This chapter reasserts extra-European monarchy as a major issue in nineteenth-century British international thought. It asks how the imperial thrones of Latin America influenced British political thinking between 1820 and 1870, and it argues that a principal intellectual effect was on conservative ideas and polemic. Casting Latin America as the site of a decisive trial between monarchy and republicanism, conservatives claimed that the success of the region’s monarchs—especially the emperor of Brazil—was proof that rule by kings secured political stability in the New World as well as in the Old World. This thesis sustained wider political and intellectual agendas. Ultimately, however, events cut the ground from under these conservative arguments, as it became clear that monarchy would have no place in the future of the New World. The case reveals that international monarchism played a consequential role in the reinvention of British conservatism. It also helps to explain why the association dissolved.
