Latin America has not featured in the historiography of modern British political ideas. Recovering its significance helps us to rethink the pressures that shaped modern international thought. This chapter asks how the British constructed Latin America as a political problem, focusing on the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, and highlighting James Bryce’s 1912 study 'South America: Observations and Impressions' as a case in point. It makes two main points. The first is that Latin America became a subject of serious public interest in the period 1880-1920, in ways that challenge widely shared assumptions about the global preoccupations of the late Victorians and Edwardians. The second point is that this reshaping of Latin America as a perceived problem was an Atlantic process, responsive both to changes in international policy, and to transnational circulations of texts and ideas. The case suggests that historians of ideas can benefit from paying more attention both to power politics, and to patterns of global exchange.
