ABSTRACT
The role of the Royal Navy in the acquisition and retention of British profit and power have specific links to finance capital and government policy formation. In some locations, such as the Falkland Islands, British naval power was used to secure places regarded as fundamental to British maritime pre-eminence. During the period of insurgency in Latin America and the heroic struggles of Bolivar and San Martin, the British officers on the South America station had to concern themselves with radical political upheavals on shore. In Latin America a British realm of influence – what some, including Robinson and Gallagher, D. C. M. Piatt and P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, would call an 'informal empire' – had been erected in place of the old dominions of Portugal and Spain. Throughout the greater part of the period 1688-1914 most new accretions of formal empire were seen as encumbrances and little-wanted additions, others were viewed as mere pawns in international diplomacy.
