hutton is called as the father of Argentine football. Many of the early players were British and the country's numerous clubs that exist today had British or Anglo-Argentine founder. The British also introduced Polo, Rugby and even cricket in Argentina.
Today, around 50,000 to 70,000 people in Chubut province of Argentina, have Welsh heritage. As many as 6,000 of these speak the Welsh language.
British banks had partly financed the independence wars of Peru, Bolivia and Chile. Later, the banks used these debts to help British companies to take over local business including nitrate mines and guano trading. The British companies and government had roles in the Pacific war in which Chile grabbed large territories of Bolivia and Peru. This benefitted British robber-baron firms such as Antony Gibbs & Sons, which dominated the nitrate industry for the next forty years.
When the Chilean President José Manuel Balmaceda nationalized the concessions of Liverpool Nitrate Company ( owned by John Thomas North), the British government, along with the British companies intervened and incited a civil war in 1891. The president committed suicide after he was overthrown.
In his epic poetry collection Canto General, Neruda wrote about North, the ‘powerful gringo’, and his dealings with Balmaceda:
The smooth sterling pounds
weave like golden spiders
an English cloth, legitimate,
for my people, a suit tailored
with blood, gunpowder and misery.
Atacama in Chile was one of the most valuable places on earth because of nitrate which accounted for as much as 80 per cent of Chile’s exports. But while the world war prompted a short-term profit surge, it also triggered the collapse of the industry. Germany’s nitrate supplies were cut-off by a British-led blockade during the conflict, which forced the country to seek out alternatives. German Chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch subsequently developed an industrial process that combined nitrogen in the air with hydrogen to produce ammonia, launching the era of artificial fertilisers. After the war, this method proved to be a cheaper and quicker way to supply farmers and arms manufacturers in Europe. This ended the nitrate fortunes of Atacama.
In 1973, the Conservative government of Edward Heath welcomed the Pinochet coup, with Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home writing: ‘For British interests … there is no doubt that Chile under the junta is a better prospect than Allende’s chaotic road to socialism, our investments should do better, our loans may be successfully rescheduled, and export credits later resumed.’ Pinochet became a close ally of Margaret Thatcher, allowing a British surveillance team to use a Chilean military base in Punta Arenas to monitor Argentine air force operations during the Falklands War while also supplying crucial intelligence reports.
Britain had played a crucial role in the creation of an independent Uruguay in 1828. Britain was eager to create a buffer state between the two large warring nations of Brazil and Argentina in order to boost free trade, which, of course, would benefit Britain above all. A British envoy Lord Ponsonby, brokered the peace deal.
The British moved quickly into the independent Uruguay with lending and investment in railways, meat industry and trading. The British also introduced football in Uruguay.
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