ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a geographic overview of Latin America before looking at how a single nation Britain has influenced developments around the world. While the global influence of Paris on artistic production is well known, this legacy of the British Empire has been largely ignored. The chapter looks at national galleries from a range of nation-making perspectives. It expresses the diversity of the world's national galleries, rather than attempt comprehensive coverage. As political and territorial entities, Mexico and the other Latin American nations are considerably older and possess longer continuous histories as autonomous states than most of their counterparts in Europe. The chapter shows that more generally, that a global history of these institutions is both undesirable and to a large extent impossible; as potentially misleading as it might be factually accurate. National galleries emerged in the wake of independence in 1947.
