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Abstract
The political and historiographical discourses of the British intellectual and traveler James Bryce (1838–1922) have been characterized as representative of the late-Victorian liberal thought. Following this interpretative framework, scholarship has focused on the analysis of the key principles of Bryce’s liberal ideology, such as “self-government”, “democracy” and “international law.” This article examines a scarcely discussed aspect of the Brycean discourses: their colonialist imprint, which is particularly evident in Bryce’s historical-political interpretations of Latin American nations. This article contends that in his work South America: Observations and Impressions (1912), Bryce built a scientific discourse, a knowledge that, framed in late-Victorian British liberal nationalism and imperial liberalism, inferiorized and discredited Latin American nations and justified the economic and cultural dominance that the European civilization, and in particular, the British Empire, exercised over them.
Los discursos políticos e historiográficos del intelectual y viajero británico James Bryce (1838-1922) han sido caracterizados como representativos del pensamiento liberal tardo- victoriano. Siguiendo esta línea interpretativa, los críticos han tendido a concentrarse en el análisis de los principios clave de la ideología liberal de Bryce –“autogobierno”, “democracia” y “derecho internacional”. Este artículo examina un aspecto poco discutido de los discursos bryceanos: su impronta colonialista, evidente sobre todo en las interpretaciones histórico-políticas que Bryce hizo de las naciones latinoamericanas. Como argumento, propongo que en su trabajo South America: Observations and Impressions (1912), Bryce construyó un discurso científico, un conocimiento que, enmarcado en el nacionalismo liberal tardo-victoriano y en el liberalismo imperial británicos, inferiorizó y desacreditó a las naciones de América Latina con el fin de justificar el dominio económico y cultural que la civilización europea, y en particular, el Imperio Británico, ejercía sobre aquéllas.
Les discours politiques et historiographiques de James Bryce (1838-1922), intellectuel et voyageur britannique, ont été caractérisés comme représentatifs de la pensée libérale de la fin de l’époque victorienne. En suivant ce cadre interprétatif, les écrits sur l’œuvre de Bryce se sont concentrés sur l’analyse des principes-clés de l’idéologie libérale de Bryce, tels que « l’autonomie », « la démocratie », et « la loi internationale ». Cet article examine un aspect des discours de Bryce qui est rarement traité : leur empreinte colonialiste, visible surtout dans ses interprétations historiques et politiques des nations latino-américaines. Cet article soutient que dans son œuvre South America : Observations and Impressions (1912), Bryce a construit un discours scientifique, un savoir basé sur le nationalisme libéral britannique de la fin de l’époque victorienne et le libéralisme impérialiste, qui a infériorisé et discrédité les nations latino-américaines et a justifié la domination économique et culturelle qu’ont exercé la civilisation européenne, et l’Empire britannique en particulier, sur ces nations.
Notes
1 James Bryce is considered an unavoidable reference in the field of Anglo-Saxon political science. He had an academic training at Trinity College in Oxford, where between 1857 and 1862 he studied Literae Humaniores, Law and Modern History. He also studied at the University of Heidelberg under the direction of Karl Adolf von Vangerow (1963), a disciple of Savigny. He developed his academic activity as a professor of Civil Law at the universities of Oxford, Manchester, and the American Johns Hopkins of Baltimore. Between 1880 and 1907, he was a member of the Liberal Party and Member of Parliament. Avid traveler –considered in fact “the most traveled politician of his time”–, from his voyages through the American continent were born his well-known books The American Commonwealth (1888) –analysis of the American political system– and South America: Observations and Impressions (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1912). British ambassador to Washington from 1907 until 1913, where he was able to successfully overcome the dispute over the borders between Canada and the United States. By 1913 he was appointed Viscount and admitted to the House of Lords, from whose gallery he fought for the neutrality of Great Britain and for the creation of a League of Nations. Cf., Héctor Domínguez Benito, James Bryce y los fundamentos intelectuales del internacionalismo liberal (1864–1922) (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2018), pp. 34–40.
2 In this article, I will recover Eric Hobsbawm’s periodization on the “Long 19th Century,” conceptualizing South America as a nineteenth-century work.
3 Morton Keller, “James Bryce and America,” The Willson Quarterly, 12, no. 4 (1988), 87. Russell L. Hanson, “Tyranny of the Majority or Falalism of the Multitude? Bryce on Democracy in America,” in America Through European Eyes. British and French Reflections on the New World from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, eds. Aureoan Craiutu and Jeffrey C. Isaac (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), pp. 213–4. Benito, James Bryce, pp. 34–40.
4 Benito, James Bryce, p. 285.
5 This second part was published separately in 1916 by the editor Macmillan.
6 Edward Said defines the decolonial theory as “a pronounced awareness of European and Western culture as imperialism, as a reflexive moment of consciousness that enabled the African, Caribbean, Irish, Latin American, or Asian citizen inching toward independence through decolonization to require a theoretical assertion of the end of Europe’s cultural claim to guide and/or instruct the non-European or nonmainland individual.” Edward Said, Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1990), p. 76. In this article, I also follow the definition of “decolonial theory” developed by Walter Mignolo in The Idea of Latin America: “A critical theory beyond the history of Europe proper and within the colonial history of America (or Asia or Africa; or even from the perspective of immigrants within Europe and the US who have disrupted the homogeneity) becomes decolonial theory. That is, it is a theory arising from the projects for decolonization of knowledge and being that will lead to the imagining of economy and politics otherwise. By going to the roots of modern coloniality – the invention of America and of ‘Latin’ America – this book is a contribution to that decolonization of knowledge and being.” Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), p. xx. On the other hand, by post-colonial theory I understand, with Homi K. Bhabha, a critical theory that “bear witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order. Postcolonial perspectives emerge from the colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of ‘minorities’ within the geopolitical divisions of East and West, North and South. They intervene in those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give hegemonic ‘normality’ to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, peoples. They formulate their critical revisions around issues of cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination in order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the ‘rationalizations’ of modernity.” Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 245–6.
7 Edward Said, L’orientalisme. L’Orient crée par l’Occident (Lonrai: Éditions du Seuil, 2003), 13–16. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, xii. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 60–2.
8 Said, L’orientalisme, pp. 29–35.
9 Cf., Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 4–5.
10 In their famous article, J. Gallagher and R. Robinson proposed that the British Empire was an empire of global scope with a flexible and pragmatic structure and not one that merely accumulated colonies through its military and bureaucratic strength. Based on that assumption, they argued that the British Empire used “informal” tactics of influence, pressure, intimidation, and collaboration to ensure their preeminence over a “semi-colonial periphery.” See Paul Garner, “El ‘Imperio informal’ británico en América Latina: ¿Realidad o ficción?,” Historia Mexicana, El Colegio de México 65, no. 2 (2015), pp. 541–559.
11 Matthew Brown, “Introduction,” in Informal Empire in Latin America. Culture, Commerce and Capital, ed. Matthew Brown (Norwich: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), p. 12.
12 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 11.
13 J. Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-system, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) apud. Garner, “El ‘Imperio informal’ británico en América Latina,” pp. 545–552.
14 Alan Knight, “Rethinking British Informal Empire in Latin America (Especially Argentina),” in Informal Empire in Latin America. Culture, Commerce and Capital, ed. Matthew Brown (Norwich: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), p. 30.
15 Matthew Brown, “Introduction,” pp. 9–10, 16–17. E. Vargas García, “Imperio Informal? La política británica hacia América Latina en el siglo XIX,” Foro Internacional, 184, no. XLVI (2006), pp. 283–384.
16 The “White Dominions” –Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the South African Union– were settlements mostly occupied by white immigrants from the British Isles who thought of themselves as British “nations” or “peoples” and whose populations developed an ethnic pride, but also a pride in being inheritors and exporters of the British political traditions of “freedom” and “self-government.” J. Darwin, “Empire and Ethnicity”, Nations and Nationalism, 16, no. 3 (2010), pp. 395–399.
17 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 288–9.
18 Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 270–1; and Matthew Brown, “Introduction,” pp. 9–10
19 Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 267–70; and Matthew Brown, “Introduction”, p. 20.
20 Benito, James Bryce, p. 251.
21 Henry Cabot Lodge, “England, Venezuela and the Monroe Doctrine,” The North American Review, 160, no. 463 (1895), pp. 657–8.
22 James Bryce, “British Feeling on the Venezuelan Question,” The North American Review, 156, no. 434 (1896), pp. 147–8.
23 Benito, James Bryce, p. 257–8.
24 Benito, James Bryce, p. 269.
25 Bryce, South America, p. 424.
26 Emmanuel-Joseph Sièyes, Qu’est ce que le tiers état (s. i., 1789), p. 106.
27 Guy Hermet, Histoire des nations et du nationalisme en Europe (Manchecourt: Éditions du Seuil, 1996), 119–21; Benedict Anderson, Comunidades Imaginadas. Reflexiones sobre el origen y la difusión del nacionalismo (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 102–3; and Eric Hobsbawm, Naciones y nacionalismo desde 1780 (Buenos Aires: Crítica, 2012), p. 66.
28 Bryce, South America, p. 440.
29 Darwin, “Empire and Ethnicity,” p. 394.
30 John Stuart Mill, “On Nationality as Connected with Representative Government,” in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. XIX: Essays on Politics and Society, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 546.
31 Bryce, South America, pp. 439–40.
32 Ibid., p. 440.
33 R. A. Cosgrove, “A Usable Past: History and the Politics of National Identity in Late Victorian England,” The Parliamentary History Yearbook, vol. 27 (2008), pp. 30–3, 41.
34 Cosgrove, “A Usable Past,” 37. Darwin, “Empire and Ethnicity,” p. 393.
35 James Bryce was part of the Oxford academic group called “The Old Morality Society,” a sort of “liberal intellectual aristocracy” that integrated characters such as John Nicol, Edward Dicey, Thomas Hill Green and Thomas Erskine Holland, who ended up establishing themselves as professors in some of the main British universities –Oxford and Glasgow, among others– and even having some participation in politics. See Benito, James Bryce, 70–1.
36 Darwin, “Empire and Ethnicity,” 392; Hobsbawm, Naciones y nacionalismo desde 1780, 114–116; and D. A. Hamer, Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery: A Study in Leadership and Policy (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1972), p. 59.
37 Jonathan Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 84–5.
38 Parry, The Politics of Patriotism, pp. 4,44, 86.
39 As Michael Ruse points out, Social Darwinism is a set of “theories of human social development and maintenance which are in some way inspired by biological evolutionary theories –this ‘inspiratio’ could take the form of seeing human sociality as a straight extension of the animal (and perhaps plant) domain, or it could involve some sort of analogy.” The two main sources of these theories are considered to be those of Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin –being both fervent Malthuseans. First, in his article “Progress: its Law and Cause” (1857), Spencer proposed that, because of the population pressure and the consequent struggle for existence that this implied, both the inorganic and the organic world, including in the latter the human being and his societies, were subject to the same law of evolutionary progress, that is to say, to “constantly changing or evolving from relatively uniform basic –‘homogeneous’– forms to fairly intricate, sophisticated –’heterogeneous’– versions”. Some years later, in The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin defended that the entire organic world, and in this, he also included man and its societies, was subject to the same law of “evolution” through “Natural Selection,” which meant that because the very existence of all living beings in its infinite variations implied a constant struggle with each other for food supplies and space, therefore the organisms that succeeded in that struggle were those that demonstrated to have more adaptive capacity, being therefore “naturally selected” for transmit their successful characteristics and variations to the following generations. M. Ruse, “Social Darwinism: Two Sources,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 12, no. 1 (1980), pp. 23–4, 26, 28–9.
40 It must be said that this doctrine of the “civilizing mission” was not invented by Social Darwinism nor by late-Victorian “imperial liberalism,” but had a long history that can be traced almost to Augustin. See Robert A. Nisbet, Metaphor and History. The Western Idea of Social Development (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009), pp. 82–85. Concentrating on its modern history, Michael Mann states that “from the late eighteenth century onwards,” almost “all European powers [France, Great Britain, Portugal, the Netherlands] claimed to pursue a civilizing project in their colonies.” In fact, says Mann, the term “civilizing mission” was a linguistic borrowing that English made from the French mission civilisatrice, notion that summed up the latter’s imperial ideology which rested on three fundamental presuppositions: the superiority of French culture, the backwardness of the rest of human societies, and the perfectibility of human nature. The attitude that the British Empire almost simultaneously assumed not only toward the subjects of their colonies in the East and in Africa, but in general, toward nonwhite societies like the South American ones, was similar to that of the French. With a view to justify their incursion into countries and territories, and even to self-legitimize their sovereignty over them, the British discursively claimed “to improve the country and to bring the fruits of progress and modernity to the subject peoples” –that is to say, that by expanding their political and economic interests, the British were undertaking the “civilizing mission” of “improving the humankind” that History and God had entrusted to them as top points on the scale of civilization. Michael Mann, “‘Torchbearers Upon the Path of Progress’: Britain’s Ideology of a ‘Moral and Material Progress’ in India. An Introductory Essay,” in Colonialism as Civilizing Mission. Cultural Ideology in British India, eds. Harald Fischer-Tiné and Michael Mann (London: Wimbledon Publishing Company, 2004), pp. 4–8. Taking all this into account, it could be said that the Social Darwinism and the “imperial liberalism” of the late-nineteenth-century did nothing but update the traditional ideology of “civilizing mission” and give it a scientific clothing.
41 Hamer, Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery, (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1972), p. 263–6. The scientific, and particularly biological, language in the interpretation of the national phenomenon was driven mainly by the publication of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Authors such as Henry Sumner Maine or Walter Bagehot conveyed the idea of “evolution” from biology to politics or to the analysis of politics and political systems. Maine, for example, in Ancient Law (1861) understood the “national character” as a historical-evolutionary entity; Bagehot, in his Physics and Politics: Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of Natural Selection and Inheritance to Political Society (1873), raised an evolutionary conception of political systems –of the progress of the organs of those political systems from natural selection criteria of use and disuse thereof. Benito, James Bryce, pp. 46–7, 72–81.
42 James Bryce, “The Migrations of the Races of Men Considered Historically,” in The Contemporary Review, vol. LXII, (1892), p. 131.
43 Here I refer mainly to his works “The Migrations of the Races of Men Considered Historically” (1892), The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races of Mankind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), and South America (1912).
44 James Bryce, The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races, pp. 7–9.
45 Bryce, South America, p. 438.
46 Ibid., p. 474.
47 Ibid., p. 439.
48 Ibid., p. 452.
49 Maurice Olender, Race sans histoire (Lonrai: Galaade Éditions, 2009), pp. 15–6.
50 Olender, Race sans histoire, p. 16.
51 Cf., Bryce, South America, pp. 475–476.
52 Bryce, South America, pp. 531.
53 Ibid., pp. 530.
54 Bryce, The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races, p. 16.
55 Bryce, South America, p. 531.
56 Ibid., p. 440.
57 Ibid., pp. 441–2.
58 Ibid., pp. 440–2, 541–3.
59 Ibid., pp. 545–6.
60 Ibid., pp. 520–1.
61 Olender, Race sans histoire, pp. 46–7.
62 Ibid., pp. 426.
63 Ibid., pp. 447–8.
64 Ibid., pp. 422–3.
65 Cf., Bryce, South America, pp. 429–51.
66 Ibid., p. 440.
67 Ibid., pp. 537–9.
68 Henri Sumner Maine, Popular Government. Four Essays (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1885), pp. 201–2.
69 Bryce, “British Feeling on the Venezuelan Question,” 148. Bryce, South America, p. 540.
70 Agustín Basave Benítez, México mestizo. Análisis del nacionalismo mexicano en torno a la mestizofilia de Andrés Molina Enríquez (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002), 17–41. Charles Hale, Las transformacions del liberalismo en México a fines del siglo XIX (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002), pp. 393–4. Fernando Devoto, Historia de la inmigración en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2003), pp. 251–2.
71 Bryce, South America, p. 567.
72 Ibid., pp. 544–6.
73 Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, p. 273.
74 Knight, “Rethinking British Informal Empire,” p. 42.
75 Bryce was not the only one who thought of Argentina as a “true democratic republic” or as a country in the process of reaching that status: Charles Morrison (1817–1909), for example, a London financier who acquired the Mercantile Bank of the River Plate in 1881, saw in Argentina a great democratic republic in formation, “a New United States that would realize and renew the virtues of individualism, private property and minimum government.” Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, pp. 274–5.
76 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 60–2.
77 Daniel Carey, “Truth, Lies and Travel Writing,” in The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Carl Thompson (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 3–4.
78 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 7, 38–9.
79 Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, p. XI.
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Notes on contributors
Ricardo Ledesma Alonso
Ricardo Ledesma Alonso holds a PhD in History from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters (FFyL) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters (UNAM) - Mexico City, Mexico. He is contributor of the Center for Portuguese Literature at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. His main research interests are Latin American and European nineteenth-century historiography and Portuguese historical novel. He is author of the articles “History, Knowledge and Narration: Alexandre Herculano’s ‘Crónicas-Romances’”, Revista de Estudos Literários, vol. 9, Center for Portuguese Literature, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, 2019; and “History, Narrativity and Progress in the Life of Jesus by Ernest Renan”, Revista de História, num. 178, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, 2019. [email protected]