Abstract
In the early nineteenth century, British statesmen understood and approached the Cuban Question not as a distant and trivial colonial problem, but as a matter of profound grand strategic significance—indeed, that Cuba represented in microcosm the problem of ‘international disorder’ plaguing the Atlantic world after the Age of Revolutions and the spectre of rival powers gaining strategic advantage from that disorder. British statesmen saw Cuba’s slave trade as a pivotal issue—one that could potentially cause a slave revolution like Haiti’s, invite an U.S. seizure of the island, and thus destabilise the Atlantic world brining severe forms of conflict. To deal with this problem, British leaders sought to advance a new form of ‘order’ for the Atlantic world—a set of rules and patterns of international behaviour, the crux of which was antislavery, that would conjure the possibility of disorder degenerating into graver forms of geopolitical conflict.Following in the trend of diplomatic historians who have started to put world order and disorder at the core of international history, this dissertation explores Britain’s ordering of the disarrayed Atlantic world in competition with the United States—which also tried to advance its own version of order, only based on closed slaveholding empires opposing Britain’s antislavery. It seeks to answer the question: how did British statesmen envision disorder and pursue order in the Spanish Atlantic world between 1815 and 1867? Analysing the correspondence of key statesmen in high office during this period—like George Canning, Lord Palmerston, and Lord Clarendon, intellectuals like abolitionist James Stephen, and diplomatic agents around the Atlantic world—with regards to the Cuban Question, this dissertation will show that the pursuit of order for the Atlantic world was a key objective and worry of British statesmen after the Napoleonic Wars. Using the statesmen’s understanding of the concepts of ‘disorder’ and ‘order’, this dissertation provides a new conceptual understanding of their foreign policy, looking beyond the traditional balance-of-power Eurocentric narrative: it re-signifies the period 1815-67 as one of international disorder outside of Europe and of bitter competition between the Anglo-Saxon powers to correct it and shape the future of Atlantic international politics. Moreover, it will show how the idea and duty to ‘re-order’ the world was not only central in British statecraft since the early 1800s, but also one which was the basis of divisions between political traditions within the British establishment; and shaped foreign policy decisions and imperial strategy.
| Date of Award | 1 Nov 2023 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Maeve Ryan (Supervisor) & Andrew Lambert (Supervisor) |