Abstract This article considers British interest in Paraguay during the rule of its first dictator Dr José Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia (1814–1840). At Francia’s direction, Paraguay operated under a ‘system of non-intercourse’, in which entrance to the country was nearly impossible and foreigners were detained. Fascination with Paraguay’s sealed borders and counterintuitively positive evaluations of Francia’s regime in the British periodical press help demonstrate the conflicting impulses within Britain’s ‘unofficial mind’ in the first half of the nineteenth century, and influenced a foreign policy in which elements of free trade liberalism contended with mercantilist holdovers. Respect for Paraguayan isolation took root, I show, despite the persistent hopes of British merchants in Buenos Aires of drawing that country into Britain’s commercial orbit. I argue that hermetically sealed borders came to constitute a special category in the emerging Victorian world picture. The positive valence surrounding such impermeable frontiers, just as free trade ideology was coalescing, reflects an ambivalence surrounding the status of the nation-state in an era of globalisation.
Alex Chase-Levenson (Sat,) studied this question.