In his latest book, Shafik Meghji tracks the relationship between Britain and Latin America across hundreds of years
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Britain’s historical presence remains highly visible across large parts of Asia and Africa. In the Western Hemisphere, it was Britain that helped launch the nation now known as the United States of America. But what about Britain’s often overlooked influence further south – in Latin America?
Author Shafik Meghji, a seasoned traveller throughout South America, opens his book by referencing the probably apocryphal winner of a 1920s Fleet Street ‘dullest headline’ competition: Small Earthquake in Chile. Not Many Dead. ‘The phrase characterises a certain British attitude to South America,’ he writes, ‘a distant place of little relevance.’
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In this entertaining and meticulously researched narrative, Meghji uncovers forgotten and often surprising links between Britain and South America
– a history largely absent from British classrooms, media and popular culture. In Bolivia, for instance, he encounters the surreal sight of a graveyard of British- built trains on the edge of the world’s largest salt flat (not to omit the tale of a British diplomat stripped naked and kicked out of La Paz). Elsewhere, he visits a town in southern Brazil originally constructed by a British railway company.
The relationship dates back to the late 16th century, when Sir Walter Raleigh embarked on a quest for El Dorado in what would become the British colony of Guyana. Some 300 years later, British troops fought alongside Simón Bolívar in the South American wars of independence against Spanish colonial rule.
But it’s in the Southern Cone – Argentina, Chile and Uruguay – that Meghji finds the most compelling material. Travelling from the Atacama Desert to Tierra del Fuego and from Easter Island to South Georgia, he unearths a layered and oft-neglected history that stretches across five centuries.
It’s a story populated by nitrate kings and wool barons, footballers and pirates, polar explorers and radical MPs, cowboys and missionaries – a diverse cast in a far-reaching imperial subplot.
Meghji doesn’t shy away from examining the darker sides of this relationship. Files declassified in 2020 show that former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet maintained close ties with the British government, which worked to protect what it defined as ‘British interests’ in Chile during the 1960s and ’70s. When Britain failed to prevent the 1970 election of socialist leader Salvador Allende, the Foreign Office launched a covert propaganda campaign to discredit him.
According to Meghji, this was part of a broader British Cold War strategy across the region, which aimed to undermine trade unions and left-wing political movements, manipulate media narratives and support right-wing regimes.
Despite these episodes, Meghji argues that British involvement in South America was generally shaped more by exploration and commerce than by a desire for political domination. Economic interests such as nitrate, guano, whaling and sheep-ranching were key motivations. And although much of Britain’s South American legacy has faded from view, traces of it remain – particularly in London.
Meghji points readers to the James Caird lifeboat that carried Ernest Shackleton to safety, now housed at Dulwich College; maritime paintings of whaling and guano ships at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich; and the Manor House Library in Hither Green, once owned by the Baring banking family, whose fortunes were closely linked to Buenos Aires.
Belgrave Square offers yet another reminder of these ties: the statue of José de San Martín, standing alongside fellow libertador Simón Bolívar, reflects the respect once held for those who led South America’s fight for independence. Meanwhile, Admiral Thomas Cochrane – who helped liberate Chile – is interred in Westminster Abbey.
Britain’s historical ties to Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and the wider continent are not merely relics – they continue to evolve. South Americans have lived in the UK since the 18th century, and today form one of the country’s fastest-growing migrant communities – a modern thread in a shared and often overlooked history.
