Empire, Incorporated by Philip J. Stern

Author:Philip J. Stern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

GLOBAL WAKEFIELD

Like Wakefield, Angas was fascinated with William Penn, though for a different reason. For him, emigration and settlement in South Australia were part of a vision of colonies as religious and moral enterprises, not just for proselytization but, like Pennsylvania, as a kind of nonconformist utopian experiment. The symbolism of having the ship Prince George, carrying two hundred German settlers he recruited for the colony, depart in 1838 from Plymouth, just like the early New England “Pilgrim Fathers,” was not lost on him or his supporters. Like those early Puritans, Angas was also a prolific businessman. He started his own shipping firm, G. F. Angas & Co., during the 1824 company speculation bubble and went on to be instrumental in the founding of the National Provincial Bank, the Union Bank of Australia, and the South Australian Company’s own subsidiary South Australian Banking Company. He was what one might call a typical philanthropreneur of his era, perceiving no contradiction between Christian and capitalist enterprise, leaving him much in demand as an advisor, investor, and director of many overseas schemes.146

Among these was an offer to become chairman of a new Eastern Coast of Central America Commercial and Agricultural Company, a venture that had grown out of the short-lived Black River scheme and the related Río Tinto Commercial and Agricultural Company, another in a long line of efforts to assume the land rights and securities of the defunct Poyais scheme. Angas declined the invitation, and the position was ultimately taken by Peter Harris Abbott, an accountant who, ironically or appropriately, was one of Britain’s leading authorities on public debt and bankruptcy (and who, not for nothing, himself went bankrupt by the early 1840s). Abbott was also invested in several company projects, including the British American Land Company.147 Meanwhile, a rival group of Poyais bondholders acquired their own grant from the Miskito king, vesting it in an ill-fated British Central American Land Company and, by 1838, an affiliated Yorkshire and Lancashire Central American Land and Emigration Company. They too set out to revive MacGregor’s dream of a colony, but also claimed by virtue of their land grant to be the King’s envoy to London, even petitioning, unsuccessfully, for the right to join Queen Victoria’s coronation parade as a foreign dignitary under the Miskito flag.148

Though this venture eventually collapsed, it was enough to help turn the Eastern Coast Company’s attention away from Miskito to a more ambitious plan to establish settlements in the Verapaz region of Guatemala. Eastern Coast’s project was not so much about extending the boundaries of the British Empire as about investing in the “internal” colonization characteristic of state building across early nineteenth-century Central and South America.149 José Felipe Mariano Gálvez, the governor of the state of Guatemala from whom the new Company received its grants, stated the point succinctly to his Legislative Assembly: “Colonizations are the first interest of the State.” That this happened when it did was no coincidence. Gálvez, who had keenly watched the debate over the East

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