"All Ways Open to all Men": Anthony Trollope and Mary Seacole in The Central American Transit Zones
Journal: ELH
Year: 2023

This article focuses on two writers whose work on Panama and Nicaragua confronts Britain's supersession by the United States as the hegemonic power in Central America. Reading the nurse and memoirist Mary Seacole and the novelist and civil servant Anthony Trollope, I argue that these British subjects both understood the fate of the Empire as tied to that of the Central American transit zones, particularly the transoceanic route across Panama. They differed, however, on whom waning British influe