The government and people of Great Britain played a significant role in the events of Latin American independence, but the admiration was mutual. British politicians, industrialists and abolitionists looked toward Iberian America as a place of opportunity and fortune, and as a place that was far enough away to carry out experiments with reformist ideas. In return, Latin American patriots looked toward Great Britain for the naval protection it could provide, to its armaments and woollen factories for material goods, and to its banks for development loans. People on both sides of the Atlantic assessed their public and private interests and sought results on their own terms. But it also was more than a military, diplomatic and commercial relationship. There were equally significant cultural exchanges in the form of scientific knowledge, legal structures, pedagogical theories, Masonic practices, incentives to abolish slavery, and the beginning of an active book trade. On an individual, human level, there were also hundreds of long-standing, fond personal friendships and family connections that spanned both language and geographical space. British involvement in Latin American independence was much broader than just the diplomatic and military spheres; it encompassed economic, material, intellectual, cultural and human exchanges as well.

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the United States was a fledgling power, weaker than many European countries in both economic and military terms. The central government had effective control over only a small area of the continent, and disputes between it and the states were already well entrenched. The country had continental aspirations, but only gradually would it begin moving its border westward. The power imbalance between the United States and Latin America was therefore not yet great, but it would rapidly swing in favour of the U.S. in the first decades of the century. This chapter analyzes the challenges in establishing and maintaining relations between governments in the United States and Latin America and concludes with the post–Civil War period, at which time U.S. economic and military power markedly increased.

Chapter 3 departs from the Colombian Pacific and ventures to the eastern Andean highland town of Cúcuta, where white slaveholding delegates from across Gran Colombia (and one from Mexico) established the policy of gradual emancipation. After surveying historical precedents for and factors leading up to the 1821 gradual emancipation law’s adoption, including Antioquia’s gradual abolition law of 1814 and the Haitian Revolution, the chapter turns to the contentious debate over the Free Womb law and the question of slaveholders’ compensation. Delegates principally wrestled over the age at which Free Womb children’s bondage would be terminated and over the parameters of their salability, grounding arguments in Enlightenment thought and colonial racial accounting ideas of the development life cycles of enslaved people. Here I also examine the debates and conditions for the trafficking of Free Womb children, a phenomenon I refer to as the Free Womb trade that adopted specific legal parameters regarding puberty and geography. The chapter ends by exploring the combative and regionalized public spheres of abolition and antiabolition that developed across Gran Colombia in the 1820s.

This essay examines the anonymous serialization of George Numa Des Sources’s novella Adolphus, A Tale (1853) in The Trinidadian, a radical Brown newspaper published in Port of Spain. The plot – a romance about a Brown Trinidadian exiled in Venezuela – mirrors Des Sources’s own emigration scheme for founding a utopian socialist colony in eastern Venezuela. Written after emancipation but set during slavery, Adolphus evinces what I call 'nonhistorical' fiction, foregrounding how the experiences of enslavement disrupt not only the temporal linearity of History (what Édouard Glissant calls 'nonhistory'), but also the ideological continuities that Georg Lukács argues define the post-1848 historical novel. By narrating an alternative past (one in which the protagonist and Simón Bolívar form a transnational alliance and collaborate to advance the mission of multiracial democracy), Des Sources forges the nonhistorical foundation for the future that his emigrant colony hoped to realize.