“A Thin Red Line”. The South Atlantic as Circumpolar Frontier of the British Empire (1820-1870)

Abstract

This article argues that, from the first decades of the 19th century, the Southernmost end of America was shaped as a region of political and strategic importance based on the merging of interests of both the colonial empires and the new national states, which aspired to control maritime spaces and take possession of indigenous peoples’ territories, whose political rights were not recognized. It is shown how the cartographic discourse, serving European geopolitics, was involved in representing and building territories and territorialities and, at the same time, in legitimating geopolitical interests that accompanied the development of the imperialist projects during the central decades of the 19th century. Being associated with the imperial ideology of its authors and/or promoters, it served the British expansion in the southern hemisphere, by proposing a circumpolar border where the uninhabited southern lands were incorporated into the imperial space, while the indigenous territories of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego –although outside the formal domain of the British Empire– constituted territoriality without territory.