Fantasías de conquista y liberación: el mito de salvación británica de Hispanoamérica y su circulación en Gran Bretaña y el Río de la Plata durante las Invasiones Inglesas

Abstract

Facing Napoleons continental blockade, Britain began to look at Spanish America as a territory in which it could pursue its commercial and imperialist ambitions. Historical essays and news, travel stories, dramas, and poems about that part of the New World fed fantasies of conquest, but also of liberation, in which the indigenous people were seen as victims of Spanish oppression, whom the British could save as defenders of Liberty. In this context, the 1806 and1807 British expeditions to the Río de la Plata were partly justified as a plan of occupation that had the ulterior purpose of returning the American people to their rightful power. This was represented in the diffusion of a prophecy of presumed American origin, which predicted that a nation named England would restore the Inca empire. In this sense, the following paper will investigate the utopian imaginaries that sustained the construction of a British salvation myth ofSpanish America and its diffusion in the Río de la Plata during the English Invasions, through testimonial accounts of the time, merchandise allusive to the British victory and The Southern Star periodical, published in Montevideo.