From the author of LAB’s bestselling ‘Crossed Off the Map’ comes the brand new ‘Small Earthquakes’, which uncovers the fascinating story of Britain’s forgotten connections with South America, from the Atacama Desert to Tierra del Fuego, Easter Island to South Georgia. Blending travel writing, history and reportage, it tells a tale of footballers and pirates, nitrate kings and wool barons, polar explorers and cowboys, missionaries and radical MPs.
The History section in the Waterstones on Oxford’s Broad Street is fairly extensive: rows of new releases, canonized historical works, and Penguin translations of The Aeneid. You are met with expected categories: ‘British History’, ‘Classical studies’, ‘Asian History’, ‘African History’, ‘European History’. When one turns to the section entitled ‘American History’, however, it is only after the rows of Civil War works and Malcom X biographies that it becomes discernible that when Waterstones labelled the section, they did indeed consider Latin America as well as the United States. With a bend of the knees, you get to a small selection of works on Cuba and an encyclopedic ‘biography’ of Brazil. The rest are Lonely Planet guides. With Waterstones and other such chained bookshops being some sort of partial index for and curator of Britain’s popular historical imagination, perhaps Shafik Meghji’s Small Earthquakes: A Journey Through Lost British History in South America can go some way in plugging the gap in popular history writing in the UK not only about Latin America, but more specifically about Britain’s relationship with the continent.
Meghji makes clear to us from the start of Small Earthquakes that addressing this comparative lack of British engagement with Latin American history on the part of Britons is one of his aims for this travel writing stroke historical work. Both the title of the book and that of its preface (‘Not Many Dead’) refer to a game played by sub-editors of The Times in the early 1920s: whoever came up with the ‘dullest headline’ would win. In one particular edition of the game, the winner was: ‘Small Earthquake in Chile. Not Many Dead.’ This fabricated headline, Meghji argues, both as an introduction for and an organizing principle of the book, is what characterizes British attitudes towards South America – ‘a distant place of little relevance’ – and therefore precisely what Meghji is trying to row back against.
‘Small earthquake in Chile’ also introduces us to the predominant geographical focus of the work: the continent’s Southern Cone – Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay – where British presence, predominantly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was particularly felt.
Broadly conceived, Small Earthquakes strives to do two things. First, it seeks to fill the gaps in popular literature published in the UK on Latin American histories. Second, it seeks to emphasize British traces that reside within a broader political and cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth-century Southern Cone. Meghi’s book should therefore be read as an appeal to British readers: Latin America is not a ‘distant place’ but rather one embedded with British histories.
There is a certain irony that a travel writer like Meghji, drawn to Latin America no doubt by its very difference to the UK, should have to appeal to ‘shared histories’ in order to draw in the British reader. That being said, these are certainly important and fascinating links that Meghji highlights and no doubt ones that are considerably under-discussed in the British mainstream.
There seem to be two types of ‘Britishness’ that Meghji uncovers through his travels in the South. On the one hand, there’s the jingoistic, imagined Britishness of royalty, its associated iconography, and various other global remnants of some sort of Britain that seem to stick once traces of actual lived British lives fade into the distance. Meghji describes the statues of Victoria and Elizabeth that linger in a cemetery in Montevideo, for example. He notes the fish and chips on the menu and Premier League football on the television at a pub in the Falklands. He eats high tea on the same island trip.
On the other hand, Meghji also uncovers enduring, genuine links to Britain – ones that still have a considerable influence upon some communities in South America, beyond simply essentialized images of Britain. What is interesting is that these latter images seem to be much more culturally divergent than the metropolitan imagery of royalty and British cultural cliché and soft power. Meghji traces the Welsh settlers in the Chubut valley in Argentina and their relationships with the Tehuelche, indigenous to the area of Patagonia where the Welsh settled, alongside the expansionist and genocidal Argentine government of the late nineteenth century. These waves of Welsh immigration are reflected alongside the statues of Victoria and Elizabeth in the aforementioned grave in Montevideo: ‘The names on the gravestones,’ Meghji notes, ‘[tell] stories of both immigration and integration: Cooper, Lumb, Humphreys, Cutler, Clark, Coates and Attree, as well as Ruiz-Balbi, Keller, Arechavaleta and Clark-Vidal’.
We get the sense that we accompany Meghji as these histories are told: we walk with him across the Atacama Desert; we travel with him to Fray Bentos’ slaughterhouses in Uruguay; we talk to local connoisseurs and storytellers in bars in Buenos Aires; we see the iconic moai structures on Easter Island. That is to say, we read a demystifying of British-Latin American links through the author’s eyes ‘in real time’ as he experiences them. Equally, and perhaps ultimately, the writing style achieves what any good travel writing should: it fills you with a sense of nostalgia for the last time you travelled and makes you think about when and where you will go next.
The book is structured geographically. In separating chapters by region, Megjhi is able to dive deep into the culture of each location and give a sense of moving through the space with him. Yet the structuring of the book could also be seen as a way of reconsidering the cultural geography of the Southern Cone and its surrounding islands: how, Meghji asks, might we re-consider Chile’s Pacific Easter Island (Rapa Nui) through its entangled British-Latin American traces, from Chilean slave raids to the ‘Scottish-style stone walls across the island’?
In closing the book with a nod to Eduardo Galeano’s influential Open Veins of Latin America, Meghji asks us to not only consider Britain’s historical relationships with Latin America, but also to see how these relationships continue to develop and diversify into the present. Meghji reads Latin America’s ‘open veins’ as historical – running from the past to the present – and as transcending borders, creating underappreciated links between the Southern Cone and the UK. Meghji’s is an interesting take on Galeano’s more central point that Latin America has been used as a medium of extraction by and for the Western world. We need, Meghji seems to say, to both appreciate and critique Britain’s historical and present-day links with Latin America.
The book finishes with a quote by Galeano, whose middle name (Hughes) reflects, rather appropriately, his Welsh roots: ‘history never really says goodbye… history says, see you later’. This is a welcome conclusion to a book that should help foster and mediate new conversations in the present about Britain and South America’s shared histories.
Purchase a copy here.
