This article examines how newspapers, periodicals and books represented the southern part of America between 1810 and 1820. Although the region made up of Argentina, Chile and Perú was important for British trade, this article proposes that there was a considerable lack of first‐hand information about it during that decade. Most of the material then printed in Britain regarding these countries was speculative or propagandistic, while at the same time British trade carried out in the area was mostly by ‘speculators’, who profited from general ignorance about the actual situation of those markets. This article suggests that speculation is a word that is key to understanding these representations.