Spheres of Influence: An Aspect of Semi-Suzerainty

Austen Chamberlain, British Secretary of Foreign Affairs, declared in the House of Commons, December 15, 1924, that Great Britain would “ regard as an unfriendly act any attempt at interference in the affairs of Egypt by any other Power, and would consider any aggression against the territory of Egypt as an act to be repelled with all the means at their command.” Similar statements have frequently been made by the responsible ministers of the Powers when discussing “ spheres of influence.” It is probably not possible to give a precise meaning to the phrase “ sphere of influence” because, as Hall says, “ perhaps in its indefiniteness consists its international value.” Nevertheless, the phrase has been applied specifically to characterize the control of portions of Asia and Africa, certain islands in the Caribbean, and of regions in Central America. In these regions are to be found in operation arrangements, some secret and some public, stipulated either by treaty, diplomatic declaration, “ gentlemen's agreements,” or effected, ofttimes, by military or economic penetration, varying greatly in degree and intensity, which enable Powers and their citizens to enjoy advantages in these regions without exercising, necessarily, sovereign control.

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House of Commons. Fifth Report from the Foreign Affairs Committee, Session 1981–82. Caribbean and Central America. Together with an Appendix; part of the Proceedings of the Committee relating to the Report; and the Minutes of Evidence taken before the Committee with Appendices. Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed 21 101982. London: Her Majesty/s Stationery Office, £14.20 paperback.

Journal of Latin American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0022216x00000791 ◽

1983 ◽

Vol 15 (2) ◽

pp. 471-480 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Christopher Abel

Keyword(s):

Central America ◽

Foreign Affairs ◽

House Of Commons

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The Evacuation of the Mosquito Shore and the English Who Stayed Behind, 1786-1800

The Americas A Quarterly Review of Latin American History ◽

10.2307/1008294 ◽

1998 ◽

Vol 55 (1) ◽

pp. 63-89 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Frank Griffith Dawson

Keyword(s):

Central America ◽

San Juan ◽

Northern Coast ◽

Half Century ◽

San Juan River ◽

The Caribbean ◽

Sphere Of Influence

On 14 July 1786, representatives of the Kings of Spain and England signed the Convention of London by which His Britannick Majesty undertook to evacuate all British subjects from the northern coast of Central America, thereby putting an end to over a half-century of conflict in that remote corner of the Caribbean.Although Article I of the Convention referred to the territory to be evacuated simply as “the Country of the MOSQUITOS …,” the intention was to secure the removal of a string of small British settlements extending from sixty miles east of Trujillo in what is now Honduras along some 550 miles of coast to Cape Gracias a Dios, and then south and east to Nicaragua’s San Juan River. The area was called then, as now, the Mosquito Shore, and had been a British sphere of influence since the 1730s.

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Local Histories/Global Designs

10.23943/princeton/9780691156095.001.0001 ◽

2012 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Walter D. Mignolo

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

Central America ◽

Postcolonial Studies ◽

The United States ◽

Philosophy Of History ◽

South Central ◽

The Social ◽

The Caribbean ◽

Border Thinking ◽

East West

This book is an extended argument about the “coloniality” of power. In a shrinking world where sharp dichotomies, such as East/West and developing/developed, blur and shift, this book points to the inadequacy of current practices in the social sciences and area studies. It explores the crucial notion of “colonial difference” in the study of the modern colonial world and traces the emergence of an epistemic shift, which the book calls “border thinking.” Further, the book expands the horizons of those debates already under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by dwelling on the genealogy of thoughts of South/Central America, the Caribbean, and Latino/as in the United States. The book's concept of “border gnosis,” or sensing and knowing by dwelling in imperial/colonial borderlands, counters the tendency of occidentalist perspectives to manage, and thus limit, understanding. A new preface discusses this book as a dialogue with Hegel's Philosophy of History.

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