English occupation of the Pailon, Ecuador, 1860-1896: A case study of British settlement failure in nineteenth-century Latin America

The thesis analyses the British attempt to settle and develop the Pailon region of Esmeraldas province, Ecuador, between 1860 and 1896. Set against the background of Ecuador's nineteenth-century struggle to achieve political stability and economic development in the forging of an independent nation-state, the study accounts for the Ecuadorian government's agreement in the treaties of 1854 and 1857 to cede territory for European colonisation to British bondholders in order to cancel unpaid back interest on Ecuador's portion of Gran Colombia's 'Independence' debt. Through the extensive use of settlers' first-hand accounts and of the primary documents contained in the British Foreign Office archives, a framework established from the personal experiences of the leading protagonists of four successive groups of British Pailon settlers enables the thesis to argue that the attempts to colonise and develop the Pailon not only failed through conflictive issues over sovereignty and development related to Britain's position as the world's hegemonic imperial, commercial and financial power, but also as a result of local conditions and disputes that can be broadly categorised as cultural conflicts between settlers and the native population in the frontier territory of an emerging, newly independent nineteenth-century Ecuadorian republic. In the final analysis, the thesis uses the case study to highlight the factors that conspired against successful settlement and offers the results as empirical evidence for the proposal of a more holistic 'cultural' model to explain the high incidence of failure among British colonisation attempts in nineteenth-century Latin America, as well as developing a more general six-stage model for determining the extent to which a colonisation attempt succeeds or fails.