It is a neglected fact that the theoretical strands of republicanism drawn on most heavily by contemporary neorepublicans like Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit were strongly colored by a love of empire. Machiavelli famously preferred not just a republic, but an expansive republic, and archrepublican Harrington sowed in his Oceana the “buds of empire,” which might “spread the arms of your commonwealth like a holy asylum unto the distressed world.” Then, of course, there is Rome, which wedded republican liberty to imperial greatness in a way that captivates still. These facts render Edward G. Andrew's Imperial Republics a timely addition to the literature of neorepublicanism, as well as recent debates over the influence of modern political ideology in the West's imperial and colonial history.

Imperial Republic's goals are three: (1) to “complement the existing literature on republicanism with an emphasis on imperialism”; (2) to “demonstrate that republicanism and imperialism are not antithetical”; and (3) to argue that “eighteenth-century neo-Romanism was patrician or anti-democratic,” contrary to contemporary uses (xxi). In the service of these goals, it deploys eight chapters alongside a preface, introduction, and conclusion. Chapter 1 is a brief exploration of the two historical types of republicanism that appeared in the early modern period: the first, Athenian and Aristotelian, based its foreign policy on an ideal of the self-sufficiency of the polis and its domestic policy on the ideal of republican harmony; the second, Roman and Machiavellian, emphasized expansionary foreign policy and, connectedly, a domestic policy of ongoing class conflict. Andrew's contention is that the neo-Romanism of early modern republicans reflects a deliberate choice for the latter over the former—that is, when central figures of the republican movements in England, France, and early America draped themselves in the imagery and rhetoric of Rome (and not Athens), they did so because of Rome's preference for expansionary greatness and senatorial aristocracy, preferences that tracked their own modern and often revolutionary political aspirations. The remaining seven chapters survey the various uses of Roman history and imagery in the service of imperial projects undertaken by England (chaps. 2, 3, and 8), France (chaps. 5–7), and early America (chap. 4) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In regard to the book's first objective, Imperial Republics is a success. The substantive chapters cover much of the historical ground and many of the political thinkers who figure prominently in the neorepublican accounts of the period. For example, chapter 2, “Republicanism and the English Civil War,” features sections on Hobbes, Milton, Harrington, Sidney, and Marchamont Nedham; Andrew interrogates each in turn on his Roman sympathies, his imperialist proclivities, and his view of the Roman agrarian reforms. The results provide sometimes-pointed rejoinders to the neorepublican historical narrative: Andrew rehabilitates the absolutist Hobbes's now-infamous rejection of Roman liberty as a rejection of Rome's ravenous appetite for empire (27–28), and republican hero Harrington sees his agrarian schemes linked inextricably to a policy of civilizing expansion (42). The rest of the chapters are filled with similar, often ironic, corrections of our historical impressions: here is Shaftesbury comparing Holland to Carthage and dedicating England qua Rome to its destruction (“delenda est Carthago”) (47–48); here are the men who would become American revolutionaries, invoking the names of Scipio and Cato in order to stoke anti-Catholic sentiment against the Quebec Act of 1774 (86–8); here is Robespierre slaying the republic's enemies like so many Caesars, for “what does it matter that Brutus has killed the tyrant? Tyranny lives on in human hearts and Rome exists only in Brutus” (157–58). On this count, Imperial Republics proves a thorough and lively inventory of republicanism's strange political and ideological bedfellows.

Over the course of the work, the evidence Andrew accumulates satisfies his second and third objectives as well. Andrew's phrasing of the second objective—to demonstrate that republicanism and imperialism are not antithetical—sets the bar somewhat low, however. Imperial Republics ably demonstrates that republicans were often expansionists, and that republican imagery and rhetoric were often deployed in the service of imperial aspirations, but Andrew's method limits the scope of his claims. In these pages, “republicanism” refers not to a normative theory but to a loose constellation of views typically derived from the pages of Machiavelli or the Roman historians. In other words, Andrew has shown that many of the figures acclaimed by twentieth-century neorepublicans were simultaneously imperialists and great admirers of a distinctly Roman republicanism, but the door remains open for normative theorists like Pettit to claim that there is nothing inherently imperialist about a republican theory of nondomination and, moreover, that a more consistent application of republican principles would have short-circuited the imperial republics. The same goes for the third objective—Andrew persuades the reader that prominent figures in the republican tradition feared popular rule, favored an empowered elite class, and clad these views in Roman garb, but the heavy lifting necessary to wed conceptually republicanism and elitism is left for others (despite recent work casting Pettit's republicanism in a paternalistic light).

Imperial Republics loses focus at times, but it does so in consistently interesting ways. Andrew's inventory of the less well-known uses of republican rhetoric approximates at times a list of past sins of republican revolutionaries. Illustrative of this tendency are sections on James Edward Oglethorpe (75–79) and Charles Rollin (118–22), interesting detours which nonetheless appear to complicate, rather than straightforwardly support, Andrew's thesis. This scattershot tendency points to a tension in the authorial intent of Imperial Republics. In his conclusion, Andrew seems to drift from his previously stated theses, suggesting that his “primary intention … has been to criticize the thoughtless adulation of Rome and deprecation of Athens in the eighteenth century”; a few sentences later, he writes that “our primary purpose has been to challenge republican theorists to specify the conceptual relationship between republics and empires” (181). These statements reframe the project broadly enough to accommodate the sections in which Andrew strays from the narrower theses offered in the opening pages, but they water down the argument in at least one important way: the reader is left wondering whether the evidence linking republicanism and imperialism is attributable to some important theoretical connection between the two, or whether the real culprit is the oft-noted theoretical indeterminacy of republicanism and the great allegorical versatility of Roman imagery. Indeed, the ubiquity of Roman imagery suggests that the more conceptually instructive cases might be those who, like Marchamont Nedham (36–38), resisted the Romanophilia of their compatriots.

Edward Andrew's Imperial Republics is a lively, effective, and important book that will find a well-deserved home on the shelf next to the contemporary neorepublican histories it intends to complement and interrogate. It will prove useful to anyone interested in exploring the murkier corners of the historical records of the republican revolutionaries. Moreover, it presents a strong contextualist challenge to the neorepublican projects so influential in the field over the past quarter century.