Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
Summary
British relations with Latin America have fallen badly into disrepair. The deterioration in the relationship was brought home in spectacular fashion by the war between Britain and Argentina in 1982 over the Falklands/Malvinas, although the decline had begun many years earlier. Even before the First World War, it was becoming clear that Britain's exceptional influence in the nineteenth century – based on trade and investment – could not be sustained and the two world wars, together with the intervening depression, left the United States as the undisputed hegemonic power. Since 1945, British preoccupations with decolonisation on the one hand and the rise of Western Europe on the other have pushed Latin America even further towards the margin of official interest.
The reduction in British influence in Latin America was, of course, inevitable. British hegemony in the nineteenth century was based on the absence of commercial rivals able to provide the capital and goods needed by the newly independent republics. With the emergence of other capital-exporting countries before the First World War (notably France, Germany and the United States), the British monopoly declined and commercial competition led to a diversification of Latin America's trade and investment links. British influence remained strongest in the Southern Cone of Latin America (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay), but this position was further undermined by the debt defaults of the 1930s and the wave of nationalisations (including that of the Argentine railways) in the late 1940s.
From their low point at the end of the 1940s, British relations with Latin America have declined still further. This has not, generally speaking, been the result of conscious decisions by British or Latin American policy-makers.
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- Britain and Latin AmericaA Changing Relationship, pp. ix - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989