During the decades immediately following Mexico's emergence as a sovereign nation, and indeed throughout the nineteenth century, one of the country's most important political and economic relationships was with the United Kingdom. British recognition was a key milestone in the consolidation of Mexican independence, British investment shaped the finances and commerce of the early republic, and British power served, for a time, as a potential counterweight in the region to the rising might of an expansionist United States. Considering the extent of British influence in Mexico during this period, it is perhaps unsurprising that nationalist narratives have tended to characterize Great Britain as one of the rapacious, interventionist foreign powers at whose hands the country suffered so greatly over the course of the nineteenth century. Such an interpretation would appear to coincide neatly with a significant literature on the “informal empire” that Britain is said to have maintained over areas...

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