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Abstract
This article situates the Anglophone newspapers published in nineteenth-century Valparaíso, Chile, within global information networks, highlighting Valparaíso's role as an influential hub in the development of the informal empire. These publications, reflecting the characteristics of the nineteenth-century foreign-language press in their production, content, and readership, underscore the extensive influence of British cultural and economic influence, which extended well beyond the bounds of formal empire. Central to this study is the Anglophone Chile Newspaper Project, which not only preserves these publications through digitization but also facilitates their global dissemination. In its theoretical framing too, this essay contributes to the larger goal of overcoming disciplinary silos, working to forge a complex understanding of the intersectional identities that shape national, transnational, and global perspectives. Our theoretical framework accords with our material efforts to reconnect this siloed and endangered archive with the global ‘big data’ projects that are capitalizing on the accelerating pace of newspaper digitization, thus providing a platform for understanding the transnational narratives and transoceanic exchanges, championing a reinvigorated discourse on identity, transculturation, and the interplay between local and global dynamics. By situating the English-language press within the broader context of foreign-language print media, the project underscores the newspapers' contribution to the dynamic identity transformations within British colonies and, in turn, the enduring impact of print culture on contemporary globalized identities.
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Notes
1 UNESCO: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/959. Accessed August, 2017.
2 Iglesias-Rogers, ed. The Hispanic Anglosphere, 1. The concept of entangled histories is discussed on pages 5–6.
3 Brake and Codell, eds. Encounters in the Victorian Press, 5.
4 Schelstraete and Van Remoortel, “Towards Sustainable Periodical Studies,” 336–354.
5 The Anglophone Chile Newspaper Archive was launched in 2017 and the resulting Omeka archive (consisting of approximately 400 high resolution PDFs, scanned at 300 dpi, together with metadata and contextual materials) is now freely available to researchers and the general public worldwide. Our goals are to preserve these heritage materials; provide public access; expand current understanding of the Anglophone diaspora; and develop new methods of connecting data from the global North and South. At the same time, our work increases awareness of the relevance, importance and influence of transnational migrations and exchanges, in parallel with other recent projects like the journal Global Nineteenth Century Studies (https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/journals/id/111/; accessed 09/2021) and the work of the TRANSFOPRESS collective, a transnational network for the study of the foreign language press (https://www.chcsc.uvsq.fr/transfopress-english; Accessed September, 2021).
6 Newspaper digitization projects are underway across the continent, but for practical as well as cultural reasons they currently focus on preserving Spanish- or Portuguese-language periodicals; given the time-intensive nature of newspaper digitization, there are currently no plans to digitize the English-language holdings in Chile.
7 Marsh, “Memorials And Archives.”
8 The term “informal empire” has been debated by historians ever since Gallagher and Robinson's influential 1953 article “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” which argued for broadening traditional definitions of empire. For a synthesis of the debate as well as a balanced range of perspectives on the issues involved, see Latin American historian Matthew Brown’s edited collection, Informal Empire in Latin America (2007); for a recent intervention in the debate, see Jessie Reeder’s The Forms of Informal Empire (2020).
9 Wagner, “The Transcultural Press.” Wagner’s diagnosis reflects the current state of the Anglophone newspapers in Chile: some Anglophone titles have never been microfilmed, and some numbers are missing, with no known copies anywhere in the world. Finally, despite the impressive scope and progress of the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile’s cultural-heritage digitisation initiative, there are no urgent plans to digitise the library’s foreign-language newspapers.
10 Wagner, “The Transcultural Press.”
11 While making the case that the term remains accurate and useful in describing British/Latin American relations in this period, Reeder acknowledges that ‘historians and economists do not all agree that influence in a foreign region is tantamount to empire, nor that “empire” is the right term for processes that were often ad hoc, decentralized, and bidirectional. Some argue that terms like “sphere of influence” or “dependency” are more appropriate. It also remains a point of contention among historians whether foreign investment in Latin America in the nineteenth century was a debilitating force or a necessary evil that helped modernize helpless economies’ (Reeder, The Forms of Informal Empire, 9–10).
12 Coronil, “Latin American Postcolonial Studies,” 225.
13 Ortega, “Post-teoría y estudios transatlánticos,” 114.
14 Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” 5.
15 Ortega, “Post-teoría y estudios transatlánticos,”115; translation ours.
16 Qtd. in Bethell 1985, 217.
17 Source: Census data, Office of Statistics, Chile (1865–1875–1885 and 1895). Full data available through Memoria Chilena, Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, Accessed September 22, 2021. http://www.memoriachilena.gob.cl/602/w3-article-31530.html.
18 Other foreign communities in Valparaiso also published periodicals; just a few examples are the German community’s paper the Deutsche Nachristen, the French Courrier du Chili and Colonie Française, and the Italian L’Italia.
19 Iglesias-Rogers, ed., The Hispanic Anglosphere, 1; the concept of entangled histories is discussed on pages 5–6.
20 Mayo, British Merchants and Chilean Development, 13.
21 Wagner, writing on the foreign-language press in nineteenth-century China in ‘Don’t Mind the Gap,’ notes characteristics that substantially echo the situation in South America in the same era: “the treaty ports established in the mid-nineteenth century … created a structural change by formalizing a series of contact zones … These were border- and language-straddling information communities … [and] deeply intertwined in the Chinese public sphere … The treaty ports with their close connections to the world at large and their thick flow of news and opinion have concentrated so much public articulation that their distance from Inland China was much greater than that from other international contact zones and ports.”
22 Hall, Sin garantías, 401.
23 “Imprenta Universo,” Memoria Chilena, Accessed September 13, 2021. http://www.memoriachilena.gob.cl/602/w3-article-97853.html; see also Cecilia García-Huidobro & Paula Escobar, Una historia de las revistas chilenas, Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2012, 27.
24 Piesse, 21.
25 Originally printed in Reports by Her Majesty’s Secretaries of Embassy and Legation of the Manufactures, Commerce, & C. of the Countries in which they Reside, in the series Commercial (Trade Reports). London: Harrison & Sons, 1876.
26 For an analysis of this transcultural debate, see Jennifer Hayward & Michelle Prain Brice, “‘La cuestión de la mujer ha surgido en Chile’: la prensa británico-chilena de Valparaíso,” in Figuras de lo común: Formas y disensos en los estudios literarios. Valparaíso, Chile: EUV/Colección Dársena Chile, 2021.
27 Examples of fictional narratives include ‘Scoundrel or Saint?’ in January, ‘The Honour of the Bank’ in February, and ‘The Woman Who Dared’ in July, all in 1902; nonfictional serials include ‘The Story of Brigham Young and his Life,’ which ran in December, 1902.
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Jennifer Hayward
Jennifer Hayward, Facultad de Artes Liberales, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Viña del Mar, Chile; College of Wooster, Wooster, OH, USA; Email [email protected]
Michelle Prain-Brice
Michelle Prain-Brice, Facultad de Artes Liberales, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago, Chile; ANID, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Valparaíso, Chile