Salons in the Queen's House: A (new) world in the pocket

A (new) world in the pocket: Poyais, or Emblems of a Changing Early 19th Century

The early decades of the 19th century witnessed drastic global changes. As a consequence of the Napoleonic Wars, the American continent saw the emergence of numerous new countries from a crumbling Spanish Empire. 

A silk handkerchief on display at the Queen’s House illustrates these massive transformations. Printed in the 1820s, it depicts many flags, old and new, that a navigator might have encountered at the time. 

Among the myriad flags adorning this handkerchief, one in particular stands out: the flag of Poyais. This emblem represents a short-lived political project in Central America that briefly existed as a country and sovereign borrower between 1820 and 1824. 

Join academic Damian Clavel to explore this project's history and delve deeper into the complexities of national recognition in this era. This talk reveals what it meant to create a new country in the early decades of the 19th century. 

About the speaker

Damian Clavel is an economic and social historian of international finance, colonialism and sovereignty in the nineteenth century. He currently holds a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione fellowship at the University of Zurich. 

Previously, Damian was the Howard S. Marks postdoctoral fellow in Economic History at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Economic History Society Anniversary fellow at the University of Oxford and the Institute of Historical Research.