Natalia Sobrevilla’s book offers a compelling and rigorously documented study of the armed forces’ role in the formation of the postcolonial Peruvian state. Covering the final decades of colonial rule through the 1870s, Sobrevilla situates major political and military transformations within a broader social history, placing the experiences of soldiers, veterans, and their families in the foreground. The book examines how the colonial militias became professional armies through the wars of independence, the citizen-soldier was redefined, and a new system of social protection emerged. Although this system originated in the Bourbon-era montepíos (pensions), during the republic it gradually developed different criteria for allocating benefits. Drawing on hundreds of individual, fragmentary, and dispersed cases, Sobrevilla argues that the armed forces became an effective institution that, despite political instability and challenges to reform efforts, forged durable ties with the men that served in its ranks.

Militia men repeatedly turned to the institution to obtain recognition, improve their social standing, and gain access to economic benefits such as rewards and pensions. This sustained military mobilization ultimately rested on the promise of future compensation in exchange for services rendered to the republic. From the wars of independence through the subsequent civil conflicts, the colonial pension system was adopted and largely retained its traditional generosity in practice, even as republican legislation increasingly restricted eligibility. Yet, as Sobrevilla cautions, the substantial fiscal burden did not ensure that many men remained in active service, nor did it guarantee the uninterrupted preservation of acquired benefits. This was largely a result of military reforms fluctuating according to economic circumstances and factional conflict.

The book is organized into five chapters. The first examines the colonial antecedents of the republican armed forces by reconstructing the evolution of militias and tracing how their fueros (jurisdictional privileges) and uniforms articulated a local corporate identity while also encouraging military participation. It also analyzes the renewed connection, in the age of revolutions, between citizenship and military service. The second chapter explores the “citizen-soldier” from the Túpac Amaru rebellion to the conflicts following independence, addressing recruitment, promotions, rewards, the relationship between the National Guard and the regular army, and uniforms as markers of social hierarchy and belonging. The third chapter studies how the state provided care and financial assistance to sick, wounded, and incapacitated soldiers, established the importance of medical records, and justified differences in compensation. It also traces the gradual institutionalization, during the 1830s and 1840s, of qualifying juntas (committees) responsible for assessing eligibility and determining access to benefits, a process accompanied by the standardization of paperwork. The fourth chapter, the longest, focuses on military retirement and pensions, showing how political instability, fiscal constraints, and the economic boost from the guano industry shaped the state’s capacity to reward veterans and consolidate a military structure. The fifth chapter turns to survivors’ pensions, directed mainly to widows and children of military men. It uncovers how the colonial montepío legacy persisted, was adapted to republican paternalism, and became subject to discretionary administrative control. Sobrevilla concludes that the armed forces were central to the construction of the nineteenth-century Peruvian state by generating lasting bonds among its members through systems of protection, recognition, and assistance.

To support her argument, Sobrevilla gives particular weight to service records preserved in military archives, which she reads alongside a broad documentary corpus. The centrality of these sources places the book within a renewed military history that seeks not only to reconstruct the Peruvian army’s functioning, but also to illuminate its connections with civilian life and the mechanisms of legitimation that linked men in arms to the republican project. In dialogue with recent historiography, Sobrevilla shows that civilian and military spheres were porous and often overlapping. The book’s title encapsulates this argument by emphasizing that individuals moved between military and civilian roles throughout their lives. This perspective shifts attention away from great leaders and toward the men and women who sustained the military apparatus in everyday practice, many of whom changed sides according to opportunities for social and economic advancement.

This is an innovative work that opens a fertile field of research on how the military institution was anchored in traditions inherited from the Spanish colonial order and adapted to the republican context. These traditions helped redefine citizenship, military service, and the very nature of both state formation and nation building. Although the book at times seems to present the institution as separate from its members and subordinate to a reform agenda, closer analysis reveals that ordinary men and women shaped it through bottom-up interactions, disputes, and negotiations.

The book leaves several aspects underexamined: the invalid corps’ role in this process of institutional construction; its evolution; and its ties to the military montepío. Likewise, the book’s emphasis on the idea of having “spilled blood for the nation” does not fully capture the bodily experiences of those disabled in military service. This limitation invites closer examination of the political languages in circulation and of how soldiers with bodily impairments began to claim compensation and entitlements before the state. Even so, Armed Citizens and Citizens in Arms is a fundamental contribution that substantially reframes the historiography on the making of the Peruvian state and opens up a promising field for comparative research on whether the military dynamics of this process were exceptional in Peru or part of broader transnational processes of state formation in Spanish America.