Robert Aguirre should be commended for calling our attention to the less-studied area of the circulation between, and symbolic function of, collections and displays in nineteenth-century Britain and parts of Latin America. Largely centered on nationalist discourses, Aguirre’s very useful and informative Informal Empire explains the ways that England, in the place of direct military colonization of post-independence Mexico and Central America, and in the face of increasing interventions by the United States, nonetheless managed to play a vital, if not controlling, economic role in those regions. England did so, Aguirre argues, through the appropriation, trans-Atlantic exchange, and display of cultural artifacts from Mexico and present-day Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Aguirre, drawing on the works of historians of British imperialism, refers to this viewing and controlling from a distant London center of “calculation”—where appropriated and decontextualized objects were measured, quantified, and put on display—as “informal imperialism.”1 Much of the first half of the four-chapter book is concerned with the collector, traveler, and showman William Bullock (c. 1773–1849), whose adventures and entrepreneurial schemes centered on charging admission to aggressively promoted exhibitions of collections of Egyptian and, more importantly, Mexican artifacts, many of which later became part of the British Museum’s...