This is an ambitious and sophisticated study that, in focusing on the republican experience of continental Spanish America for the greater part of the nineteenth century, succeeds in demonstrating how the political transformations of the region must be seen and understood from a world perspective and as having shaped the overall history of republics and republicanism. Hilda Sabato is to be commended, in this sense, for bringing Latin American history out of the periphery and placing it very much at the forefront of any mainstream discussion on the global history of democracy. Given that despite the 1789 French Revolution and Napoleon's shake-up of Europe most of the Western modern polities stuck with constitutional monarchical political systems, the Americas’ drive to experiment with different forms of republicanism following the achievement of independence (with the notable exception of Brazil) is a subject that must be and here is rightly explored and addressed. Challenging long-established notions of exceptionalism and marginality that have either ignored the political experience of nineteenth-century Latin America or caricaturised it as one of exotic warlords, savage civil conflict and chronic instability, Sabato forces us to engage with the region's history on its own terms whilst presenting it as a key part of the wider story of liberalism and the advent of modernity.

Making excellent use of what Sabato terms the ‘vibrant scholarship’ that has, over the last two decades, challenged the more traditional ‘chaos school of thought’, revising our understanding of post-colonial Latin America as one where popular politics were in fact the norm, where ‘the few’ could not ignore ‘the many’, and where the principle of popular sovereignty was embraced by all and sundry, she provides a compelling broad-ranging comparative interpretation of the republican frameworks, institutions and practices that were experimented with across Spanish America from the 1820s to the 1870s. Focusing in particular on elections and popular political participation (Chapter 2), on armed citizenship (with its corresponding use of pronunciamiento pressure) (Chapter 3), and public opinion (as embodied in associations and captured in the press) (Chapter 4), Sabato highlights the extent to which: (1) elections became the main legitimate road to government posts (with greater electoral participation than in west European countries), (2) militias and National Guards acted as a check on the abuses of authority and (3) the ‘voice of the people’ found expression in particularly active social clubs, Masonic lodges, newspapers and popular mobilisations.

As distilled in the final chapter, in which Sabato brings together the findings of the book to offer an ‘essay in interpretation’ of the ‘republican experiment’, what becomes resoundingly evident is that across Spanish America, regardless of whether political actors rose to power through elections or on the back of coups or waves of pronunciamientos, to attain or remain in power the few had no choice but to resort to the many, engaging in most cases with different forms, practices and expressions of popular sovereignty. The republican experience of elections, armed citizenship and public opinion thus not only conditioned the different societies’ evolving understanding of the creation and legitimation of political authority, it also shaped the manner in which the leadership became inevitably compelled, if not to obey, at least to negotiate and engage with the demands and grievances of the ‘popular classes’ at key moments. The fact that so many Spanish American presidents were caudillos, men on horseback who donned uniforms with epaulettes and medals, should not detract from the fact that few of them were actually career officers, having climbed the social hierarchy through their involvement in armed citizenship. Neither should we forget or ignore that they owed their legitimacy to complex webs of political transformation that resulted in them appealing to the many.

Regardless of the fact that it proved difficult for orderly representative governments to settle in any given Spanish American country for over five decades, with uncertainty and instability being the norm (as well as common in the evolution of the republican experience across the Western world), Sabato argues that the republican order remained strongly shaped by a shared ideal of active popular sovereignty. Paradoxically, the triumph of the liberal order, if we can call it that, towards the end of the nineteenth century, with the consolidation of more stable and long-lasting republican constitutional governments, notwithstanding the way it curtailed the power of the Church and sought to guarantee a whole range of citizen rights, came about through the limitation of the suffrage, the reduction or dismantling of the militias, and the censorship of the press.

The nature of the book, sweeping and general, covering the history of all of the Spanish American republics that came into being between 1820 and 1870 in under 220 pages, with its analysis built on political theory and the recent relevant historiography rather than on archival research, could result in some readers finding that Sabato's ‘one size fits all’ interpretation of the ‘republican experiment’ does not do justice to the many and varied conflicting and multifaceted experiences of each and every country in the region. However, Republics of the New World provides a noteworthy corrective to mainstream narratives of political modernity that have focused exclusively on the northern Europe–United States axis, ignoring the importance of the decades-long period of republican experimentation that was experienced in Spanish America. And it offers a suggestive and fruitful approach to interpreting the nature of nineteenth-century republicanism generally by forcing us to pay attention to the role elections, armed citizenship and public opinion played in fostering a resilient and widespread understanding of popular sovereignty across the region.