Vanguard boldly advances an old but forgotten argument about the world-historical significance of nineteenth-century Hispanic American republicanism. Building upon a new generation of research on the nineteenth century that has rescued postcolonial Latin America from obscurity, Sanders contends that Hispanic ‘American republican modernity’ (hereafter, HARM) was not an ‘alternative’ or marginal ‘modernity’ but instead the very stronghold and ‘vanguard’ of popular, anti-imperialist liberty in the Atlantic world and beyond. This general argument is deeply indebted to the ideas of the exiled Chilean intellectual Francisco Bilbao (1823–65), who argued that although the idea of liberty may have been pronounced loudest in France it actually failed miserably there; the true home of liberty, equality, and fraternity was Spanish America, where it lived in the practices of the people (p. 237). But Bilbao was far from alone: HARM was the mainstream ‘roar’ and ideology of ‘liberal’ republican intellectuals, statesmen, soldiers, and the popular or subaltern classes during the turbulent, nation-building decades of the 1840s to 1870s. In short, during this time of counter-revolution and restoration in Europe and aggression, slavery and civil war in the United States, HARM was the cutting edge of democracy and modernity in the Atlantic world. By the 1880s, however, that promising vanguard would slide into its assigned station as the ‘caboose’ of ‘industrial modernity’, and then was written off altogether.

Why, Sanders asks, have scholars turned a deaf ear to this world-leading republican ‘roar?’ Why has HARM been denied its place in the world history of political modernity? He lists five reasons. The first is that stellar scholars of both conservative and progressive stripe, from Hegel to Hobsbawm and Berman, and from Rodó to Chakrabarty and Mignolo, have all assumed that Western Europe and the United States created political modernity and then exported it to the rest of the world. Such Euro- and Anglo-centric views also shaped the agenda of Atlanticists like Harvard's Bernard Bailyn, the result being an Atlantic ‘Age of Revolution’ that conveniently ends in 1825 when in Hispanic America that ‘Age’ was still seen by many intellectuals in the region to have continued into the 1870s if not, as in Peru and Bolivia, into the 1880s. The third reason is that the Hispanic American ‘republican vision of modernity is not teleological in the right ways, being neither Marxist nor conservative nor classical liberal’ (p. 10). The fourth ‘and most important’ reason for the eclipse of HARM is that Latin American intellectuals of the Right and Left completely buried it in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when they adopted Eurocentric historical narratives. The last reason offered is that the Age of HARM was relatively short-lived.

Perhaps still more powerful reasons are elaborated by the author at the close of his book. The first among these is that HARM was dismantled and destroyed in the late nineteenth century by the newly ascendant ‘industrial capitalist modernity’ of that new invention called ‘the West’ precisely because it was too democratic. As political modernity or popular democracy was conquered and tamed by economic modernity (or democracy by and for the bourgeoisie) and the civilising mission, ‘the West’ and ‘civilisation’ became identified with the capitalist and imperialist nations of the North Atlantic (Britain, France, the United States, etc.). As ‘Latin America’ was relegated to ‘the Rest’ whose station it was to always play catch up with ‘the West’ or, in the ‘Third Worldist’ socialist and dependency versions of the Cold War, overthrow it and then speed past it, the region was excluded from scholarly debates and narratives about the origins and history of modernity. This exclusion, Sanders notes, is still visible in the US History profession's flagship journal, the American Historical Review.

Although Sanders does not ponder the obvious point, it is worth noting that the very name of ‘Latin America’ is a product of that late nineteenth-century, anti-democratic ‘Western’ imaginary of imperial ‘industrial modernity’. Ironically, it is the surreptitious persistence of that imaginary today that is responsible for the obliging fact that ‘Latin America’ not only adorns the cover of this book but is everywhere present as the argument's enabling anachronism. In other words, strictly speaking Sanders' claims do not actually apply to ‘Latin America’ at all since ‘Latin America’ had not yet been invented. Indeed, the gradual displacement of the common name of ‘América’ and las repúblicas hispanoamericanas with the name ‘Latin America’ curiously coincides with the decline of HARM. In short, Vanguard points to the need for a new critical appreciation of the invention and configuration of ‘Latin America’ in the late nineteenth century.

Vanguard is not a comprehensive political history of the region in the nineteenth century. Instead, it is an anecdotal narrative history based primarily on Colombia and only secondarily on Mexico, with an episodic foray into Uruguay and the garibaldino connection with Italy. Sanders leaves aside Brazil, for the most part not a stage for early nineteenth-century ‘republican modernity’. Unsurprisingly, the book is strongest when it comes to the Colombian material (the author's field of expertise), and in particular the liberal political ‘experience’ of Afro-Colombians and the democratic clubs. The discussion of the political practice and discourses of ‘Indians’ is reasonable but less persuasive, in part because Sanders confuses the intricate history of the terms ‘Indian’ and ‘indigene’. Thus, Sanders asserts that ‘indigenous identity, a legal, cultural, and racial construct from the colonial period, was explicitly non-universal’ (p. 172) when what he should say is ‘Indian’ identity. ‘Indigene’ (indígena) is of Latin origin and circulated widely in Italian and French since the sixteenth century but gained ascendency in the eighteenth as a universal gloss for the native (Vico applies it to the natives of ancient Greece and Italy). Bourbon officials introduced the term in the 1790s as part of the liberal reforms that officially displaced the name of ‘Indians’ and ‘Indian tribute’, opening the way for ‘natives’ to become citizens of the Spanish Commonwealth, which they did indeed officially become in 1812. In a related miscue, Sanders argues that ‘while in the eighteenth century and twentieth century, both Creole patriots and nativists hoped to construct a postcolonial nation based on deep indigenous pasts, in the mid-nineteenth century the nation emerged out of a faith in the future’ (p. 101). This may hold for Colombia but not for Mexico or Peru or indeed Argentina, where deep genealogical narratives of nation reaching back to Incas and Aztecs and beyond were the firm basis for a liberal-republican faith in the future.

In terms of form and method, Sanders' book reads as fairly conventional, ‘rise and fall’ political narrative of the champions and detractors of key ideas and events. In terms of reaching a general audience with a strong punch line, this strategy is clearly a strength. The price of that strategy is that the discussion rarely engages in more than passing fashion the theoretical or conceptual premises on which it is based, and as a result the book packs a lighter intellectual punch than it might have.