Austral Empires: Southern Investment in Latin America, 1808-1877

Abstract

My dissertation, “Austral Empires: Southern Investment in Latin America, 1808-1877,” argues that early nineteenth-century, white United States southerners strengthened their identities as pro-slavery, modern, and southern heads of families through their connections to Latin America. Tracing this long-standing outward southern gaze sheds new light on what United States “expansionism” and southern “modernization” looked like in practice both before and after the Civil War. I critique traditional narratives about the development of Manifest Destiny when I demonstrate that United States residents created multiple expansionistic ideologies that highlighted either militant or commercial agendas. These expansionists sought to establish a vast empire rooted in slavery that stretched southward to Argentina as well as westward to the Pacific Ocean, a goal often overlooked in the current historiography. Archival material from both the United States and Brazil questions stories that depict the antebellum South as an isolationist and anti-modern entity when it traces the ways in which southerners capitalized on Latin American connections to promote visions of modernity compatible with slave labor.