Robert Aguirre should be commended for calling our attention to the less-studied area of the circulation between, and symbolic function of, collections and displays in nineteenth-century Britain and parts of Latin America. Largely centered on nationalist discourses, Aguirre’s very useful and informative Informal Empire explains the ways that England, in the place of direct military colonization of post-independence Mexico and Central America, and in the face of increasing interventions by the United States, nonetheless managed to play a vital, if not controlling, economic role in those regions. England did so, Aguirre argues, through the appropriation, trans-Atlantic exchange, and display of cultural artifacts from Mexico and present-day Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Aguirre, drawing on the works of historians of British imperialism, refers to this viewing and controlling from a distant London center of "calculation"—where appropriated and decontextualized objects were measured, quantified, and put on display—as “informal imperialism.”¹

Much of the first half of the four-chapter book is concerned with the collector, traveler, and showman William Bullock (c. 1773–1849), whose adventures and entrepreneurial schemes centered on charging admission to aggressively promoted exhibitions of collections of Egyptian and, more importantly, Mexican artifacts, many of which later became part of the British Museum’s holdings. Inherent in this accumulation of cultural artifacts on the part of British entrepreneurs such as Bullock was a symbolic redistribution of cultural wealth that formed part of the discourses of “informal imperialism.” Aguirre contends that the “roots of this massive redistribution of property lay in Bullock’s venture, whose combination of travel, collection, and exhibiting remained a crucial feature of Britain’s relationship with Mexico and Central America for decades” (33). While the author is more concerned with strategies of display, readers may question Aguirre’s views on how Bullock’s collecting patterns fit into, or distanced themselves from, the general trends of private collecting (art or other objects) in England and the Continent during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Indeed, one of the most interesting portions of this book deals with the use, reception, and meanings in London of a panorama representing Mexico City. Aguirre describes it as a compelling metaphor for the empire’s reach and grasp," and one that “made explicit the association between museum collections and the extractive operations of imperialism” (35). Bentham’s panopticon is the model here for Aguirre’s understanding of the panorama as an apparatus of vision (he acknowledges the work of Walter Benjamin, Anne Friedberg, Susan Buck-Morss, as well as Jonathan Crary in regards to the technologies of vision²), and he attempts to correlate this technology into a framework of “informal imperialism.”He tells us that, ultimately, “Bullock’s panorama must be understood as part of a larger system of representations that served the goals of British informal imperialism in the Americas”(43). If Aguirre makes a compelling case for the ways that the popular device of the panorama might have “envisioned” for London audiences a, quite literally, superior (from above) vision, it would be another, no doubt more difficult, task to demonstrate just what the panorama suggested to viewers in regards to political (imperial) positions and possession. For this reason, he takes us to contemporary historical accounts. However, given the mid-century ubiquity in a wide array of fields of both the terminology of conquest and metaphors of vision, Aguirre’s sweeping connections between the iconographic and technical innovations of Bullock’s panorama, on the one hand, and the narratival vision found in William Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), on the other, seem less convincing. But these connections also raise a critical issue.

Aguirre is careful not to grant to imperialism any totalizing powers, advising us that there was an “uneven” development among “heterogeneous and differently motivated representations,” and that “informal imperialism” did not originate in any “master plan” and “was never a unified strategy” (xvii). Readers nonetheless may wonder what those differences among strategies and representations would be. We might ask, for example, if it is true that differences in attitudes and strategies among the nations’ collecting patterns lay not only in centralized versus de-centered administrations, but also in private versus state-funded patronage (national museum versus private institution), then how might these differences, in turn, manifest themselves formally in display or even contents? What other types of apparatuses or means were available that would allow us to understand where the difference of London’s informal imperialism lay? Aguirre’s project here is not to survey all technologies of vision. However, we might put the question another way by asking what the difference would have been had the panorama been French, Spanish, or German—especially given the fact that many more panoramas represented the major (imperial) urban centers of London, Paris, and Madrid, to name a few, and that they employed the same technical visual devices as Bullock’s panorama of Mexico City? While a panorama no doubt served multiple purposes (e.g., middle class diversion, imperialist discourses), the difficulty in Aguirre’s chapter lies not in convincing us that there was an imperialist vision paralleled by the language of accompanying or contemporary literature and books, but rather in distinguishing the differences and significance of particular visual and textual languages. (In this light, his explanation of how officials validated the display of Mexican objects in a hall constructed for Egyptian objects is illuminating and poses a model.)

Chapter 3 details the failed plot to bring Maya (Copán) ruins to the British Museum. The bureaucratic negotiations offer Aguirre an opportunity to delve into the Foreign Office archives. He argues for the centrality of writing while examining letters and dispatches as a genre as well as diplomatic tool. In doing so, he points out the paradox of the government’s reliance “to act by dispatch,” which simultaneously impeded “its ability to act with dispatch” (81; emphasis in original). Informal Empire includes interesting and significant sidenotes on the small but tight-knit exhibition and commercial groups that fed into England’s empire building, such as the familial connections among the inventors and promoters of the original panoramas and those of Bullock and contemporary engineers (59). Another example is Lord (then head of the Foreign Office) Palmerston’s attempt to control even the order of grammar and the neatness of handwriting by demanding resubmission of briefs if not properly or neatly written.

If Informal Empire relies heavily on English archival materials at the expense of those in Mexico, Guatemala, or Spain, it may be perhaps simply out of necessity and the conditions of examining the imperial archive, or from the difficulty of accessing the forms of resistance to the events detailed therein. In certain places, indeed strategically placed at the end of each chapter, Aguirre anticipates readers’ questions of where to turn or how to give a greater presence to indigenous voices. (As Aguirre mentions, many of the letters and briefs concerning the negotiations over Mexican or Honduran cultural artifacts often address Spain, England, and the United States, but Central Americans are rarely referenced.) Even so, readers will want to hear more about the strategies on the part of the Mexican administrators or individuals for deterring the exportation of cultural goods. We are not told, for example, of the details and greater Mexican context of the 1829 legislation prohibiting the exportation of objects from that nation, or for that matter that such laws had become increasingly common for many nations—even in post-Napoleonic Europe.

“Freak Shows” are the focus of chapter 4. These exhibitions manifest Victorian England’s mania for putting on display the deformed, the unusual, or the exotic even when it meant transforming in 1853 two young children from El Salvador into a spectacle called Aztec Lilliputians. Aguirre shows how medical discourses combined with ethnology to dehumanize these subjects in order that claims of a moralizing (superior) and scientific distance from the region’s race, origins, and economy could be legitimized.

All the chapters therefore, revolve around the appropriation, collection, and, to a greater degree, the display of material goods (and even peoples) from parts of Latin America, and their being viewed by a London audience. Aguirre has done a particularly fine job of providing the specific historical contexts of some of the individual objects and spectacles studied. Although he is thorough about their context, there at times seems to be little difference between the production, function, and circulation of some of the objects under analysis—whether a panorama, sculpture, or manuscript—since ultimately they conform to the function of “informal imperialism.” While certainly not all collecting or display can or should be so easily catalogued into colonial or imperial projects, Aguirre’s examination subjugates the varied (heterogeneous, as he himself admits) cultural acts and objects into homogenously functioning performances or spectacles of British commercial imperialism. The formal and functional differences of collecting and display trends within “informal imperialism’s” discourses, as opposed to national, colonial, or more “formal” imperialist discourses in the context of England, will have to be left to future investigations.

Informal Empire is a worthwhile, intelligent endeavor, and the author should be applauded for his analysis of interesting case examples in this little-studied terrain. It is a book that not only complements but also adds to the material and cultural histories of nineteenth-century public collecting and exhibition trends in Great Britain, as well as to publications examining the role of objects within colonial and imperial relations.