Abstract: The project to install a permanent naval station on the South American shores of the Pacific attracted the consensus of Spain’s political-intellectual, military, and diplomatic elites during the reign of Isabel II (1844–1868). This article reconstructs the constellation of strategic, economic, legal, and political arguments used by the Spanish monarchy’s diplomatic agents to support the need to station warships in its former Pacific dominions. It also identifies these agents’ socioeconomic coordinates, networks, and interests, evaluating the factual consequences of their attempts to create the station. We will argue that Spanish political elites conceived the naval station as a critical element in the new repertoire of instruments of power necessary for configuring a “second Spanish empire” based on the ideological postulates of navalism, pan-Hispanism, and the imperialism of free trade. This case study allows us to make some theoretical contributions to understanding the crucial functions that naval stations performed as elements of imperial power in the nineteenth century.
Roca et al. (Mon,) studied this question.