Reshaping the British Identity in South America 1900-1920

Reshaping the British Identity in South America 1900-1920 Throughout the nineteenth century, since the independence of the South American republics, Britain dominated the continent’s markets for trade and investment. As a result, British businessmen held tremendous sway over local governments and their economic policies. South America thus provides the ultimate example of Britain’s informal imperialism, where British style laissez faire and free trade became unquestioned economic dogma. But by the turn of the twentieth century, Britain’s dominance waned. Historians tend to excuse the evaporation of the British presence in the South American ports and marketplaces by attributing it to the good sense of British businessmen. The historian D. C. M. Platt argues that British manufacturers and traders made a tactical withdrawal from South America to more lucrative, less competitive markets in the British Empire. However, many of the British in South America would have derided Platt as defeatist. The annual reports of British consuls and diplomats exhibited profound antiGerman feelings among British officials and merchants. Command of the “ExportImport Complex” had long given Britain influence in the economic and political affairs of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. The fact that German business increasingly ruled the foreign trade of the republics struck many of the local British as ominous and terrible. These men wanted their nation, Great Britain, to repel German economic and political 2 incursions into South America. They believed that British trade had lost control of profitable sectors due to German competition. To remedy the problem, they hoped that traders, industrialists, and all other commercial interests of their country would struggle to reassert their national identity by considering themselves part of a “Greater Britain”, fighting in league with their fellow countrymen against Germany and Deutschtum. British commercial nationalists recognized that such changes would transform the self-image of the British in the republics. The British in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay believed simply that British businessmen conducted themselves more ethically than their competitors. The phrase "palabra de Inglés", the word of an Englishman, exemplified to South Americans an ideal of trustworthiness. British merchants refused to renege on contracts, promptly repaid debts, and refused to bribe customs officials and government purchasing departments. Correct practices were based on the dogmas of laissez-faire and free trade, with self-reliance a moral imperative to British businessmen. They judged the Germans as immoral because they worked together and because the government of the Reich aided their trade expansion. In other words, these Britons in South America adhered to a specific commercial morality. But at the start of the twentieth century, attitudes began to change. AngloSouth Americans debated among themselves, and with their counterparts in the United Kingdom, whether it was worthwhile to maintain morally-correct commercial practices even if it damaged their overall trade. The resolute refusal of shipping lines and banks to change any practices to benefit their countrymen abroad exasperated those officials and British merchants established in South America who believed that increasing their links to British business at home would reverse their downfall. As their presence in the local 3 economy waned, British businessmen and diplomats in South America grew cognizant of themselves as a part of a larger British nation, identifying themselves as a community that must oppose the Germans, in league with their British brothers across the Atlantic. The British already held a significant nationally oriented presence in South America. The English language press in South American towns helped to nurture local British communities. Aided in geographic scope and immediacy of their coverage after 1876 by the transatlantic cable, such as the Standard and the Herald in Buenos Aires, focused on British news from around the world, and also on the news of the local AngloPorteño community such as cricket and football matches. The advent of passenger steam liner traffic likewise enhanced interaction between the British in South America and at home, especially those of the merchant classes. Undoubtedly a number of Britons did not see themselves as real immigrants, always recognizing “the possibility of return.” As Sir David Kelly, a young diplomat appointed to Argentina in 1919, later explained in his autobiography, “Young English immigrants came in without impediment, employed English lawyers, doctors and architects, shopped at Harrod’s great local branch in Buenos Aires and Thompson’s furniture stores, etc., and if they wished, retired to England either with their whole capital or with the (as it seemed then) certainty of having their incomes or pensions remitted to them as though they had merely moved from Birmingham to London.” (111) Globalization of labor and capital could appear no more complete. Yet despite the option of return, most British immigrants appeared ready to stay in South America forever. By building up a number of local British institutions over the course of the nineteenth century, they did not need to return to live a fully British life. In Buenos Aires, these included the Anglican Churches, the Scottish Presbyterian Church, a variety of missions for seamen, the British Hospital, the British Society in the Argentine, the British Club, the Masonic Lodge, the Royal Colonial Institute, the Hurlingham Club, the Belgrano Athletic Club, the British and American Benevolent society, some childrens' homes and sailors’ homes, the Salvation Army, St. George's College, and over twenty English schools. “Golf clubs, lawn tennis clubs, etc., in and about Buenos Ayres spring up like mushrooms, money being apparently always available for benevolent or athletic objects affecting the British community,” explained Sir Reginald Tower, who in his duties as British minister often appeared at the functions of such groups. In the three years before the war, the British people of Buenos Aires began to construct a £40,000 clock tower commemorating the centenary of Argentina’s independence. Like other large, assertively British buildings, such as the Harrods department store on Calle Florida, and the Retiro train station, the memorial clock tower arose as a grand physical embodiment of British power and economic successes in Argentina over the previous century. In many ways, these Britons in South America saw themselves as part of a global cultural community of “Greater Britain”. Since Dilke coined the term, “Greater Britain” has ordinarily referred to the cultural connections that have been maintained between Great Britain and white settler colonies overseas, ones which have often been thought to have geostrategic consequences for the Empire. Such analyses, whether they utilize the term “Greater Britain” or not, always include Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and often South Africa and the United States. The cultural nationalism of the numerically puny but economically dominant British groups in the South American cities should fall under this umbrella, as these people, despite being far away from home at times for generations, if anything increasingly identified themselves as British. They considered themselves quite British, with their own language, local newspapers, churches, garden suburbs and football clubs. They were slow to assimilate, did not take the learning of Spanish very seriously, and “rarely regarded themselves as immigrants”, instead considering themselves expatriates. But the new sense of Britishness which arose after 1900 could not be measured merely linguistically, by changes in the circulation of English-language newspapers, or nostalgically, by their willingness to donate generous sums to build monuments like the clock tower in Buenos Aires. Its core ethos was commercial. Among businessmen, fear increasingly permeated their self-identity as Britons. The new British nationalism in South America rested on many of the same beliefs as those held by the politicians and journalists in the United Kingdom interested in “national efficiency”. Like these activists at home, pessimists in South America recognized only relative decline, and blamed the laissez-faire liberalism embodied in the British state and economic system. For the new commercial nationalists, to be British meant to feel embattled by the Germans in a struggle between nations where only the fittest would survive. Worries about decline rested upon the assumption that the continent would always be controlled, at least economically and possibly politically, by foreigners. Displaying an acutely fin-de-siècle sense of social Darwinism, British diplomats in South America consistently generalized that the peoples of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil were inept, corrupt, and irrational. William Haggard, the minister to Brazil from 1906 through 1913, vociferously and consistently ridiculed the native politicians, whose “venal greed” led them to neglect the good of their country. In an extraordinarily lengthy and voluble appendix to his annual report for 1912, Haggard scoffed that the Brazilian people lived “practically in a state of nature”, lacking a belief in law and order or any sense of public or private morality. In notably undiplomatic terms, Haggard lamented that “there is absolutely no dependence to be placed upon the word of a Brazilian, nor is it possible to appeal to him in any of the ordinary ways or on any of the ordinary motives.” Officials in the government lacked discipline and acted only when bribed. Brazil could theoretically escape its dependence on imports, Haggard argued, but the laziness of its people made the production of even rudimentary finished goods impossible. Many of the British believed that race was an important factor in the failures of local governments and in their potential manipulability. The so-called ‘natives’, tainted both by the blood of former slaves and the migrant flood from the Mediterranean, were considered incapable of fending off domination by stronger northern Europeans. The seasonal migration from Italy of golondrinas, “the swallows” who labored in the grain fields and returned home each year, supported the prejudice of some Britons that southern Europeans were fit solely for labor in the service of British capital and international trade in South America. German immigrants, on the other hand, were different. While disparaging the general population of Brazil, Haggard noted that the southern states of Santa Catherina and Rio Grande do Sul “must be judged in a different and more favourable manner” due to the Germans who settled there, bringing with them competent schooling and a work ethic. 14 The few members of the local ruling elite whom the British respected were those with German roots. Men such as Lauro Müller, the Foreign Minster in Brazil from 1913 until early 1917, supposedly exhibited far less venality than other Brazilians. Indeed the German communities in Buenos Aires and Rio Grande do Sul believed the same about themselves, exhibiting their own beliefs in their superiority over the criollos and diligently maintaining their Germanic culture at a distance from the locals. Such beliefs about racial characteristics flourished among whites, blacks and criollos throughout Latin America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to Richard Graham, race was a “hegemonic ideology” in Latin America, as the pseudo-scientific ideas on race circulating in Europe were adopted by local elites and accepted by much of the South American population, helping the dominant classes to justify their rule. These prevailing racial ideas also justified “the economic and political power exercised by some nations over others.” The British considered themselves, and were largely considered by the local elites, as racially superior over virtually everyone else except, perhaps, Germans and North Americans. The British sense of superiority was only enhanced by the efforts of South American elites to “whiten” their populations with supposedly inferior Italians and Spanish. These racist assumptions fed British worries about the consequences of Germans rising to dominance in the republics. British diplomats and consuls believed that the Germans more successfully organized themselves into an effective transnational community. The Germans of South America appeared to work together to aid German commerce. They proved a learned and flexible sales force for their manufacturers, and their immigrant communities avidly and loyally consumed German imports. Heavily populated German immigrant farming communities dominated the Brazilian states of Parana and Rio Grande do Sul politically and socially. Their clubs and associations (Vereine) drew together German businessmen in the big cities and helped to unite all classes of Germans. Immigrants to rural South America formed concentrated settlements of German culture, and in such places as Santa Catharina in southern Brazil, German import and export houses flourished without any British competition. As the local British consul wrote, it was a reflex for the owners and managers of such houses to purchase goods from Germany. When combined with the well-known and unsated imperialist passions of the Kaiser and others in Germany, the growing German economic influence in the republics led some of the British to consider whether Germany held greater plans for the continent. The most extreme fear of the Britons of South America was that the Reich would formally colonize a piece of the continent. Southern Brazil, where by 1900 at least 350,000 Germans had migrated since the middle of the nineteenth century, looked like the most likely place. The German population in Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina failed to assimilate with the non-German locals, instead maintaining separate Lutheran churches, German clubs and societies, and a German-language press. This concentrated settlement of Germans dwarfed all British communities in South America. The German government at times appeared anxious to seed colonies in South America. The Delbrück Law, passed by the Reichstag in July 1913, allowed Germans to keep their German citizenship even after becoming naturalized in a foreign state. In Montevideo, R. J. Kennedy worried about the successes of the German Government in keeping its subjects abroad united and patriotic. Over a few generations, the Germans might lose some of their national characteristics but in general "they will maintain a close connection with their original country, and will be active and patriotic centres upon which Germany may base itself, should the day ever come in which she will find herself engaged in a struggle with the United States for extending Teutonic influence in South America." Kennedy quoted “an old German diplomatist” as saying that no one in Germany believed that the US would uphold the Monroe doctrine south of Panama, especially in the face of the recent German naval expansion. "Some day an incident will occur" in Brazil, the German diplomat reportedly prophesied, "which will give the German Government an excuse for interfering, and then it will only be a question of how much land Germany chooses to take." Any perceived intervention by the German Government to foster its foreign trade and to maintain its communities abroad was easily interpreted as underhanded and conspiratorial weltpolitik aiming to dominate South America economically and politically. Other Britons disagreed, and rejected excessive fearmongering. In his annual report for 1911, Haggard explained that the Germans of Brazil lost their "Vaterland patriotism" within a generation, just like immigrants from other countries. Lauro Müller, the Brazilian Minister of Foreign Affairs, exemplified this transformation. Müller, in Haggard’s opinion, was "as un-German as a man could well be, both in appearance and, I should think, in sympathy." In early 1914, Haggard's successor Arnold Robertson noted that German emigration had diminished over the previous few years and appeared far from menacing. Furthermore, many of the Germans who emigrated to southern Brazil did so in order to escape the militarism of Germany. "They have become nationalised" as Brazilians in mind and body, Robertson argued, "and would be the first to resist invasion." Whichever side was correct, the existence of this debate over the intentions of the Germans illustrated how some Britons believed that Germany might be pining for land across the Atlantic, in a place everyone considered ripe for domination by a racially strong imperial nation. After all, everyone assumed that Germans were already cobbling together an informal empire. Many British businessmen and government officials in South America alleged that the German government subsidized German manufacturers and contractors, allowing them to charge below-market prices for certain goods and services. In the early 1900s, German contractors for the first time regularly underbid their British counterparts for public works projects and other large public tenders in the republics. To some, this proved that German firms were more meticulous than their British counterparts, studying the specifications for public works “with minute care”, “leaving nothing in doubt”, and writing proposals in clear and simple language. But others saw the trend as indicative of a sinister plot. In his report for 1911, British Minister Kennedy described the year long progress of a tender by the Uruguayan government for electric cranes for the port of Montevideo. In what then amounted to a strong display of activism on behalf of British trade, Kennedy had appealed to Uruguayan officials in support of a bid from a British firm. They rejected the firm’s offer, as well as bids by seven other British firms, because the lowest British bid almost doubled that of the winning German firm. The British company assured Kennedy that its own tender was so low that profits would be negligible. The situation "gives occasion for much reflection", Kennedy felt, "not only upon German commercial methods, but also upon the extent to which German merchants stand in with each other, and may be perhaps supported by their Government." Kennedy was far from alone in believing that the German government and German merchants colluded to circumvent the supposed freedom of the South American markets. Although it remains uncertain whether the German government would go so far as to subsidize loss-making business ventures, no one then doubted that the German government would do a lot to help Germans conduct trade. The assignment of military advisors to the republics exemplified the way that the interests of the German government converged with those of its exporting industries. Germany, France, and Britain jostled for the privilege of instructing armies and navies across South America. As a rule, “the cannon followed the instructor", as those Latin American governments employing German instructors began to purchase their armaments from German manufacturers such as Krupp rather than from their traditional French and British suppliers. In Argentina, German instructors fashioned the War Academy and established contacts between Argentine army procurement officials and German arms manufacturers, who soon monopolized the weapons contracts tendered by the Argentine government. Historians of the German foreign ministry and armed forces have argued that the primary mission of the German armed forces in Argentina was to support such German economic interests. At the time, British diplomats came to the same conclusion. In 1911, Minister Haggard in Brazil complained to his superiors in the Foreign Office that the efforts of German businesses to boost their trade “have been supplemented by the efforts of the German Government to persuade that of Brazil to accept officers of their nationality as instructors for their army and navy.” Facing this situation, the British of South America had to decide what to do. Diplomats and consuls appeared particularly interested in action, belying their reputation as scornful of commerce. British officials in South America consistently argued that to remedy the problems caused by the immoral cooperative efforts of the Germans, British businessmen would have to overcome their qualms and copy their competitors. They proposed fundamental changes to all aspects of British trade. Some must come from British manufacturers. "It is high time", Tower proclaimed, "that she (Britain) took a leaf out of the Germans' book, and paid more scrupulous attention to the requirements, manners, and customs, and particularly the language of this South American continent". Others must come from the banks. To boost British exports to the republics, British banks should copy their German counterparts, linking together industry, banking and the export trade apparatus of the country. Most interestingly, these British representatives abroad challenged their government to do more. Tower noted jealously that in Argentina, the staff of the German legation and consulates far outnumbered their British counterparts, embodying the commitment of their government to national commerce. In a report on Baron Bussche von Haddenhausen, the new German minister to Argentina, First Secretary Claud F.W. Russell of the British legation noted that the Baron had close ties to large local businesses. Russell believed that in choosing Bussche as their envoy (whom Russell knew in Washington as a man “not celebrated for his Anglophil [sic] tendencies”), the German government “undoubtedly kept in view the importance of carrying on the system of trade push in Argentina, which it is hoped may result in considerable increase of German business with this republic at the expense of British trade.” Minister Reginald Tower believed that the inactivity of British officials at home exacerbated understaffing on the periphery. The German government paid attention to South American traders and vacationers who visited Germany, giving them access to high government officials who extolled the power of German industries and the high quality of their products. Such 13 propaganda work appeared to reap dividends. In general, the personnel of the German state expended far more effort than their British counterparts to increase the commerce of their countrymen. These proselytizers for a new Britishness in South America believed that the British government should mimic the German state by putting money into efforts to support the building of the local British community. In 1912, Minister Haggard reported that in the German community “the propaganda by means of schools, churches, and music goes on steadily”. The Germans of Montevideo had their own school to educate their children in German language and culture. According to one interested British commentator, who wrote a report for Tower, the schools exemplified “the public spirit and patriotism of individual Germans” in the region, who thought it worth “great personal sacrifice” to set up these institutions “calculated to maintain interest in and encourage devotion to the motherland.” Support from the Kaiser held tremendous importance to the growth of German-language schools. The sum allotted by the German government to these schools in the River Plate region was “relatively insignificant”, approximately £4,200, but “the moral support thus ensured cannot be measured intrinsically.” The German government also utilized the church to maintain its influence, passing a law in 1900 that gave the Prussian state church control over congregations in other countries in return for government subsidies. Although hitherto independent, most congregations in Brazil jumped at the offer, illustrating not only their desire for money but also their yearning to enhance direct ties with Germany. The new British nationalists, however, did not aim merely to maintain cultural links to the old country. They hoped that the British in the republics could become the exclusive local representatives of the trade interests of Greater Britain, working at one with manufacturers, exporters, importers, shippers and bankers to help the cause of British commerce. At the start of the twentieth century, the creation of nationality-based Chambers of Commerce became a paramount goal of British diplomats and consuls hoping to make a difference on the ground in South America. In the 1890s such nationally-exclusive trade organizations began to develop among other nationalities, including the Germans, in the port cities. This new communalism marked the disintegration of what the historian Charles Jones has termed the “cosmopolitan bourgeoisie” of these ports. When at one time the foreigners conducting business in these cities held an affinity for each other and a disdain for natives, they lost their transnational cohesiveness as changes in world capitalism placed a premium on specialization and larger scale operations. Political eruptions within the South American countries, such as the shift from monarchy to republic in Brazil, further reshaped business interest groups. Nationality-based organizations had existed a half-century earlier, at least in Buenos Aires, but had long since disintegrated. Thus in 1899 it was a novel idea when Consul-General Rhind in Rio de Janeiro suggested that "as a means to furthering the representation of British commercial interests", a British Chamber of Commerce should be established in Brazil. Noting that the French community recently formed such a Chamber, Rhind stressed that the British were falling behind. In 1912, Sir Reginald Tower expressed his pleasure in the recent founding by four hundred people of a “British society in the Argentine Republic,” but he felt it was not enough and led new efforts to form a British Chamber of Commerce. "In these days of severe trade competition”, he argued, such organizations are “indispensable if we are to progress or even to maintain our present position." Although he was happy that local 15 British people had followed his admonitions of the previous year, Tower fretted that the local British community congealed too slowly and half-heartedly. He attributed their reticence to their historic individualism; they had always competed with each other and feared sharing commercial information. Such British businessmen noted "that British trade in the Argentine had done very satisfactorily in the past, and why then disturb the even tenour of their way by introducing some new-fangled institution such as a Chamber of Commerce which nobody wanted?" Tower hoped that a Chamber would destroy such antiquated, nostalgic views by working to benefit "British trade in general" The litany of barriers to building a Chamber of Commerce included a question of how to define Britishness. There was never any doubt that the definition included businessmen and companies with English, Scottish, and Welsh roots. The first list of possible adherents to a Chamber of Commerce included names like Macdonald, Mackintosh, and Lloyd Davies, and their first meeting, on July 1, 1913, occurred in “St. Andrew’s Hall” on Calle Perú, a place colloquially known as “Scotch Hall”. A point of more contention was whether a Chamber should include non-British subjects along with companies headquartered in the United Kingdom. Some old firms were wary of joining a Chamber where the expertise they had built up over the decades in running their individual businesses might be given away to newcomers for free. Yet these “AngloArgentine houses which have taken many generations to build” were not technically British, even though the families who owned them identified themselves as British. Whether such venerable “British” firms would want to cooperate with upstart importers and salesmen sent from United Kingdom manufacturers had proved a decisive stumbling block thwarting attempts of businessmen to create a Chamber before 1913, until Tower 16 stepped in. The community meeting he called for included both old firms and new, all who were in their own minds, and in the minds of most locals, recognizably British. Indeed, Sir Reginald Tower dominated the founding of the Chamber of Commerce in Argentina, and provides us with a paradigm of the new commercial activist British diplomat. He called the first meeting of British businessmen together in July 1913 and chaired its proceedings, delivering a lengthy opening speech outlining the purposes of the Chamber and his hopes for the future. “We have not yet outlived the character given to us as a nation of shopkeepers”, Tower proclaimed. Britons in Argentina had always been there to make money. However, “our people are no longer alone in the field to supply manufactured articles to this Republic, nor are we the only nation to take the bounteous crops and products of the earth with which Providence has endowed the Argentine Republic.” Creation of a Chamber would allow the “important business houses which have risen with the progress of the country on the prosperity they now enjoy” to help “their less fortunate brethren”, with the resulting growth in trade helping both individual houses and “our British commercial community in general.” Tower declared that he and his staff would help, and in fact noted that the Legation had recently engaged as First Secretary Mr. Hugh Gaisford, a man who recently helped set up a British Chamber of Commerce in Lisbon. Over the next few months, an Executive Committee of prominent British businessmen began to create the Chamber. They advertised in the English newspapers for applicants to be the Secretary of the Chamber, asking candidates to “express in writing their views of the functions, scope and aims of the Secretary of the British Chamber of Commerce.” After hiring H.E. Powell-Jones as secretary and setting up 17 offices they filed for incorporation in England, where Herbert Gibson of the sheep ranching company Gibson Brothers hired a permanent representative for the Chamber in London. The Committee soon drafted a circular that was sent to companies and Chambers of Commerce in the United Kingdom, explaining to them that many companies in Britain with business in Argentina should obtain membership. Finally, they settled the question of who the Chamber was intended to help, resolving that “the main purpose of the Chamber is to assist British firms established or having resident British representation in the Argentine Republic,” although they would also accumulate and supply general information about local conditions of trade in any way that would help British commerce. By August 1914 the “British Chamber of Commerce in the Argentine Republic” had 85 companies as active members and nine associates, a fulltime staff and new offices, and most importantly the unprecedented attention of the local British legation and consulate Similar efforts in 1913 and 1914 by British officials likewise nurtured new nationality-based commercial organizations in São Paulo, Montevideo, and Rosario. British business leaders increasingly recognized that they lived at a time and place where national identity largely determined business opportunities. They suppressed their traditional qualms about collective action and government involvement in trade, believing that change must occur for Greater Britain to maintain and perhaps even enhance its primacy in the economies of the South American republics. With this repudiation of their laissez faire traditions, a new British identity was being born, as the British of South America adjusted, reluctantly yet inexorably, to an increasingly nationalist era in the history of globalization.