Abstract

"The Drinks Party: (Re)inventing Colombia in the City of London – July 10, 1822"

Damian Clavel, University of Zurich (damian.clavel@uzh.ch)

This paper tells the story of a dinner. Gathering hundreds of guests, mostly from the English political and financial world, it took place in the great room of the City of London Tavern on July 10th, 1822. Lavish, the dinner honored then minister plenipotentiary of Gran Colombia Antonio Francisco Zea, who had recently authorized the issuing of Colombia’s very first loan on the London foreign debt market. However, as speeches and boozy toasts unfolded, politicians and merchant-bankers of all stripes began redrawing and reinventing the geography and history of Colombia, laying the foundations for the future economic and political relations that were to link the two countries. In fact, speeches quickly ignored the tense state of transatlantic commercial, military, and diplomatic relations at the time and, more importantly, their historical foundations. Instead, Colombia was being reinvented during this drinks party, less as a new country than as a fantasized trading partner and credible borrower, whose only European inhabitants were to reinforce an international trade system in complete transformation. In other words, speakers rapidly imagined Colombia not in terms of its economic and political capacities as an individual sovereign borrower to meet, for example, its financial commitments, but rather as a future much-needed component of a theoretical model of international trade that would have Britain at its center. This paper explores how the study of this one dinner – a temporally and spatially localized event – uncovers some of the financial and political entanglements of 19th-century processes of state-making and international borrowing. In particular, it sheds light on how a foreign community comes to be imagined not by South American promoters of Colombia’s independence, but by City merchant-bankers themselves both in its form and temporality.