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Benjamin Disraeli (1804‒1881): His Lives and Afterlives (Colloque de la SFEVE 25-26 février 2024)
Part 1: Political Lives and Afterlives

Disraeli and South America

Disraeli et l’Amérique Latine
Alex Middleton

Résumés

Cet article s’interroge sur la manière dont Disraeli pensait l’Amérique du Sud. Il affirme que ses théories constitutionnelles et ses schémas de politique mondiale traitent sérieusement des questions soulevées par la région, et en particulier par l’Amérique espagnole. L’engagement de Disraeli vis-à-vis de ces problèmes, affirme l’article, a des implications pour notre compréhension de ses idées politiques internationales et de ses positions en matière de politique étrangère. L’article montre notamment que Disraeli a périodiquement intégré l’Amérique latine dans ses tentatives de se présenter comme un défenseur des intérêts atlantiques de l’Angleterre. Son cas nous permet de commencer à comprendre les liens entre la politique de l’élite britannique et l’« empire informel » dans les zones frontalières géopolitiques de l’Amérique du Sud.

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Texte intégral

Introduction

  • 1 ‘South America’ was the dominant Victorian shorthand for the whole of the region starting at the US (...)
  • 2 As Robert Blake commented, ‘a unique literary debut for a future statesman’: Blake 1982, 4. The Sou (...)

1There are two well-known facts about Disraeli and South America.1 The first is that his earliest published writings, of 1825, were a set of pamphlets about mining speculations in the region.2 The second is that he lost a large chunk of capital investing in those speculations, which complicated his finances—and through them his political career—until the late 1840s. There is no indication in any of the many modern studies of Disraeli that South America made any intellectual impact on his later activities as a politician and a writer.

  • 3 For very recent moves in this direction see however Roca; Schulz and Petersen.
  • 4 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates is cited hereafter as HPD, with the attached number indicating the (...)

2This blind spot reflects wider historiographical tendencies. Existing scholarship practically ignores Latin America as a problem in nineteenth-century British political and intellectual life.3 There is no shortage of work on British diplomacy, travel, and ‘informal imperial’ strategies in the region. But it is hard to find any sense that Latin America held any serious imaginative or argumentative significance in Britain itself, especially after the fleeting high point of George Canning’s celebrated (but, in domestic political terms, still poorly understood) moment calling ‘the New world into existence, to redress the balance of the Old’ in the mid-1820s (Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, second series, 16:397, 12 December 1826).4

3This article argues that South America did matter to Disraeli. It shows that his constitutional theories, and his understanding of international affairs, both dealt in meaningful ways with problems raised by the region, and especially by Spanish America and Mexico. The article suggests that this engagement has implications for how we understand the shape of Disraeli’s thinking about politics overseas, as well as his strategies for navigating the politics of foreign policy. In particular, the article argues that Disraeli was distinctive among his parliamentary contemporaries in integrating South America into his 1840s attempts to project himself as a defender of England’s Atlantic interests.

4The rest of the article does two things. First, it goes back to those half-remembered pamphlets of 1825, puts them in their rhetorical contexts, and attempts to take them seriously as pieces of political argument. It finds various anticipations of themes and theories that would matter to the later Disraeli. Second, the article zooms out to consider South America as part of the landscape of the rest of Disraeli’s political and literary career. It concludes by reflecting on how Disraeli’s distinctive case helps us start to make sense of the developing connections between the most rarefied levels of elite politics, and the world of trade and investment in the geopolitical borderlands of nineteenth century Latin America.

Disraeli’s South American Pamphlets

  • 5 This phase of Disraeli’s life is covered most thoroughly in Ridley. See also Jerman; Blake 1966; Bl (...)
  • 6 This episode is dealt with in detail in Akel.
  • 7 Disraeli to John Gibson Lockhart, ?12 November 1825, Letter 36. Benjamin Disraeli Letters, I, 48-50

5Disraeli wrote three pamphlets on South America. They belong to his early, unsettled years.5 In 1825, the 20-year-old Disraeli, having given up on the idea of a legal career, fell in with his former client, the businessman and financier John Diston Powles. Powles’s main speculations since the 1810s had been related to the Spanish American wars of independence, and included selling arms and ships to Venezuela. By the mid-1820s Powles was preoccupied with South American mining companies, and was making strenuous efforts to promote his ventures in the London press, in close association with the publisher John Murray (Deas). It was under Powles’s auspices that Disraeli wrote his pamphlets, as part of a campaign to boost the reputation of mining stocks. Disraeli was also involved, in the same year, with the founding of a short-lived, internationally minded political newspaper, The Representative.6 He claimed to have been involved in organising South American correspondents for the paper.7 The early numbers of The Representative feature a number of articles about the South American mines, which may have been by Disraeli, not least since they appear to draw on material from his pamphlets. But the history of his connection with the paper as published remains murky—we know that he was out of the enterprise after at most a few issues—and it is not possible to attribute the relevant articles with any certainty. So they are not used here.

6The new world Disraeli entered in 1825 was colourful and fast-changing. France’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula had pulled down Spain and Portugal’s Atlantic empires. As the independence of the new Spanish republics and imperial Brazil became more assured, the prospects for commercial profit came to appear increasingly extraordinary, and South America became a subject of intense British interest. For a few years in the early 1820s, it sat at the centre of a whirlwind of loans, investments, and colonizing schemes, becoming the obvious target for dreamers and chancers aiming to make fortunes. It offered, as such, an attractive opening for a young and lost Disraeli looking to make his way. But South America was also a serious subject for political speculation. English Utilitarians drafted constitutions for the new states; radicals celebrated the collapse of the Iberian empires as heralding the global demise of absolute monarchy; Tories foretold the failure of the region’s republican experiments, and offered alternative stories about how liberal constitutions could be made robust. Disraeli had to pick his way through an expansive web of interests and projects.

7By the mid-1820s, it was mining speculations that pumped blood around this world. Already by 1825, a vast mass of publication had been devoted to the promotion and explosion of South American mining in general, and of particular mines in particular republics. So much is well known. But historians have not been much interested in the question of how the purveyors of mining speculations marketed their enterprises; that is, in the arguments and rhetorics the proponents of these schemes relied on. These were significant issues for the then rapidly evolving discipline of political economy. By the early nineteenth century, it was widely taken for granted that the mines of Spanish America had been partly responsible for the decline of Spain, not least because they had been run with legendary inefficiency and profligacy. It was essential for champions of the new mining companies to be able to demonstrate that they would be able to overcome the technological, geological, and political obstacles which had previously stood in the way of these enterprises generating a return.

  • 8 Hereafter Inquiry into the Mining Companies.
  • 9 This was a common format: cf. e.g. English.
  • 10 Hereafter Lawyers and Legislators.
  • 11 It is not clear who made the translation from Spanish. Disraeli could not have done so.

8This was the central problem Disraeli had in front of him in composing his pamphlets. All three were published anonymously in 1825, by John Murray, partly at Disraeli’s expense. The first was called An Inquiry into the Plans, Progress, and Policy of the American Mining Companies.8 It begins with a short essay on the general prospects of mining enterprise in America, before presenting notes on the relevant features of each of the principal successor states, and each of the more substantial mining companies operating within them.9 The second pamphlet, Lawyers and Legislators: or Notes on the American Mining Companies, is dedicated to refuting arguments hostile to the mining companies.10 It is largely divided up according to the individuals expressing these unwelcome views, with sections on (among others) the Lord Chancellor, Lord Liverpool, Lord Eldon, William Huskisson, (J. C.) Hobhouse, and (Francis) Baring. The third and last pamphlet, The Present State of Mexico, is composed mainly of a translation of a report on the condition of the country, presented to Mexico’s General Congress at the beginning of the 1825 session.11 Disraeli’s contribution appears to have been the memoir of the Mexican statesman Don Lucas Alamán, which occupies the first third of the pamphlet. Together, the three pamphlets contain about 400 pages’ worth of prose, of which Disraeli appears to have been the author of about 250.

9The pamphlets had two mutually reinforcing goals. The first was to persuade readers that the South American mining companies would become profitable and socially beneficial concerns. Disraeli’s task was to explode the arguments of contemporaries who claimed that the companies were speculative, fraudulent, and delusive. His targets were not imaginary, as the structure of Lawyers and Legislators demonstrated, and detailed sceptical arguments circulated widely in pamphlets, the press, and handbills in 1820s London. Disraeli’s starting point was that these debates about the operation of the South American mines were not just a grubby commercial spat, but a subject of world-historical significance. He proclaimed that, of all the undertakings of the present age, the mining companies were ‘paramount in importance for the magnitude of the interests involved’ (Disraeli 1825a, 7). So it was essential to understand them correctly, and Disraeli proposed to offer a guide ‘unbiassed by self interest’ (Disraeli 1825b, 99). This appears to be the first demonstrable lie he committed to print.

  • 12 Disraeli went on to argue that the history of the American mines might have been quite different ha (...)

10Most of Disraeli’s attempt to explain how South American mining would become profitable was necessarily technical. The root of the difficulties hitherto afflicting the industry, he explained, was that since the age of Charles V, Spanish America had been ‘separated from Europe as to all discoveries calculated to exercise a powerfully beneficial effect on society’ (Disraeli 1825a, 10).12 American mining had as a result become woefully unscientific (Disraeli 1825a, 14). Disraeli roundly criticised the conduct of earlier mining operations, including their ‘utter deficiency in the principles of subterraneous geometry’ (Disraeli 1825a, 14). But now, he insisted, modern techniques could be applied. The pamphlets predicted rapid advances from the application of new capital to new developments in smelting, metallurgy, commodity transportation, fuel, steam engines, and labour relations (Disraeli 1825a, passim; Disraeli 1825b, 66‒68). The importation of Cornish tin mining expertise would help stimulate this acceleration (Disraeli 1825a, 33). Already, Disraeli suggested, in Mexico ‘all the mining companies appear to have been proceeding with great spirit and success’ (Disraeli 1825a, 51). Since most competing companies had offered similar positive reports, optimism about their prospects was ‘neither visionary nor deceptive’ (Disraeli 1825a, 77).

11Disraeli argued that a thriving South American mining industry would have social benefits. His pamphlets summon up an idyllic vision of the South American past, in which the once-flourishing mining districts were the only truly prosperous parts of the region. They had generated a burgeoning middle class of traders, ‘a class whose existence is a sure sign of national prosperity’, and generated the same economic effects the manufacturing interest did in England (Disraeli 1825a, 77‒79). The recent revolutions had destroyed these prosperous areas, via war and neglect. But the working of the mines by English experts would revive the districts, and put society back on an even keel. Indeed the mining interest in America was, for Disraeli, what manufacturing was in England—the basis of its whole potential prosperity (Disraeli 1825b, 6‒7). There was little of Young England social concern here.

12Profitability and social harmony both depended, however, on stable government. Disraeli’s pamphlets brimmed with confidence that the administrations of the new republics were now effectively consolidated, and primed to safeguard European investments. He argued that the ways in which the republics had freed themselves from Spanish thraldom demonstrated abundant energy, and that they possessed every advantage which could increase their wealth and power (Disraeli 1825a, 81). South America, the pamphlets proclaimed, was no longer a backwater, and its influence in the scale of nations was increasing (Disraeli 1825b, 16).

  • 13 For Alamán’s career see Van Young; and for Disraeli’s treatment of him, 260‒62.

13Disraeli filled out these arguments with reference to the newly established state that would become his most abiding South American concern: Mexico. The Present State of Mexico claimed that the country was, to the British, ‘a newly discovered land’, and the centrepiece of the third and most interesting of his pamphlets was an extended, highly partisan political history of its independent existence (Disraeli 1825c, 10). Disraeli’s theme was the robustness of the new republican regime, and his analysis was pitched against naysayers who asserted that the state was prey to adventurers and revolutionists (Disraeli 1825c, 18). This agenda involved tearing at the reputation of the ephemeral emperor of 1822‒23, Agustín de Iturbide, who Disraeli described at one point as an ‘imperial ape’, to prove that he was an excrescence on an otherwise sound political fabric (Disraeli 1825c, 48‒9). Disraeli’s account centred instead on a visionary conservative statesman, Don Lucas Alamán, who had been introduced in the first pamphlet as a friend to miners and foreign capital (Disraeli 1825a, 51, 117‒18). The later Disraeli was deeply concerned with the problem of leadership, especially in its more ethereal and spiritual dimensions, and liked to write about people who represented ideas. Alamán was the first figure in relation to whom he started to sharpen these tendencies.13

14The Present State of Mexico argued that individual politicians had outsize roles to play in shaping the character of infant states, mattering far more than nominal institutions; that the character of a minister was of greatest importance in the immediate aftermath of a revolution; and that such circumstances allowed true genius to shine through (Disraeli 1825c, 9‒10). Alamán, in Disraeli’s hands, possessed such qualities. He had wandered the world to find the proper principles on which to regenerate his country, in a ‘pilgrimage of Patriotism’ (Disraeli 1825c, 55). For Disraeli, Alamán represented the view that an infant state could not afford to dwell too long on abstract principles; that constitutions could not be recommended only on theoretical grounds; and that the duty of the legislator was to legislate for the present, as well as the future (Disraeli 1825c, 40‒41). Disraeli was sympathetic to the view that political institutions were to be judged by their practical results, not their theoretical perfection, since liberty could not feed the starving (Disraeli 1825c, 113‒14). The government in which Alamán served did not wait on abstract perfection before pursuing practical improvements (Disraeli 1825c, 51). So sceptics’ imputations that Mexico did not value freedom were wide of the mark (Disraeli 1825c, 51‒52). Alamán’s grand vision for making Mexico work was to employ his people. That employment was to be found, unsurprisingly, in the mines.

  • 14 Disraeli to ?Robert Messer, ?April 1825, Letter 21. Benjamin Disraeli Letters, I, 26‒29.

15To summarise, the pamphlets looked towards a future in which the stably governed South American consumer and the British capitalist were joined together in a mutually beneficial embrace. Was this sincere? Robert Blake suggested that Disraeli extolled in the pamphlets ‘what he must have known to be very dubious concerns’ (Blake 1982, 4). It may have been that Disraeli was interested only in profiting from the inflation of a speculative bubble, but it is just as plausible to imagine that he believed sincerely in (some of) the technical and political arguments he presented. In the early months of 1825, he confidently expected to become extremely rich. He wrote privately that ‘an immense and permanent rise is to be looked to’ in mining shares, and that he was able to ‘consider my fortune as made’.14

16The second and narrower goal of the pamphlets was to deflect pressure for intervention by the British state in the affairs of the mining companies. The specific threat was of changes in the law regulating the investment of capital, and the management of joint stock companies. This was indeed what the miners’ critics were calling for in 1825, not least in the Quarterly Review, whose influence with the parliamentary classes Disraeli was particularly anxious about (Disraeli 1825a, 109). In refuting attacks on the companies as speculative and delusive, Disraeli was aiming to persuade an imagined parliamentary audience that there was in fact no need to impose any regulation on investment in these joint-stock firms. His arguments included explanations that everything was already perfectly above board, and that profits beckoned, but also went beyond them, to wider claims about the distinctive economic identity of the present age. Disraeli argued that the unprecedented recent expansion of international relations had created both new forms of knowledge, and new opportunities for the deployment of capital, which had become overabundant in England (Disraeli 1825a, 125‒28). It was far preferable to spend capital overseas, rather than in a small and densely populated country which presented no fresh resources to develop (Disraeli 1825b, 26). On these grounds, Disraeli rejected any analogies between the eras of the South Sea and Mississippi companies and the present time (Disraeli 1825a, 126‒28; Disraeli 1825b, 85‒95).

  • 15 Disraeli to ?Robert Messer, ?April 1825, Letter 21. Benjamin Disraeli Letters, I, 26‒29.
  • 16 A handful of passages are, however, much more florid: see e.g. Disraeli 1825a, 98‒99.

17Appearing as part of a torrent of contemporary British writing about South American mining and politics, Disraeli’s pamphlets do not appear to have been influential. Disraeli claimed of Inquiry into the Mining Companies in his correspondence that ‘rapid sales of numerous and large editions testify it’s [sic] complete success’.15 There is, however, not much evidence of contemporaries engaging seriously with any of the three tracts. Their anonymous author was called an ‘ugly customer’ in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, in one of a handful of indications that contemporaries had read what he had written (Maginn 593). The rapid arrival of the stock market crash of 1825‒26 meant that the pamphlets were comprehensively overtaken by events. Their significance lies not in their impact on wider debates, but in what they tell us about Disraeli himself, and about the intellectual environments of the 1820s. From one angle, we might see the pamphlets as a hotchpotch of derivative debating points pulled together by a clever 20-year-old in a hurry. It is difficult to detect anything we might describe as a framework of political argument, let alone identifiable political principles. The mature Disraeli sought to position himself as an interpreter of the great forces of his age, and to detect the clashing visions locked in global struggles for mastery; these are not ambitions we can find any sign of here. Nor can we usefully see the pamphlets as experiments in form by an intending Romantic, given their utilitarian organisation and the generally flat style of writing.16 But as we have already seen, there are some distinctive Disraelian preoccupations in the pamphlets, and there are some further issues and themes worth drawing out.

  • 17 Disraeli to ?Robert Messer, ?April 1825, Letter 21. Benjamin Disraeli Letters, I, 26‒29.

18Disraeli worked to make sense of South America. He boasted in his letters about having read ‘every book’ on the subject, as well as having access to secret reports and private agents of the mining companies.17 He does, in fact, appear to have consulted much of what would have been available to an English reader in 1825, and his range of citation was unusually wide in the field of 1820s mining puffery. Disraeli’s pamphlets refer to Alexander von Humboldt, Guillaume Raynal, William Robertson, Adam Smith, and Montesquieu, among higher authorities (Disraeli 1825a, 10, 83). They are strikingly up to date with contemporary South American travel literature, including by German and US authors (Disraeli 1825a, 11, 23, 33, 55, 57). In addition, they cite a number of South American writers (Disraeli 1825a, 31, 63). All this meant that Disraeli was in a position to make distinctive contributions to public knowledge. In particular, the account of the political history of independent Mexico outlined in The Present State of Mexico appears to have been the most joined-up then available to British readers. Disraeli’s studies also allowed him to elaborate a fairly coherent, if familiar, set of perspectives on contemporary and historical South America. He associated himself with the standard early-nineteenth-century critique of the colonial policy of Spain, that by keeping the American colonies commercially isolated and under the thrall of clerical despotism, it had stalled all possible motors of social progress (Disraeli 1825c, 13‒14; Disraeli 1825a, 80‒81). And he joined in with a number of his more visionary contemporaries in predicting the cutting of the Panama Canal (Disraeli 1825a, 89). So Disraeli made a contribution to the South American debates of the 1820s which was not entirely negligible.

  • 18 Disraeli offered some further comments on Canning and Latin America, in relation to the designs of (...)
  • 19 See Ridley 44‒51.
  • 20 Disraeli argued elsewhere in the pamphlets that while knowledge of the past could be valuable in in (...)

19The pamphlets also hint at some systematic thought on proper principles of statesmanship. We have already seen that Disraeli portrayed the Mexican minister Don Lucas Alamán as embodying one set of attractive political qualities. The pamphlets also project sympathy with George Canning, then foreign secretary, and responsible for Britain’s relations with the successor states to the Iberian empires. Two of the three pamphlets were dedicated to him, evidently without permission.18 Attempting to gain favour with the minister responsible for British policy in the region, and already associated with support for the independence of the new republics, was a sound strategy, and in Vivian Grey Disraeli would make Canning the hero of a novel.19 But Disraeli praised him in specific terms. The first of the two dedications suggested that Canning possessed ‘that sedate sublimity of conception, which distinguishes the practical statesman, from the political theorist’ (Disraeli 1825b, iii). This can be read as Disraeli’s first published comment on his later favourite theme of the antagonism between the world of ideas and the world of action, and as an early signal of his preference for the latter.20

  • 21 Disraeli would go on to employ Tita, Byron’s former manservant, for his Mediterranean tour of 1830‒ (...)
  • 22 See e.g. Medwin.
  • 23 See also Disraeli 1825b, 19, 37, 92‒93; Disraeli 1825a, 19.

20The most distinctively Disraelian thread which runs through the pamphlets, however, was a fascination with the near East, and its forms of despotic power. We find little sign of this theme elsewhere in 1820s British writing about South American mining. For Disraeli, however, the subject suggested numerous Eastern analogies and illustrations. The pamphlets gesture variously towards Oriental conquerors and caliphs, towards the Arabian Nights, towards Cairo and Baghdad, and towards Tippoo Sultan of Mysore (Disraeli 1825a, 95; Disraeli 1825b, 28, 67). Many of these reference points doubtless came via the second-generation romantics who exercised such a hold over the young Disraeli, particularly Lord Byron (and his Oriental Tales).21 There was already an emerging industry of Byron studies by the mid-1820s, while John Murray—the publisher of the pamphlets—was Byron’s friend and publisher.22 This reminds us that Disraeli had a knowledge of the contemporary and historic East even at the age of 20, well before his seminal travels in the region of 1830‒1831, and enough interest in the subject to work it into political writing even where it was questionably relevant. More broadly, the problem of despotism—indelibly associated by contemporaries with the Orient—seemed to loom around every corner in Disraeli’s pamphlets, coming up in his reflections on Spanish colonial government, on the post-revolutionary republics, and on politics in Britain. He returned repeatedly to claims about the characteristics of the laws of despotic states, and to the occasional ‘energy and genius’ of their measures. He stressed, however, that despots hastened towards forms of political perfection which could only be robust when they were the work of centuries, often causing revolutionary reactions as a result (Disraeli 1825a, 12‒13).23 Disraeli may not have been especially interested in trying to understand South America on its own terms, but this meant that he made intriguing attempts to fit the region into wider typologies of political power.

Disraeli’s South American Horizons

  • 24 See Parry 2017.

21Disraeli never again gave South America sustained attention after 1825. The stock market crash and bank panic of 1825‒26 eliminated his material interest in its mines (Dawson 1990). In undermining wider optimistic assessments of the region’s prospects for rapid commercial and political improvement, the crash also did much to deflect British global curiosity down other paths. Disraeli’s own international preoccupations turned from the later 1820s in directions that had more sticking power. His interest in the East penetrated ever deeper, and started to reshape his political and religious ideas.24 He also began to think more seriously about questions of imperial expansion and rule, mainly in relation to Britain’s own empire.

  • 25 Disraeli to Lady Londonderry, 26 Dec 1846, Letter 1530. Benjamin Disraeli Letters, IV, 266‒68.
  • 26 See e.g., for Disraeli’s reading of a long letter from Marcia Ouseley on Argentinian affairs, Disra (...)
  • 27 See e.g., for Disraeli’s attendance at a banquet alongside a former Brazilian charge d’affairs, Dis (...)

22Yet none of this meant that South America disappeared from Disraeli’s international field of vision. He continued to read about the region in a desultory way at least until the 1860s, perusing Frances Calderon de la Barca’s celebrated travel account Life in Mexico in 1843.25 Like most members of the political class, he had friends and acquaintances who took local diplomatic positions, notably William Gore Ouseley and his wife Marcia, who served in Brazil, Argentina, and Costa Rica.26 Dinners and social engagements brought him into contact with Latin American agents.27 South America remained in the air for Disraeli, and it continued to recur as an aesthetic spice and a source of historical illustrations in his novels and speeches. More substantially, it figured in his constitutional and political-sociological reflections, providing important evidence for larger contentions about the workings of governments. And most importantly, South America was the subject of a sequence of parliamentary interventions between the 1840s and the 1860s, especially in relation to the country which had loomed the largest in the 1825 pamphlets: Mexico. Disraeli’s arguments here indicate both that South America was an unavoidable subject for politicians preoccupied with Britain’s interests overseas, and one he believed he could turn to political advantage.

23Disraeli sprinkled South America across his writings and speeches as a scenic and rhetorical device. His first novel, Vivian Grey (1826), was written shortly after the collapse of the mining schemes, and contained passages which parodied Powles’s world of South American boosterism, in the guise of the operations of ‘Premium’. It features, among other things, a Chilean minister, a project of a railroad across the Andes, and a disruptive cassowary named after the then dictator of Paraguay, Dr Francia. This last reference is worth highlighting, since Francia’s name was not widely known in Britain in 1826. The dictator achieved low-level European celebrity only with the publication of the first first-hand account of his regime in 1829 (Middleton 2022). Disraeli’s 1820s studies had been far from superficial.

  • 28 It is worth noting that Disraeli’s experiences in Spain on his tour of 1830‒31, which partially ins (...)

24There are incidental South American features in most of the later novels. Sidonia’s global travels, as summarised in Coningsby (1844), took in Chile, Brazil, Peru and Mexico, while it emerges in Tancred (1847) that he and Baroni had also visited Paraguay. In Sybil (1845), Lady Joan talks to Egremont about Aztec cities and ‘the Caciques of the new world’. Brazil is mentioned in Henrietta Temple (1837) and Endymion (1880), The Young Duke (1831) features dancing dogs from Peru, while Contarini Fleming is advised in Contarini Fleming (1832) to travel to South America to experience the tropical scenery.28 Illustrative and aesthetic South American references also pockmarked Disraeli’s parliamentary and public political speeches. He was fond of citing Cortez’s incursion into Mexico, variously as an example of what firm leadership could achieve, and as a demonstration of the ability of small forces to defeat large ones, under the right circumstances (HPD3, 191:1338, 27 April 1868; 218:421, 30 March 1874). Historians have forgotten that when Disraeli famously described Gladstone’s Treasury Bench as ‘a range of exhausted volcanoes’, at Manchester in April 1872, the particular volcanoes he had in mind belonged to ‘one of those marine landscapes not unusual on the coast of South America’ (Kebbel II, 516).

25Disraeli continued to make these superficial South American references because he continued to think about the region. It left an identifiable mark on his constitutional and imperial ideas. The sunny, and materially self-interested, assessments of the new states’ political, social, and economic futures he had outlined in the 1825 pamphlets did not reappear in any of his later ruminations. Instead, the mature Disraeli asked the same basic questions about South (and particularly Spanish) America that most partially informed British and European observers did prior to the 1880s. What was the explanation for the region’s perceived state of chronic political instability and turmoil? And what were the moral implications of its condition?

26For Disraeli, the explanation for the unhappy fate of Spanish America lay in its imperial past. The reason its experience of independence had been so unsuccessful, compared with that of North America, lay in the circumstances under which the twin regions had thrown off their respective colonial masters. As Disraeli told Parliament in 1846, Britain’s American colonies had achieved independence because they were strong, whereas Spain’s had done so because their mother country was weak. The new Spanish republics possessed ‘no means of self-government’, and had therefore never been able to govern themselves. The ‘semblances of order’ they had for a time managed to maintain—Disraeli presumably referring here to the early 1820s—had in fact been a British achievement, brought about ‘through the influence of English capital and the exertions of English subjects’ (HPD3, 88:991, 24 August 1846). In this historical framing, in the deployment of a comparative ‘two Americas’ model, and in the identification of British intervention as a decisive force in the region, Disraeli’s analysis was firmly in line with the mainstream of mid-nineteenth-century British thinking on these problems of Spanish American polity (Middleton 2024).

  • 29 Disraeli noted in the same breath that English-style constitutions would equally have failed in Sou (...)

27Disraeli took these familiar arguments further, however, making distinctive constitutional claims about the condition of Spanish America. His 1835 study Vindication of the English Constitution was especially interesting on the subject. Disraeli had already made the point in the 1825 pamphlets—as he would continue to for the rest of his career—that robust forms of free government had to grow organically over time, and that they rarely succeeded when imposed from outside. This had not made much sense in the context of defending rapidly conceived republican regimes, and later on he was able to pursue its implications more fully. In the Vindication, he developed this argument through a comparison between the recent moral influence of England over Europe, and that of the United States over the New World. Disraeli wrote that just as France, Sicily, Spain, and Portugal had made premature tilts at applying versions of the English constitution, so contemporary Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Chile had sought precipitately to apply the US constitution.29 He argued that the results of these ‘peremptory and abstract principles’, combined with the ‘Quixotic spirit of political propagandism’, had been a devastating cycle of revolutions (Disraeli 1835, 56).

28Disraeli contended that republican institutions were radically unsuitable for Spanish America. In their US form, he explained, they had been ‘invented by the Puritans, and maintained by their peculiar spirit’. It was a ‘frenzy’ to attempt to implant the same political arrangements among populations raised in ignorance under papal despotism, and on former colonies shaped by influential ecclesiastical establishments and powerful aristocracies. Spanish America’s ‘rudderless states’ had betrayed themselves by their ‘haste to establish freedom’, and Disraeli suggested that their independence—as of 1835—was far from secure. (Disraeli 1835, 58). The moral of the story was that constitutions worked only when they were ‘founded on the habits or the opinions’ of those they ‘affected to guide, regulate, and control’, and in particular on accustomed systems of law. This was why the so-called congresses of Mexico, Santiago, and Lima had attracted Europe’s ‘derision or disgust’ (Disraeli 1835, 57). Disraeli concluded that, in the New World as well as in the Old, ‘political institutions, founded on abstract rights and principles, are mere nullities’; that new legislatures did not work when they did not reflect pre-existing legal constitutions; and that large-scale free, representative governments must be ‘the very gradual work of time’ and of ‘preparatory institutions’ (Disraeli 1835, 60‒61). The course of events (and the loss of any financial interest in them) had exploded the political optimism of the 1825 pamphlets. Disraeli’s enthusiastic adoption of organic constitutional language offered a more defensible account of why Spanish American politics appeared to be in such a desperate condition.

  • 30 For a clear, roughly contemporary statement of this position, see e.g. Disraeli to Sara Austen, 1 D (...)

29Two points arise from this analysis of Spanish America in the Vindication. The first is that no other early-nineteenth-century study of the English constitution says anything about the region, from Lord John Russell’s An Essay on the History of the English Government and Constitution (1821), to Henry Hallam’s The Constitutional History of England (1827). Disraeli’s early encounter with South America evidently encouraged him to illustrate his arguments about the workings of constitutions in a distinctive way. The second point is that the passage anticipates and clarifies a theme that runs through Disraeli’s later political argument. This was that the modern principle of revolution, which had thrown the world into disorder since the eighteenth century, had its origins in America, and not in France.30 But where historians have reflexively read ‘America’ as a synonym for the United States in Disraeli’s later discussions of international politics, his category was often more expansive, and encompassed the southern as well as the northern reaches of the New World.

30A similar breadth of vision shaped Disraeli’s approaches to American politics in parliament. No politician interested in British international policy in the mid-Victorian decades could ignore South America. It was the subject of frequent debates and motions about commercial arrangements and tariffs, especially in connection with slaveholding Brazil; about the protection of British proconsuls; about loans and investments; and about the southward and westward expansion of the United States, especially in relation to territorial jurisdictions around Britain’s own possessions in Central America. Disraeli was a conspicuous and regular contributor to these debates, and evidently felt that he possessed some expert knowledge.

  • 31 Disraeli contemplated a parliamentary motion on the intervention in 1847, but did not follow throug (...)
  • 32 See also his questions on rumours about a US invasion of Cuba: HPD3, 111:898, 7 June 1850.
  • 33 Disraeli to Sarah Disraeli, 19 March 1839, Letter 906X. Benjamin Disraeli Letters, IV, 351. Disrael (...)

31Disraeli’s parliamentary interventions on South American matters in the 1840s and 1850s can be summarised as an attempt to project himself as a staunch ally to British commerce, investment, and industry in the region, and as an opponent of the expansion of the United States. He was critical of the Anglo-French intervention in the River Plate in the late 1840s, arguing the blockade of the river damaged British commerce, and had precipitated the collapse of major commercial houses (HPD3, 100:1313-14, 1317, 9 August 1848).31 He made repeated representations on behalf of an English merchant, George Ward, who the government of Venezuela had arrested on suspicion of revolutionary activity (HPD3, 117:697‒99, 13 June 1851; 117:780, 16 June 1851). In the aftermath of the repeal of the Corn Laws, the problem of the sugar duties prompted Disraeli to deprecate the Russell ministry’s handling of British relations with Brazil and Cuba (HPD3, 88:159‒61, 28 July 1846; 96:131‒32, 4 February 1848), but by the 1850s he was eager to pursue further commercial advantage through a policy of conciliation with Brazil (HPD3, 145:952‒55, 28 May 1857).32 Disraeli did not, however, think that that British trade with South America was more important than its commerce with North America, or the colonies (HPD3, 157:291‒92, 9 March 1860). He was also not always highly motivated by the questions the region raised, noting in correspondence in 1839 that he ‘might have said something with effect’ about Mexico, ‘had I had time to get it up & brush up my old researches’.33

  • 34 Disraeli recorded that his early idol, Lord George Bentinck, was informed about Mexico: Disraeli 18 (...)

32Disraeli’s main South American preoccupation, however, remained the same as in the 1820s. He was always more interested in Mexico than any other South American state.34 This predisposition was widely shared among his contemporaries, for the same basic reasons. Mexico had been the jewel in the crown of the Spanish empire, and appeared to possess the best commercial and economic capabilities in the region; Disraeli noted that it was ‘the richest in natural resources of any country in the world’ (HPD3, 88:990, 24 August 1846). Its political agonies seemed the most exaggerated of any of the republican successor states; in Tancred Sidonia explains its parlous condition by reference to the fact that ‘[i]t has not a man’, as part of a Carlylean rumination on the primacy of the influence of individual character. But the main reason Mexico arrested British attention was that the country was the principal target of the expansionist policies of the United States. This was certainly Disraeli’s central concern, especially in the 1840s. In 1846 he summoned the spectre of a US which would stop at nothing but ‘the entire conquest of America’, spanning from the St Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. This future US would also appropriate Britain’s West Indian colonies, and thereby ‘shake the authority of our metropolitan empire’ (HPD3, 88:993, 24 August 1846).

33Disraeli’s thinking on the ‘Mexican question’ changed over time, because of its interactions with larger foreign policy dynamics. Disraeli argued in the 1840s that British merchants were deeply interested in the fate of the country, thanks to their holdings in its public debt, their mercantile establishments, and their investments in mining operations (HPD3, 88:987, 24 August 1846). He deemed US appropriations of Mexican territory prejudicial to these interests, disapproving of the annexation of Texas, and expressing hostility to the prospect of a further Californian takeover on the same grounds (HPD3, 88:988‒89, 24 August 1846). Under these circumstances, the ‘Mexican question’ as Disraeli framed it was whether or not Britain saw any probability of preserving the country’s independence (HPD3, 88:989, 24 August 1846). His diagnosis of Mexico’s condition was widely echoed among Conservative commentators in the 1840s and 1850s. Disraeli argued that the country had no power of self-government, that it possessed little national feeling, and that above all else it needed tranquillity. Its disorder arose not from want of resources, or credit, but from ‘a positive and utter inability to maintain that police which is necessary to municipal civilization’. Its transient governments, which rested on no principle more profound than rapidly shifting factional and military ascendency, resisted the application of the normal tools of diplomacy. Disraeli therefore proposed a ‘protectorate’ for Mexico, organised in combination with other great powers including France, which might offer the country ‘ten years of tranquillity’. He suggested that this was the only plausible means of safeguarding its independence (HPD3, 88:991‒92, 24 August 1846).

  • 35 Disraeli to Sir Stafford Northcote, 12 September 1861, Letter 3614. Benjamin Disraeli Letters, VIII (...)
  • 36 Disraeli to Sarah Brydges Williams, 23 February 1863, Letter 3791. Benjamin Disraeli Letters, VIII, (...)

34Iterations of this imperial prospectus circulated around the Atlantic world in the 1840s and 1850s. France’s Emperor Napoleon III intervened in Mexico in the 1860s on a version of it, following a more limited joint British-Spanish-French naval expedition that had aimed to compel the payment of certain international debts. The Emperor installed the Habsburg Archduke Maximilian at the head of a newly constituted imperial polity, and rationalised the scheme as a means to secure the peace and order required for the regeneration of the country. Most British Conservatives supported the enterprise, many with great enthusiasm (Middleton 2023). Disraeli, however, did not. In parliament, at the outset of the joint Anglo-Franco-Spanish expedition that preceded Napoleon III’s invasion, he recalled attention to the fact that England had been the first country to recognise independent Mexico. Disraeli expressed anxiety about rumours that the expedition might seek to establish new dynastic principles of government in North America, and argued that the occasion must be truly grave to ‘bring about the necessity that England should strike at that political independence which itself created’ (HPD3, 165:66‒67, 6 February 1862). In contemporary correspondence, he described the possibility that Spain might attempt to reconquer Mexico as a sign that the 1860s were ‘a pantomimic age of glittering illusions & startling surprises’.35 Later on, he described Napoleon III’s intervention as a ‘Quixote adventure’.36

35Disraeli’s altered stance on the idea of a Mexican protectorate did not respond to shifts in Mexico’s intricate internal politics, in which he does not seem to have been interested, or to wider changes in his thinking about the effectiveness or legitimacy of imperial protectorates. The explanation for the seeming volte-face is twofold. First, by the 1860s Disraeli was a statesman thinking seriously about geopolitics, rather than a relative upstart pitching for the support of mercantile communities, as he had been in the 1840s. Second, North American politics presented a very different set of questions in the 1860s. There had been considerable anxiety among Conservatives about US expansion throughout the 1840s, with its successive annexations of increasingly vast swathes of Mexican territory, alongside perceived threats to the integrity of British North America. This helped to make the idea of a more robust Mexico as a buffer state politically appealing. The collapse of the US into civil war, arresting any immediate prospect of further expansion, changed the calculation. It also fed into Disraeli’s developing conception of North America as a state system—with the United States, the British Colonies, and Mexico interacting with one another—and into his longer-standing convictions about the growing importance of the Atlantic realm in global politics. In 1865 he argued that North America was in a general condition of revolution (HPD3, 178:169‒70, 23 March 1865). The US civil war, Disraeli suggested, demanded a reconsideration of the proper meaning of the ‘balance of power’. It ought not to be understood any longer as a system of great and small states, but instead as ‘security for communities in general against the predominance of one particular power’. Disraeli deprecated statesmen ‘mumbling over what they call the balance of power in Europe’, since schemes of the distribution of power now needed to take account of other quarters of the globe. Looking to the future, Disraeli insisted, ‘you will have to take into consideration States and influences which cannot be counted among European Powers’, not least those of America (HPD3, 177:1573‒75, 13 March 1865).

Conclusion

  • 37 This may suggest that we need, in some respects, to drag the formation of Disraeli’s political visi (...)

36Benjamin Disraeli’s 1825 encounter with South America was an important episode, and not just because of its crippling financial implications. It turned Disraeli into a writer for the public, presenting political and social argument to a wide (imagined) audience for the first time. His pamphlets, while undoubtedly derivative, show a young man engaging seriously with international history and politics. Many of their themes would shape Disraeli’s later political career, especially his fascination with political leadership, with despotic power, and with the slow, organic development of free government.37 Disraeli’s early exposure to the specificities of South America, moreover, would inform his elaborated arguments about constitutions and constitutionalism into the 1830s, and underpin a distinctive and informed series of parliamentary interventions in relation to the region that ran through to the 1860s. Setting himself apart from his competitors in Conservative parliamentary politics, Disraeli integrated Latin America into a deliberately pitched set of attempts to project himself as a defender of England’s Atlantic interests. He had a more serious interest in the region than any other nineteenth-century Prime Minister who had not previously served as Foreign Secretary.

37So South America has a role to play in making sense of Disraeli’s political and constitutional ideas. But historians’ habit of treating his interest in South America as purely materialistic, and indeed unserious, has reflected much wider trends in the study of Britain and Latin America, as channelled through the dominant and often distorting lens of ‘informal empire’. Recognising that Disraeli had well-founded and well-developed ideas about the region, which had tangible legacies, can help us to start making sense of the intellectual dynamics which connected Britain and South America, even at the most rarefied levels of British politics.

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Bibliographie

Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, Third Series. Cited as HPD3.

Akel, Regina. Benjamin Disraeli and John Murray: The Politician, the Publisher and the Representative. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2016.

Blake, Robert. Disraeli. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1966.

Blake, Robert. Disraeli’s Grand Tour: Benjamin Disraeli and the Holy Land, 1830‒31. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982.

Borgstede, Simone Beate. ‘A006Cl is Race’: Benjamin Disraeli on Race, Nation and Empire. Zürich: Lit Verlag, 2011.

Dawson, Frank Griffith. The First Latin American Debt Crisis: The City of London and the 1822–25 Loan Bubble. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990.

Deas, Malcolm. ‘Powles, John Diston (1787‒1867)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2016.

Disraeli, Benjamin. Benjamin Disraeli Letters. Ed. J. A. W. Gunn, et al. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1982. 10 vols.

[Disraeli, Benjamin]. An Inquiry into the Plans, Progress, and Policy of the American Mining Companies. London: John Murray, 1825. 3rd edn.

[Disraeli, Benjamin]. Lawyers and Legislators: or Notes on the American Mining Companies. London: John Murray, 1825.

[Disraeli, Benjamin]. The Present State of Mexico: as Detailed in in a Report Presented to the General Congress, by the Secretary of State for the Home Department and Foreign Affairs, at the Opening of the Session in 1825. With Notes, and a Memoir of Don Lucas Alaman. London: John Murray, 1825.

[Disraeli, Benjamin]. England and France; or, a Cure for the Ministerial Gallomania. London: John Murray, 1832.

Disraeli, The Younger [Benjamin]. The Revolutionary Epick. London: Edward Moxon, 1834.

Disraeli, The Younger [Benjamin]. Vindication of the English Constitution, in a Letter to a Noble and Learned Lord. London: Saunders and Otley, 1835.

Disraeli, B. [Benjamin]. Lord George Bentinck: a Political Biography. London: Colburn and Co., 1852.

English, Henry. A General Guide to the Companies Formed for Working Foreign Mines. London: Boosey & Sons, 1825.

Hicks, Geoffrey. Peace, War, and Party Politics: the Conservatives and Europe, 1846‒59. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007.

Jerman, B. R. The Young Disraeli. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1960.

Kebbel, T. E., Ed. Selected Speeches of the Late Right Honourable the Earl of Beaconsfield. London: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1882. 2 vols.

[Maginn, William]. ‘The Quarterly Review, and the American Mines’. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 17.100 (1825): 592‒600.

Medwin, Thomas. Conversations of Lord Byron. London: Henry Colburn, 1824.

Middleton, Alex. ‘Britain and the Paraguayan dictatorship, c. 1820‒1840’. Historical Journal 65:2 (2022): 371‒92.

Middleton, Alex. ‘British Liberalism and the French invasion of Mexico’. Journal of British Studies 62:2 (2023): 362‒89.

Middleton, Alex. ‘Latin America and British international thought, 1880‒1920’. Culture, Thought and Belief in British Political Life since 1800: Essays in Honour of Jonathan Parry. Ed. Paul Readman and Geraint Thomas. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2024. 310‒29.

Parry, Jonathan. ‘Disraeli and England’. Historical Journal 43.3 (2000): 699‒728.

Parry, Jonathan. Benjamin Disraeli. Oxford: OUP, 2007.

Parry, Jonathan. ‘Disraeli, the East and Religion: Tancred in Context’. English Historical Review 132.556 (2017): 570‒604.

Ridley, Jane. The Young Disraeli. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995.

Roca, Rodrigo Escribano. Memorias del Viejo Imperio: Hispanoamérica en las culturas políticas de España y Reino Unido (1824-ca. 1850). Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2022.

Schulz, Carsten-Andreas, and Mark Petersen. ‘Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean: The View from Elsewhere’. Re-imagining Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1780‒1870. Ed. Eduardo Posada-Carbo, Joanna Innes, and Mark Philp. Oxford: OUP, 2023. 239‒64.

Sultana, Donald. Benjamin Disraeli in Spain, Malta, and Albania, 1830‒32: a Monograph. London: Tamesis Books, 1976.

Van Young, Eric. A Life Together: Lucan Alamán and Mexico, 1792‒1853. New Haven: Yale UP, 2021.

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Notes

1 ‘South America’ was the dominant Victorian shorthand for the whole of the region starting at the US-Mexican border, and ending at Tierra del Fuego. This article uses the formula in that contemporary sense.

2 As Robert Blake commented, ‘a unique literary debut for a future statesman’: Blake 1982, 4. The South American pamphlets almost never feature in the notes of work on Disraeli: though see Borgstede.

3 For very recent moves in this direction see however Roca; Schulz and Petersen.

4 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates is cited hereafter as HPD, with the attached number indicating the series.

5 This phase of Disraeli’s life is covered most thoroughly in Ridley. See also Jerman; Blake 1966; Blake 1982.

6 This episode is dealt with in detail in Akel.

7 Disraeli to John Gibson Lockhart, ?12 November 1825, Letter 36. Benjamin Disraeli Letters, I, 48-50.

8 Hereafter Inquiry into the Mining Companies.

9 This was a common format: cf. e.g. English.

10 Hereafter Lawyers and Legislators.

11 It is not clear who made the translation from Spanish. Disraeli could not have done so.

12 Disraeli went on to argue that the history of the American mines might have been quite different had they been worked by ‘the enterprising subjects of a free government’: Disraeli 1825a, 20.

13 For Alamán’s career see Van Young; and for Disraeli’s treatment of him, 260‒62.

14 Disraeli to ?Robert Messer, ?April 1825, Letter 21. Benjamin Disraeli Letters, I, 26‒29.

15 Disraeli to ?Robert Messer, ?April 1825, Letter 21. Benjamin Disraeli Letters, I, 26‒29.

16 A handful of passages are, however, much more florid: see e.g. Disraeli 1825a, 98‒99.

17 Disraeli to ?Robert Messer, ?April 1825, Letter 21. Benjamin Disraeli Letters, I, 26‒29.

18 Disraeli offered some further comments on Canning and Latin America, in relation to the designs of France, in Disraeli 1832, 4‒5.

19 See Ridley 44‒51.

20 Disraeli argued elsewhere in the pamphlets that while knowledge of the past could be valuable in informing practical politics, it was a dangerous guide when the analogies were not exact. True statesmanship lay in a proper grasp of the present: Disraeli 1825a, 129‒30; Disraeli 1825b, 92‒93.

21 Disraeli would go on to employ Tita, Byron’s former manservant, for his Mediterranean tour of 1830‒31.

22 See e.g. Medwin.

23 See also Disraeli 1825b, 19, 37, 92‒93; Disraeli 1825a, 19.

24 See Parry 2017.

25 Disraeli to Lady Londonderry, 26 Dec 1846, Letter 1530. Benjamin Disraeli Letters, IV, 266‒68.

26 See e.g., for Disraeli’s reading of a long letter from Marcia Ouseley on Argentinian affairs, Disraeli to Sarah Disraeli, 10 November 1845, Letter 1447. Benjamin Disraeli Letters, IV, 196‒98. The Ouseleys’ son, William Charles Ouseley, also took to South America, dying of an opium overdose in Asuncíon, Paraguay, in 1859.

27 See e.g., for Disraeli’s attendance at a banquet alongside a former Brazilian charge d’affairs, Disraeli to Sarah Disraeli, 27 June 1835, Letter 408. Benjamin Disraeli Letters, II, 52‒54.

28 It is worth noting that Disraeli’s experiences in Spain on his tour of 1830‒31, which partially inspired Contarini Fleming, do not appear to have prompted any reflection on South America, beyond a passing thought about the Spanish conquest of Peru: see Blake 1982, 12; Sultana.

29 Disraeli noted in the same breath that English-style constitutions would equally have failed in South America.

30 For a clear, roughly contemporary statement of this position, see e.g. Disraeli to Sara Austen, 1 Dec 1833, Letter 297. Benjamin Disraeli Letters, I, 379‒81. It was developed further in 1834’s The Revolutionary Epick.

31 Disraeli contemplated a parliamentary motion on the intervention in 1847, but did not follow through, later apologising ‘for not having performed my duty to the merchants engaged in that trade’: HPD3, 101:701, 30 August 1848. He was familiar with General Rosas’s role in the affair: HPD3, 121:6‒7, 30 April 1852.

32 See also his questions on rumours about a US invasion of Cuba: HPD3, 111:898, 7 June 1850.

33 Disraeli to Sarah Disraeli, 19 March 1839, Letter 906X. Benjamin Disraeli Letters, IV, 351. Disraeli later planned to participate in a parliamentary motion on the blockade of Mexico by Texas in 1842, which he thought would make a sensation, but did not in the end say anything substantial on the subject: Disraeli to Mary Ann Disraeli, 11 Mar 1842, Letter 1229. Benjamin Disraeli Letters, IV, 31‒32.

34 Disraeli recorded that his early idol, Lord George Bentinck, was informed about Mexico: Disraeli 1852, 333.

35 Disraeli to Sir Stafford Northcote, 12 September 1861, Letter 3614. Benjamin Disraeli Letters, VIII, 139.

36 Disraeli to Sarah Brydges Williams, 23 February 1863, Letter 3791. Benjamin Disraeli Letters, VIII, 258.

37 This may suggest that we need, in some respects, to drag the formation of Disraeli’s political vision back beyond the domestic and international crises of the 1830s and 1840s (Parry 2001).

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Alex Middleton, « Disraeli and South America »Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], 101 Printemps | 2025, mis en ligne le 07 avril 2025, consulté le 17 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/15516 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13qsx

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Auteur

Alex Middleton

Alex Middleton is Fellow in History at St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford. His research is on modern British politics and ideas, and on international and imperial thought after 1750. He has published widely in both areas. His main current project is a study of nineteenth century British visions of Latin American politics and society. He is one of the editors of the English Historical Review.
Alex Middleton est Fellow en histoire au St Hugh’s College de l’Université d’Oxford. Ses recherches portent sur les idées et la politique britanniques modernes, ainsi que sur la pensée internationale et impériale après 1750. Il a publié abondamment sur ces deux questions. Son projet actuel porte principalement sur une étude des visions britanniques de la politique et de la société d’Amérique latine au cours du XIXe siècle. Il est l’un des rédacteurs en chef de la English Historical Review.

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