For scholars of the “Age of Revolutions,” two issues have been long-standing interpretative thorns. The first concerns the ideological contradictions in the political thought and practice of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revolutionaries and founders, most glaringly between political ideals of freedom and equality and practices of domination and inequality. The second concerns that of explaining the differential outcomes of revolutions, such as the purported success of one (the American Revolution) over others.

Joshua Simon’s The Ideology of Creole Revolution offers a groundbreaking new approach to these issues. At the heart of Simon’s approach is a reinterpretation of this period that shifts the axis of analysis from a transatlantic to a long-overdue hemispheric perspective, focusing on the commonalties and linkages between revolutionary leaders in the United States and Spanish America. Mainly, the author argues for a unified view of these leaders as creole revolutionaries united by a shared ideology that emerged from their unique position within the institutional context of European imperialism. As creoles (or criollos in Spanish), these American-born descendants of European settlers found themselves in the contradictory position of seeking independence from European rule while preserving the very privileges they enjoyed through its imperial institutions, particularly those over nonwhite populations such as indigenous peoples, Africans, and pardos, or mixed-raced populations. The result was what Simon terms an ideology of “anti-imperial imperialism,” which creoles came to espouse and deploy not only to support rallying cries for revolutionary independence but also to guide their constitutional designs and foreign policies in the postrevolutionary period. Paradoxically, such a view meant that the thinkers who held it could be both for and against empire and imperialism simultaneously.

In seven chapters, the book develops this framework and traces out its manifestations in the thought of three key creole leaders: Alexander Hamilton, Simón Bolívar, and Lucas Alamán. Despite their different geographic positions in the Americas (the United States, Venezuela, and Mexico, respectively), and the influences of differing intellectual traditions (Scottish Enlightenment, classical republicanism, and Burkean conservatism), Simon illustrates in crisp prose how these leaders cohered around a distinctive and contradictory set of ideas and beliefs (anti-imperial imperialism) that they drew upon and produced to guide their political practice. For instance, their anti-imperial imperialism shaped a creole constitutionalism centered on presidentialism and the idea of union, which while establishing the new republic’s self-determination in rejection of prior monarchical and imperial rule, also sought to remain imperial in scope and preserve their privileges as creole elites.

Simon’s critical reinterpretation of these “Founding Fathers” (in South as well as North America), and his recasting of theirs as “creole revolutions” centered on elite interests, fits more broadly within the tradition of critique associated with the historian Charles Beard. In Beard’s 1913 An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, the U.S. Founders emerged as propertied elites who sought to consolidate their interests against the rising democratic masses and competing agrarian interests through the writing of the Federal Constitution, an interpretive move that cast a shadow on their deification as enlightened patriots acting in the name of “We, the People” and the public good. Yet, distinct from Beard’s approach, that of Simon rejects economic determinism as the central explanatory mechanism and also resituates their material interests beyond the concept of domestic class and class conflict to focus analysis on their position not just as elites but also in relation to the institution of European imperialism, including, most importantly, overarching racial domination over nonwhite populations.

This critical analytical recalibration is one of the central contributions of the book. Foremost, it provides a more nuanced understanding of creole elites’ complex status, and with it a more convincing interpretative lens for understanding the chasm between enlightenment era ideals and illiberal practices. It also better captures the complexity of elite interests by not subsuming race and ethnicity to class and economic structure, or to a simple colonizer/colonized binary. This is best illustrated in the author’s lucid rereading of Simón Bolívar’s famous Angostura Address (1819) as a contradictory text that while advocating for the abolishment of slavery and formal exclusions against pardos and indigenous peoples in land-tenure systems, simultaneously subsumed these calls for equality in a form of government that limited representation and governance to creole elites whose “moral power” could provide for more enlightened governance over an easily corrupted and highly heterogenous people (pp. 102–3). As Simon makes clear, it is in his fear of future pardocracia—or a government by mixed raced classes—that we can see Bolivar’s anti-imperial imperialism.

One of the most provocative interpretative surprises of the book is Simon’s application of this lens to the American Revolution and Founding through the figure of Alexander Hamilton. As the Caribbean-born son of a British aristocrat and a woman of British and French Huguenot descent, Hamilton fits more easily the profile of creole revolutionary than other U.S. Founders such as James Madison or even the more cosmopolitan Thomas Jefferson. I found Simon’s introduction of this new lens not only highly applicable but also illuminating. While the notion of creole might be most associated with Spanish America and the Caribbean, the extension of this notion to the North American context helps to correct historical misinterpretations that have long associated the U.S. Revolution more closely with the French Revolution and have ignored its own hemispheric connections with the independence movements in Spanish America and the Caribbean. In this regard, Simon’s work is part of an important new wave, including recent works by Juliet Hooker and Jane Gordon, that has brought to the fore the fecundity of a hemispheric perspective for a better understanding of the transnational flow of ideas and political practices across the Americas, and creolité as a more expansive analytical lens for political theory and the social sciences.

Simon’s expanded deployment of this creole framework, while fruitful, also raises some concerns over its limitations and possible distortions. In its ambitious attempt to underscore much ignored connections among U.S. and Spanish American revolutionaries, particularly as individuals sharing an ideology resulting from their creole position, the presence of others who do not fully fit this mold raise questions. For instance, in the U.S. context, influential thinkers such as Thomas Paine and Benjamin Rush appear more puzzling: British–born Paine, who was nonetheless a fervent ideologue of the American revolutionary cause, and someone who in essays such as his 1775 African Slavery in America expressed a wholesale rejection of slavery on a moral basis; or Rush, who refuted Jefferson’s biological arguments on the natural inferiority of some races over others. Likewise, although Simon addresses his omission of the Haitian Revolution and Haitian thinkers as outside the purview of his analytical framework, I nonetheless wonder what is lost from his account as a result of this omission. As he underscores in several chapters, Haiti played an important role in shaping the fears of both U.S. and Spanish American Founders, and it would be helpful to also understand fully how it also shaped anti-imperial imperialism in the Americas.

These omissions aside, The Ideology of Creole Revolution opens up new ground for continued research and debate not only on this historical period but moreover on the distinct trajectories of political development between North and Spanish America. As Simon highlights, postcolonial conflict in the aftermath of creole revolutions was as equally prevalent in the United States as in the new Latin American republics, and save for some accidents of history, the early U.S. union would have collapsed, preventing it from enjoying the material and political benefits that even a shaky early union enabled it to garner. By drawing our attention to these historical interconnections in evaluations of the so-called success and failure of different revolutions and their subsequent developmental pathways, this excellent book reveals the importance of engaging in comparative theoretical work to better understand not only the past but also how we evaluate the present.