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During c. 1810–59 over 260 British merchant houses operated in the River Plate or Chile, and many more in the rest of Latin America. These were times when Anglo-Latin American economic relations remained largely commercial, since the region was an important commercial partner of Britain. British investment was unimportant during this period in the region. The main economic activity of these mercantile houses was the import of textiles in exchange for bullion, specie, bills of exchange and local produce. Yet the textile trade has received little attention, despite the importance of the region as a market for British manufacturers. This paper describes in detail the relations between textile manufacturers and/or merchants in Britain and merchants on the spot, in particular for the marketing of textiles, the backbone of the business of British merchants operating in Latin America. This paper focuses on the particular case of the Southern Cone during c. 1810–59. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article deals with Huth & Co.'s activities in Chile during the 1820s-1850s. Huth was the only London merchant-banker that decided to go global before 1850, and also the only one to open a branch in Chile. The analysis of how his branches operated should take this into account, yet Huth's activities in Chile have only previously been examined using a bilateral approach to examine the economic relations between Chile and Britain. This situation was mainly due to the fact that the richest collection of primary material on Huth & Co. (the Huth papers at University College London) had been ignored by scholars working on Anglo-Chilean economic relations during the first half of the nineteenth-century. The main focus of this paper is on the information that we were made unaware of due to this restricted investigative approach. Among them are the connections established between Huth's branches in Chile and the USA, Asia, continental Europe and the rest of Latin America; and the important trade in Spanish quicksilver. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]