Papers presented by Damian Clavel since 2019

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

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

Abstract:

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.

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2021 Hopin Virtual Events Platform

"Robert Southey’s Madoc Revisited: Excluding Indigenous Peoples from British Business Imperialism in the Early Decades of the Nineteenth Century"

Abstract:

This paper focuses on Madoc, a poem written by Robert Southey and published in 1806-7. It sheds light on the role cultural productions and representations played in the cultural shaping of British business imperialism in the early decades of the 19th century. A literary success of the time, Southey’s poem revisited the legend of Madoc, a Welsh prince having discovered the Americas in the 12th century already and assimilating with American Indigenous populations before conquering the whole of the American continent. Rather than a simple literary work, Southey’s poem participated, this paper posits, in the construction of private British colonialism. Indeed, the poem of Madoc appears as having been initially created to support and promote the financing of a private English colonial project. Led by Southey and friends, it envisioned constructing a pantisocracy (an artistic utopia) in the Americas. Placed in its historical context, this poem, however, does not only have colonial origins. It also appears as having participated and culturally supported the constitution and financing of a particular form of British imperialism in Central and South America with, as yet, no real political existence. Presenting an America devoid of natives capable of achieving great things without being of European descent, the trope upon which the story of Madoc rested contributed to shaping the perception of many subsequent British colonial transatlantic enterprise as endeavours that could only maintain commercial and political relations with Spanish descendants, rather than indigenous populations. This study highlights the central role of a piece of literary work in the financial and political promotion of a particular form of private British colonialism. As such, it contributes to recent transdisciplinary scholarship studying the development of money markets and empires through the lenses of both political economy and literature.

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