The government and people of Great Britain played a significant role in the events of Latin American independence, but the admiration was mutual. British politicians, industrialists and abolitionists looked toward Iberian America as a place of opportunity and fortune, and as a place that was far enough away to carry out experiments with reformist ideas. In return, Latin American patriots looked toward Great Britain for the naval protection it could provide, to its armaments and woollen factories for material goods, and to its banks for development loans. People on both sides of the Atlantic assessed their public and private interests and sought results on their own terms. But it also was more than a military, diplomatic and commercial relationship. There were equally significant cultural exchanges in the form of scientific knowledge, legal structures, pedagogical theories, Masonic practices, incentives to abolish slavery, and the beginning of an active book trade. On an individual, human level, there were also hundreds of long-standing, fond personal friendships and family connections that spanned both language and geographical space. British involvement in Latin American independence was much broader than just the diplomatic and military spheres; it encompassed economic, material, intellectual, cultural and human exchanges as well.

The extraction of wealth from British colonial territories would be justified by the ingenious combination of ideas about improvement and chattel slavery. While the establishment of the Atlantic settlements was an affair of colonial companies and private proprietors, they were gradually taken into direct government by Westminster. But the conflict between settlers’ defence of their autonomy under the theory of the ancient rights of Englishmen and metropolitan sovereignty would eventually push the settlements into statehood – a result that could be understood to open a wholly new global commercial order. By contrast, the East India Company continued to operate as a lucrative, though diminishing source for private enrichment until crown sovereignty was given formal imprimatur in 1813. Not keen to expand Britain’s administrative duties across the world, British lawyers and political leaders would reimagine their empire in terms of occasional interventions to protect private investments and to enforce the system of international rules they held valid all over the world.

This chapter provides a historical point of comparison for the contemporary cases explored earlier. By testing my argument in a different historical context, I am able to provide an additional assessment of the external validity of my theory. In this chapter I show that the European powers, especially the British, were able to establish stable forms of hierarchy and informal empire in China and the Ottoman Empire. In contrast, in Egypt they faced resistance, and these forms of hierarchy broke down, resulting in formal empire. The chapter demonstrates that these different outcomes can be explained by the different levels of contestation and rent-seeking in these states.

This chapter serves two purposes. The first purpose is to provide a theoretical explanation for why subordinate actors will surrender sovereignty to an external power and when they might choose to resist. The chapter lays out how high levels of rent-seeking and high levels of political contestation can create incentives for actors to give up sovereignty. I also show that actors’ choices are going to depend on their beliefs about the costs of formal, territorial expansion for the dominant state. If actors in subordinate states believe that territorial expansion is cheap, then they may support informal forms of hierarchy knowing that the dominant state can impose a more costly form of formal hierarchy even if they resist. The second purpose of the chapter is to show that dominant states prefer informal forms of hierarchy to formal forms of hierarchy such as colonialism or military occupation. This is done by building a theoretical argument regarding the higher costs associated with formal control. This theoretical argument is supplemented by a brief historical survey demonstrating that European powers almost always preferred informal arrangements to territorial expansion, even during periods when there were few constraints on territorial expansion and colonialism.

In the first chapter I provide a brief introduction to the manuscript and the questions it addresses. The concepts of hierarchy and surrendering sovereignty are defined, and the importance of hierarchy for the functioning of international politics is explained. The comparative historical case selection is justified, explaining that it is important to examine the issue of hierarchy in environments where the constraints on formal expansion vary, such as the nineteenth century and the contemporary era, to account for possible systemic causes.