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Post-revolutionary Spanish America barely features in existing scholarship on nineteenth-century British political and social thought. But the region was widely discussed, and raised distinctive issues about republican government, the effects of colonial rule, and the operation of absolute power. This article examines how the British debated the autarchic dictatorship erected in newly independent Paraguay. Their attempts to make sense of this spectacular experiment in government, and its architect Dr Francia, helped to crystallize public attitudes towards the condition of Spanish America in the 1820s and 1830s. Francia's broader significance, however, was as a token in wider debates about the proper limits of republican and constitutional principles, and about the merits of arbitrary directive rule in less developed polities. For his admirers, he cast light on how other comparable regimes had gone wrong.

In the two parts of this chapter, we investigate the ways in which major royal cities of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid realms were constructed as capitals of imperial states. In particular, we discuss how the foundation stories of these cities reflect conflicts and integration politics, which the creation of imperial metropoleis involved and which these stories aimed to control. Against the common assumption that the capitals of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires were culturally and politically uncontested, we will suggest that both Ptolemaic and Seleucid royal cities were constantly positioned and re-positioned vis-à-vis other royal or imperial cities that expressed, or had expressed in the past, similar claims. In the foundation myths of royal cities, we observe both competition and accommodation: competition and acommodation, that is, across the imperial zones of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kings, between Memphis and Alexandria, as well as between Alexandria and Rome.