Overview
- Reappraises the significance of French interactions with Latin America from the 1820s to 1860s
- Proposes a new interpretation of the French military intervention in Mexico, as a strategic and ambitious attempt to resist the rise of US power in Latin America
- Contributes to the historiography of Latin American and Mexican intellectual and political history, exploring pan-Latinism, anti-Americanism and Mexican conservatism
Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies (CIPCSS)
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This book explores French imperialism in Latin America in the nineteenth century, taking Mexico as a case study. The standard narrative of nineteenth-century imperialism in Latin America is one of US expansion and British informal influence. However, it was France, not Britain, which made the most concerted effort to counter US power through Louis-Napoléon’s military intervention in Mexico, begun in 1862, which created an empire on the North American continent under the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian. Despite its significance to French and Latin American history, this French imperial project is invariably described as an “illusion”, an “adventure” or a “mirage”. This book challenges these conclusions and places the French intervention in Mexico within the context of informal empire. It analyses French and Mexican ideas about monarchy in Latin America; responses to US expansion and the development of anti-Americanism and pan-Latinism; the consolidation of Mexican conservatism; and, finally, the collaboration of some Mexican elites with French imperialism. An important dimension of the relationship between Mexico and France, explored in the book, is the transatlantic and transnational context in which it developed, where competing conceptions of Mexico and France as nations, the role of Europe and the United States in the Americas and the idea of Latin America itself were challenged and debated.
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Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Edward Shawcross is an independent scholar based in London, UK. He recently completed an AHRC-funded PhD at University College London, UK. He is the author of an article on French imperialism in Latin America in the European History Quarterly.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: France, Mexico and Informal Empire in Latin America, 1820-1867
Book Subtitle: Equilibrium in the New World
Authors: Edward Shawcross
Series Title: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70464-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-70463-0Published: 19 February 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-88942-9Published: 06 June 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-70464-7Published: 06 February 2018
Series ISSN: 2635-1633
Series E-ISSN: 2635-1641
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 294
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: History of the Americas, History of France, Imperialism and Colonialism