ABSTRACT
British merchants served as the essential middlemen in organizing the satisfaction of each nation’s demands on the other. Most of the British were miners from the Clyde, the rest agricultural laborers, and were under contract to the Hudson’s Bay Company for three years to work in the mines and on farms on Vancouver Island. One’s employment neither separated one from the British community nor made one a member of it. Cricket remained almost exclusively a British pursuit, though the Valparaiso Cricket Club’s annual athletic contest between members did attract “French, German, Chilians and English” in the crowd and the intendente sent the Naval Brigade Band to the meeting. Valparaiso assumed and maintained an important role in the country’s economic life. Though there were Britons in every province of the republic, only in the mining provinces of the north, the coal-mining and wheat-growing area in and around Concepcion, and in Santiago, were there British communities of any size outside Valparaiso.
