During the long nineteenth century, Britain’s influential presence in Latin America encompassed diplomacy, mercenaries, trade, banking, settlement, immigration, and cultural models. Great Britain’s power and success accounts for much of this influence, but the extraordinary diversity of the British presence in terms of its origins, religion, and class was what made it so effective. Witness Buenos Aires merchant Joshua Waddington, born into an Anglo-French family of Catholic faith, who in 1817 moved to Chile, where he became a wealthy landowner and founded an elite family (p. 185). Important as the British presence was, however, it did not endure. In full retreat after 1914, by 1950 it was gone. Its legacy includes sports, schools, churches, surnames, and among some, a sense of distinctive identity.
The present volume is the result of a 1997 London conference that brought together a number of specialists on English-language communities in Latin America. This book is...
