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first placement was in 1876 as consul general in Liverpool, the hub of Britain's imperial
commerce, where he could observe and monitor the flow of global commodities, which
increasingly included Brazilian rubber and coffee. He was thus especially well placed
fromthebeginningofhiscareertoappreciatethecommercialsignificanceofAmazonia,
a reality that often escaped his Rio-based colleagues. He would continue his diplomatic
career in Paris (which, predictably, he adored), with postings later to Washington and, in
the critical years of the African Scramble, Berlin. During the adjudication over French
Guiana, he was usefully deployed to Berne. His responsibilities placed him in the most
vibrant political circles in Europe during the fever of its active imperialism, and near
the best archives of Europe. He was to witness the diplomacy of the great powers in the
ScrambleforAfrica,andwithitthemechanismsthroughwhichnorthernEuropeandom-
inance of the Tropics was achieved: the charter companies, the colonization schemes,
the imperial proconsuls, the “back deals,” purchases, and covert alliances that were to
define this period of colonial expansion.
3
To observe the complexity of the diplomatic relations associated with the African
Scramblewasusefulschoolingfordecipheringstrategyinlarge-scaleterritorialdisputes,
and in Rio Branco's time in Europe he watched the masters of late nineteenth-century
international diplomacy and intrigue at work: Salisbury, Disraeli, Chamberlain, Bismar-
ck, Leopold, Brazza, Gladstone, Rhodes, and, banker to Empires, the financier genius
de Rothschild. It certainly must have struck Rio Branco how little was known of the re-
sources of the African continent compared to South America, where resource reconnais-
sance had been a regular feature of colonization and conquest for the better part of four
hundred years, although reports remained submerged in the archives of Iberian crowns
and Vatican libraries.
4
Rio Branco's own researches on the Paraguayan War and other controversies of the
Southern Cone educated him about boundary disputes and treaty histories in his subcon-
tinent and the interplay of military, diplomatic, geographic, and ideological strategies.
Certainly the European experience of shaping Africa was of extraordinary interest, but
there was also much to be learned from the neighbor to the north, the United States, a
country that had during the nineteenth century managed to defeat the British in the War
of 1812 and extended its political reach by annexing swaths of Mexican lands, coloniz-
ing northern terrains, buying out huge portions of European possessions, and effectively
occupying parts of the Caribbean and Central America. The Spanish-American War had
also given the United States a foothold in Asia with the annexation of the Philippines.
This idea of continental-scale hegemony was naturally of tremendous interest to Rio
Branco.TheNorthAmericandeploymentsblendedformalandinformalsettlement,con-
quest, purchase, and diplomacy as different circumstances required and was highly in-
structive both as a model to emulate and as a warning. When Rio Branco took up the
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