Dr Stephen Tuffnell: List of publications

This chapter argues that the American diaspora anchored the United States’ commercial relationship with Southern Africa between 1871 and 1902. The American diaspora imagined a “new west” in South Africa and worked alongside US consuls to shape economic behaviour by directing American goods to the region’s growing cities and booming mines. Central to this process was information on market prices and opportunities supplied by American consuls. As a result of their efforts, the US became the Cape’s largest trading partner after Great Britain. Closer attention to US-Southern African trade reveals that the United States dominated trade only in select sectors and that US consuls struggled to understand the complex global commodity chains American goods passed along before they reached Southern African markets.

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This article examines the overlooked synergy between American economic expansion and British imperialism in the late nineteenth century. The established scholarship on American empire in this period focuses on the domestic origins of US expansion into the markets of the Western Hemisphere. This article contends, however, that informal American expansion was shaped by external collaborations with the British World. Between 1865 and 1914, an American “colony” of expatriate businessmen emerged in London that is central to this study. The American “colony” integrated itself within the social and economic networks upon which British imperialism depended and mediated new inter-imperial collaborations. Migrants, knowledge, and investment flowed through these intersections, shaping the geography of American expansion around the global footprint of the British World. A snapshot of the pharmaceutical firm Burroughs Wellcome & Co. spotlights these processes, highlighting the mutual imbrications of the British and American empires and the inter-imperial reciprocities sustaining late-nineteenth century globalisation.

Review of Nicole Phelps' Sovereignty Transformed: U.S.-Habsburg Relations from 1815 to the Paris Peace Conference. <a href=""></a>