British-Chilean Newspapers: From Informal Empire to Hybridity in Print

Since the 1820s, Chile and Great Britain have shared a unique relationship that shaped the development of both countries and is still influential today. Despite their importance, however, the historical connections between Britain and Latin America are understudied. This essay analyzes the English-language periodical press published in nineteenth-century Chile, using the newspapers digitized by the authors' Anglophone Chile Newspaper Project (http://anglophonechile.org/news-archive/) to build on the bifocal post-colonial studies established by Fernando Coronil, the transatlantic and transdisciplinary model developed by Julio Ortega and the notion of the contact zone pioneered by Mary Louise Pratt. By tracing the Anglophone periodical press through three stages of development, from the colony's beginnings in commerce, through the era of informal empire, to the eventual hybridization of the Anglo colony with the local culture, the essay maps longstanding interrelations between the global north and south and illuminates the changing dynamics of informal empire.