The army in nineteenth-century Latin America has attracted scant attention from scholars. Surprising as this is, studies of the Latin American military from independence to the first half of the twentieth century remain few and far between. The comparatively abundant attention that the second half of the twentieth century has received from historians and political scientists has not extended to the long nineteenth century. Therefore, where discussion of the nineteenth-century military has taken place, this has been carried out tangentially in works that have made the twentieth century, and in particular the 1960s onwards, the prime concern of their analysis. It is consequently understandable, albeit regrettable, that most references to the nineteenth-century military have been heavily influenced by anachronistic schemata. The serious study of the Latin American military started in the 1960s precisely because of the emergence of long-lasting military governments at the time. As a result, many of the studies written in the 1960s and 1970s were influenced by the political landscape of the moment. This may have proven useful when eliciting research into military political practices in the Cold War, but it obscured rather than aided our understanding of the political and social roles of the army in nineteenth-century Latin America. It presupposed, for instance, that the members of informal armies of the nineteenth century viewed themselves as belonging to a distinct and separate caste from their civilian contemporaries, much in the way that their twentieth-century professional successors did. It unquestioningly assumed that concepts such as patria, democracy or sovereignty meant the same thing then as they did in the 1970s, as if the civilian liberals of the 1850s were the ‘reds’ of their day, and the generals were inevitably ‘right-wing’.

In tandem with this dearth of focused studies on the nineteenth-century military, the historiography, perhaps not surprisingly, has also had a tendency to simplify Latin American politics into a long and painful haul of repeated coups d'état and military domination. The classical view of the army's participation in the political life of the young Spanish American republics has been one that has defined it in terms of ‘predatory praetorianism’, explaining its behaviour and motivation as if the armies that were forged after independence were a monolithic preying military force, devoid of political ideas and addicted to plunder and robbery. It is an interpretation that has held sway for a long time. However, as Nicola Foote and René D. Harder Horst note in the introduction to the excellent collection of essays reviewed here, the army, as an institution, was so much more than a monolithic force of repression and authoritarian practices. As is now becoming evident in a few seminal works on the subject, the military facilitated social mobility for subordinate and subaltern groups in ways that no other nineteenth-century institution did. It was also a critical ‘medium for education and integration’ (p. 1).

Foote and Harder Horst's volume is thus a very welcome addition to the historiography, not only because it addresses a subject that has been forgotten for far too long, but because it does so by concentrating on the particularly important question of race and ethnicity. From the achievement of independence to the present, the army has had a tendency to present itself as the guarantor of its country's sovereignty, the embodiment of the nation. Therefore, this collection of essays sets out to untangle the relationship between national identity, citizenship formation and the armed forces during the so-called Liberal Period (1850–1950), in particular at times of war, when national identities are more visibly contested and reimagined, drawing the reader's attention to a range of highly suggestive points about the Latin American military, the nation-building process, and matters of race and ethnicity.

Military Struggle and Identity Formation in Latin America is a volume that explores how war and military struggle affected the lives of Afro-Latin Americans and Indians. It looks at how a number of international and domestic struggles, paired with given racial/ethnic/class-based communal identities, informed the nation-building process following the mid-nineteenth-century watershed. Focusing in particular on the question of social mobility as it was offered to subaltern groups, the book uncovers the different ways in which the army actually altered the social structure of Latin America. One striking revelation is that Afro-Latin American communities were more prone to supporting the Liberal cause, while Indians were much more ambivalent in their political stance. What becomes obvious is that race, gender, ethnicity, war and Liberal ascendancy all became profoundly intertwined, especially since the Liberals discovered they needed to engage the popular classes in order to control them.

The book is divided into two sections. The first contains chapters by James E. Sanders, Justin Wolfe, Aline Helg, Nicola Foote, Richard N. Adams and David Carey Jr. on soldiering and military participation and how ideas about citizenship evolved and revolved around and for different racial groups and ethnicities, with case studies from Colombia (1851–77), Nicaragua (1844–63), Cuba (1895–8), Ecuador (1895–1930) and Guatemala (both in 1914 and between 1925 and 1945). The second part compares international wars and internal wars of pacification or extermination and studies how they, in turn, contributed to the racialisation of national boundaries and imaginaries, uncovering what war meant, in political terms, for different subaltern groups. There are chapters by María de Fátima Costa, Peter M. Beattie, Carlos Martínez Sarasola, Julia O'Hara, Joanna Crow, Vincent C. Peloso, and René D. Harder Horst, with case studies on how different indigenous groups engaged with competing understandings of national identity and citizenship formation during the War of the Triple Alliance/Paraguayan War, the Conquest of the Desert in Argentina, the Apache wars in nineteenth-century Mexico, the War of the Pacific, the 1881 Cañete massacre in Peru, and the Chaco War, following a loose chronological order.

Unfortunately there is not the space here to do justice to all of the contributions by discussing each one individually. Suffice it to say that this volume offers a collection of thoughtful and original studies on the complex and subtle manner in which race and ethnicity informed and influenced the nation-building process in Latin America during the Liberal Period. It underlines the fact that comparing the responses of Afro-Latin American and indigenous communities to military struggle and identity formation is critical when interpreting the intersection between nation and society in Latin America. And it proves the importance of researching how subordinate groups understood the relation between race and nation at times of war. In brief, Military Struggle and Identity Formation in Latin America is a very welcome contribution to the historiography; one, moreover, that will inspire further research into the army by applying novel social and cultural perspectives.