Forgotten colonies

Britain’s footprint in South America is still visible. Review: Small Earthquakes: A Journey Through Lost British History in South America, Shafik Meghji, by Gavin O'Toole

Small Earthquakes: A Journey Through Lost British History in South America, Shafik Meghji, 2025, Hurst & Co

It would be wrong to say the British empire never had designs on Latin America, where it failed to establish large mainland colonies, making do with the scrappy territories of British Honduras and Guyana.

The Crown contented itself with a stranglehold over the Caribbean, where its presence was pervasive—11 countries in the sub-region continue to belong to the Commonwealth, as indeed do Belize and Guyana.

Britain certainly tried to establish a bridgehead in the Southern Cone, with unsuccessful invasions of the River Plate in 1806-07 and playing a role in the formation of Uruguay, and it intervened with military force in the region on several occasions.

But London’s eye for an opportunity to expand its possessions in this part of the world was always circumscribed by caution towards its main rival Spain; painful memories of the rebellion by its former colony, the US; its labour-intensive imperial expansion elsewhere in Africa and Asia; and Washington’s own rapidly developing imperial competition.

By the end of the 19^th century, Britain had accepted US hegemony over the continent and was content to get on with the real business of all empires—trade and extraction, matters in which it at that stage had a clear advantage.

By the late 19^th century Argentina in particular had developed into a key emerging market, its railways, ports and utilities attracting vast sums of British capital—up to 50 per cent of all British foreign investment by the 1880s. By 1929, a staggering 12 per cent of all British income from overseas investment came from the country.

Indeed, given the British influence in Argentina, Buenos Aires might even be called the “forgotten colony”, a phrase Shafik Meghji uses in his excellent and highly readable history of Britain’s footprint in South America.

Imperial power or not, Britain left more than just physical paraphernalia through extensive investment and banking in the region, it also left established civil society networks, habits and even attitudes that have had a lasting impact on the region.

Take the story of the legendary former editor in chief of the English-language Buenos Aires Herald, Andrew Graham-Yooll.

This character represents more than just an excellent example with which to start a book about Britain’s relationship with South America, he also symbolises a state of mind that seems to capture well—if you put aside the rapacious economic exploitation—the more positive aspects of British contributions to the region.

“Of course we were afraid,” Graham-Yooll, told his newspaper after returning from exile from the military terror, “but it’s one thing to be afraid and another thing to be a coward.”

If it were possible to bottle that defiant resilience then administer it to the more spineless regime cheerleaders of the journalistic profession the world would, of course, be a much better place.

Born in Buenos Aires to English and Scottish parents in 1944—his father had emigrated in 1928 and initially farmed in Patagonia—Graham-Yooll grew up in the suburb of Ranelagh, which had been built by a British railway company.

His life illustrates both the physical imprint of Britain on the development of Argentina, but more importantly some of the values and temperament those like his parents took with them to the country and seeded in, for example, areas such as journalism.

Small Earthquakes is clearly written in the spirit of Graham-Yooll, who died in 2019, a prolific and courageous writer who would pen the classic book about the years of terror in Argentina, A State of Fear.

His role during the dictatorship passing on information to human rights groups earned him beatings, threats, imprisonment, assassination attempts and ultimately, exile back to the UK.

It seems to speak loudly of attitudes that have been all but lost in contemporary Britain itself—of courage under fire, duty untainted by greed, a stoical calmness in the face of adversity, and a determination to do the right thing come what may.

There are hints of these ideas throughout Meghji’s fascinating journey through a history that British schoolchildren are simply never taught.

It is a great loss that they are not, because as the author points out, Britain’s quasi-colonial forays into the continent were not only extensive, but also had an important influence on the mother country.

“This may sound overrated, but the British influence is everywhere in Argentina,” Graham-Yooll told the author when they met. “Their legacy is vanishing, but it still stands out … If you look at sport, the schools, the clubs, the railway, everything … you just can’t avoid it.”

No surprise, then, that Argentina recently beat the British and Irish Lions in the rugby, a game for which the Pumas seem to have a natural affinity—American football is practically unheard of in the country, yet cricket thrives as one of the oldest sports in Buenos Aires (the first recorded game took place in 1806).

Watching the rugged Pumas on the pitch, it is not hard to imagine these tough Argentines taking up arms against and then defeating British expeditionary forces in 1806-07.

And although it is unacceptable to paint neo-colonialism in a positive light, by at least opening our eyes to the relationship between Britain and South America, and marvelling at the scale of ambition, we can perhaps discern an alternative to the nefarious, sleazy and menacing corporate greed and racism that define US ties with the region.

There are some great examples of why we should ponder such an alternative. Take the Buenos Aires Herald, for example, which following the coup of 1976 “played an outsized role during those torrid years, courageously reporting on the junta’s atrocities when many other media outlets fell silent.”

Britain, of course, would continue to make a positive contribution to Argentine history by ridding the country, through military defeat, of that sordid, murderous, fanatical dictatorship.

Britain’s architectural influence is ubiquitous in churches, railway stations, waterworks, schools—but so are the echoes of its lifestyle in civil society.

In Montevideo, Uruguay, British residents founded English-language newspapers—the Montevideo Independent, River Plate Times and Montevideo Times—musical and theatrical societies and, above all, sports clubs.

The Montevideo Cricket Club established in 1861 was in fact a multi-sports organisation and is the oldest rugby union club still in operation in the Americas. South America’s intense passion for what we recognise today as football, it has to be said, was also seeded by the British, its popularity driven in Uruguay by characters such as William Leslie Poole.

Meghji paints a fascinating story about what took the Welsh to Argentine Patagonia, and the lasting impact this small community had on this vast, and then sparsely populated, wilderness.

The author explores the persistently strange tussle for control over the Falklands and South Georgia, eventually consummated in a nasty, short war compared famously by Jorge Luis Borges to “a war between two bald men fighting over a comb”.

He delves into the history of Francis Drake’s journey along South America’s coastline, the first Briton to sail along the Strait of Magellan in 1578, and the subsequent exploits of the British in Tierra del Fuego and Chile’s Rapa Nui (Easter Island).

It is in Valparaíso, once one of the most important trading hubs in the Americas and a natural magnet for the mercantile classes, that Britain’s role in South America becomes most complex.

For it was from here that British and Irish soldiers and sailors played a vital role in South America’s wars of independence, some of them gaining immortality as liberators from imperialism, and not its forward guard—Bernardo O’Higgins, Roberto Simpson, Jorge O’Brien and Thomas Cochrane.

This contradictory protagonism encapsulates the British relationship with South America—an adventurous fascination with the exotic combined with a uniquely arrogant belief in a civilising mission.

It has been a love-hate relationship, the author points out, with admiration for things British combined with nationalist resentment at its economic influence—in Argentina, for example, a popular satirical cartoon depicted railway firms as a “Pulpo Inglés” or “English Octopus” whose tentacles encircled the country, taking its resources and stifling its development.

But as Meghji notes, South America has also influenced Britain in important ways, from the courageous parliamentary politics of the “Gaucho Laird” Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, a vehement anti-imperialist who co-founded the Scottish Labour Party and then the forerunner of the modern Scottish National Party, to the profound impact of the nitrate, guano, whaling and sheep-ranching booms on UK economic development.

It is a relationship, the author notes, quoting the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, that is still developing: “History never really says goodbye. History says, see you later.”

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