Securing Hegemony through Law: Venezuela, the U.S. Asphalt Trust, and the Uses of International Law, 1904–1909

Coates, Benjamin A.

doi:10.1093/jahist/jav353

Cited by 6 publications

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“…Castro, a blustering, recalcitrant strongman, immediately refused to arbitrate the claims and ordered the capture of an island off the coast of Venezuela claimed by the UK. An allied force of the British, German, and Italian navies was dispatched soon thereafter, arriving in December of the same year (Coates, 2015). The US government initially approved of the action, distinguishing between limited intervention-'if any South American country misbehaves toward any European country, let the European country spank it', wrote the equally blustering Theodore Roosevelt at the outset-and the kind of territorial ambition precluded by the Monroe Doctrine (Maass, 2009).…”

Section: Direct Contracting: Peru 1890mentioning

confidence: 99%

Sovereignty and Debt in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Zendejas¹,

Cole²

2021

Sovereign Debt Diplomacies

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After their independence from Spain and Portugal, Latin American governments became frequent borrowers in international capital markets. However, the region’s political and economic instability also led to recurrent episodes of sovereign defaults. During the particular historical context of the nineteenth century, remedies to debt defaults were not limited to bilateral negotiations between creditors and governments. They also encompassed military interventions or control commissions formed by foreign governments, bondholders, or merchant bankers. In North Africa and the Middle East, debt defaults could even trigger military interventions from creditor states ending in the establishment of colonial regimes. This paper shows that such interventions were rare in Latin America, as creditors only enlisted their governments’ military intervention in the most extreme cases. In most cases, external control was exerted privately by bondholders and merchant banks through the imposition of economic policies promoting trade openness and fiscal management. Additionally, bondholders turned to legal methods of contractual enforcement to obtain debt settlements that limited the sovereignty of debtor states over their land, infrastructure, and resources. By the end of the century, Latin American jurists began to respond to the increasing use of legal techniques to settle sovereign debts by developing counter-legal discourses aimed at limiting foreign intrusion in sovereign affairs.

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Section: Direct Contracting: Peru 1890mentioning

confidence: 99%