Although the historiography of the Wars of Independence has generally noted the important role British mercenaries played in assisting Simón Bolívar's ultimately successful campaign in present-day Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador, the references to these adventurers' participation have remained brief, tangential, and, more often than not, confined to sketching their military contribution. No previous study has attempted to ascertain who these men were, where they came from, what their motivation was, and how they related to, or engaged with, the emergent nations they crossed the Atlantic to free from the yoke of Spanish domination. The traditional view has tended to depict the 7,000 English, Scottish and Irish men who joined Bolívar and his armies of liberation between 1816 and 1825, as demobbed British troops who, unable to adapt to civilian life after Waterloo, packed their bags and set sail for South America looking for action and to make a quick fortune.

Matthew Brown's study serves as a fascinating corrective to such an interpretation whilst providing a novel and refreshing multidisciplinary approach to early nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic notions of nationhood, national identity, honour and politics by analysing the involvement and participation of these men in Gran Colombian life from a cultural and social perspective as well as a military one. In other words, this a study that offers, for the first time, a clear and comprehensive overview of the adventurers who joined Bolívar as part of the British Legion, the Irish Legion, and Gregor MacGregor's Legions. It is also a monograph that delves into the experiences these men faced on and off the battlefield, and explores the social and cultural affinities they developed with the Gran Colombians. The result is a compelling and suggestive work that raises a number of important questions about early nineteenth-century concepts of liberty, equality, ethnicity, and how the fatherland was flexibly interpreted. It also dispels a number of myths that have been reiterated in the historiography about these men's backgrounds and intentions.

Employing a variety of sources (letters, published narratives, memoirs, petitions, service records, censuses, interrogations of prisoners, poetry, diaries and court cases), Brown succeeds in outlining the backgrounds and occupations of a representative sample of ‘adventurers’, as he prefers to describe them, and in so doing, demonstrates, for the first time, that the majority of them were not the battle-hardened veterans of the Napoleonic Wars they have generally been depicted to be. In fact, only one in three British private soldiers who fought for the independence of Gran Colombia had served previously in the British army or navy (and this is a generous estimate). The majority, according to Brown, were, quite simply, emigrants who used military service as a means to an end. Their motivation was varied and mixed, and included hoping to start a new exciting life in the Americas, become rich, experience the adventure of a life-time, and even display loyalty or commitment to a Romantic code of honour that, in this age of revolutions, privileged the cause of liberty.

Brown's study uses well-known Venezuelan and Colombian sources, but also engages with an array of ignored documents found in Spanish and Ecuadorean archives. Its versatility lies in the way that it is capable of combining an interesting range of different historiographical repertoires: diplomatic, business, military, social, cultural, and everyday life history. The result is a rich text that is capable of challenging macro-historical interpretations such as the reiterated view that British activity in the region was representative of the United Kingdom's ‘informal empire’, whilst analysing evolving early nineteenth-century notions of chivalry and honour vis-à-vis duelling practices. There is a certain holistic methodology at work, whereby the subject matter is analysed from multiple perspectives that succeed in providing a relatively full picture of who these British adventurers were, the challenges they faced, and the manner in which they became part of the nations they fought to liberate, either as individuals who settled in independent Gran Colombia or as the heroes who became, to a degree, part of the historical memory of Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador. The result is a commendable human take on the lives these adventurers led, from the moment they decided to join the Gran Colombian cause of independence, to that in which they died, chose to return to the United Kingdom, or decided to settle in their newly-adopted fatherland, marrying into criollo families such as the Arismendis, Bolívars, Flores, Robles and Rocafuertes.

This is a very enjoyable book to read, full of surprising and suggestive insights. Brown's statistical, quantitative and qualitative analysis is enlivened with the anecdotes and individual stories that bring the adventures and misadventures of these, at times, altruistic Britons, to life. Perhaps most importantly, it is an interpretation that adds complexity, and nuances, to long-standing historiographical views of British involvement in the Spanish American Wars of Independence, of early Spanish American concepts of nationhood and ethnicity, and of the impact these adventurers' actions had in the region. Far from the corridors of the Foreign Office, the birth of Gran Colombia was aided and supported by Britons whose involvement and motivation in its Wars of Independence had little to do with British foreign policy, and much more to do with individual choices fed by early nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic notions of honour, and a Romantic quest for adventure. The fact that the integration of foreigners in Gran Colombia was much more meaningful and noticeable than anywhere else in Latin America is seen as evidence of the extent to which these adventurers' participation in the Wars of Independence transformed them into something more than honorary Gran Colombians.

In brief, this is a noteworthy contribution that challenges long-held inaccurate and misinformed interpretations of who these British adventurers were, what they hoped to achieve, and how they integrated into the societies they helped liberate.