Maria Graham and South America: Travel, Historiography, and Intellectual Networks

This thesis examines Maria Graham’s historiographical works about South America (1824-1835). Having travelled in Brazil and Chile during the Latin American Wars of Independence, Graham engaged with the histories of these countries in innovative and complex ways across a range of genres and in both published and unpublished materials. This study analyses Graham’s historiographical practices in the light of her early education, her extensive travel experiences, and her wider scholarly and artistic activities and networks. I uncover how, at a time in which history writing was predominantly considered a masculine domain, Graham’s discursive and visual representations of the South American past responded to, challenged, and shaped British and European debates about Latin America. In her two published South America travel journals, Graham drew on her previous travels in India and Italy and her knowledge of history, art history, associationism, and aesthetics to capture the historicity of Brazilian and Chilean landscapes. She also made strategic use of paratext to collect, store, debate, and create historical knowledge. This study also offers the first sustained critical analysis of Graham’s unpublished historiographical writing about Brazil and Chile. My research on the production, dissemination, and reception of this body of work reveals that Graham, in close collaboration with Caroline Fox and other members of the influential Holland House circle, documented Brazilian Emperor Pedro I’s involvement in the development of Brazilian constitutionalism and re-imagined the history of Araucanian resistance against Spanish colonialism. Analysing a wide variety of previously unstudied archival material, I show how Graham used manuscript writing to intervene in the historical and political debates at Holland House. Analysing Graham’s published and unpublished work in relation to that of her contemporaries, this thesis offers new insights into the ways in which British ideas about progress and informal empire shaped British historiographical representations of Latin America.