In London's Grafton Way, a plaque marks the house (now the Venezuelan Consul) where Francisco de Miranda, called the Precursor of Latin American Independence, and his wife lived early in the nineteenth century. Around the corner in Fitzroy Square, a statue honors the would-be liberator, who died in a Spanish prison in 1816. In London, Miranda sought British government support for overthrowing Spanish rule in his native Venezuela. The cast of rogue revolutionaries whose exploits Vanessa Mongey follows in Rogue Revolutionaries: The Fight for Legitimacy in the Greater Caribbean had considerably less contact with Britain than did Miranda, and they remain generally unremembered. In his memoirs, the professor-turned-revolutionary Manuel Cortés Campomanes complained of having been “forgotten and abandoned,” insisting that “the cause of America was and is for me the cause of humanity and reason,” not to be hailed as “the cause of Bolívar, Marino, Miranda etc” (59). He had reason to be bitter. He and his close confederate, Juan Bautista Mariano Picornell, both of whom were born in Spain, had an impressive liberationist vita, stretching from their part in the antiroyalist San Blas conspiracy of 1796, followed by republican involvement in Venezuela, to their final expedition against Mexico staged from Galveston, Texas in 1817.

Campomanes and Picornell were among history's losers, as are most of the other “cosmopolitan patriots” (6) featured in Mongey's well-researched study, losers both in their own lifetimes and in the histories written following the consolidation of new nation states in former Spanish colonies. The unravelling of Spain's American empire, to which British governments occasionally lent a helping hand, opened space for a mobile group of republicans determined to overthrow Spanish authority. Principles of liberty, inspired in some measure by the American and French Revolutions, were mixed with motives of self-interest and self-aggrandizement, and did not extend to enslaved people. The profits won by the French corsair Louis-Michael Aury accrued in large part from the capture of Spanish slave ships and the sale of enslaved Africans in ports such as New Orleans. Aury, like his fellow privateer Sévère Courtois, a freeperson of color and refugee from Saint Domingue, sought to establish republican outposts in the Caribbean. Following Aury's death, Courtois took over the government of the small island of Providencia and in 1822 oversaw Gran Columbia's peaceful annexation of Providencia. The authoritarian government that Aury established lasted four years, longer than the “ephemeral states” (2) he set up on the islands of Galveston (1816–1817) and Amelia (1817).

In each of her five chapters, Mongey shifts two or more of these revolutionary desperados from the historical margins to the narrative center of this unstable period of revolution and state formation. Eschewing a chronological approach, in each chapter Mongey uses the central characters to illustrate a key theme or question: chapter 1, featuring Aury, examines what made a government legitimate; chapter 2, focusing on Campomanes and Picornell, considers the importance of circuits of communication and the coexisting worlds of print and word of mouth to revolutionary mobilization. In chapter 3, Mongey follows Joseph Savary and Marcelin Guillot, both freeborn Saint Dominguans of mixed race, as they moved through the greater Caribbean (with insurrectionary stops at Cuba, Louisiana, Texas, Amelia, and Providencia), seeking equality—a slippery word in the lexicon of men for whom equality “meant the freedom to climb military and political ladders” as well as freedom to “to seize and sell enslaved Africans” (74).

Mongey is alert to historical contradictions and contingency. In the era of liberation struggles, revolutionary dreams were also projected onto Puerto Rico (the subject of chapter 4) by revolutionaries like Georges Nicholas Jeannet-Oudin, the nephew of the Jacobin leader Georges Danton, who in 1822 led an expedition to seize the island from Spain and establish the Republic of Boricua. The scheme, which was hatched in the United States, drew on webs of peripatetic revolutionaries. The republic's declaration of independence was among the documents published to legitimate the would-be revolution. As Mongey comments, the declaration was “an artful feat of ventriloquism” (93) speaking in the voice of inhabitants of an island where none of the leaders had been born or raised. Their failure signaled the beginning of a closure in the zone of revolutionary experimentation, as colonial powers cooperated to bring order to the region, and freedom fighters were stigmatized as men operating outside the law. In the final chapter, Mongey raises questions about the legitimation of historical memory made operational through various modes of self-presentation such as memoirs, maps, and petitions. The nation state proved crucial to the encoding of remembrance and ordering of historical significance. The itinerate military adventurer Agustín Codazzi, who was born in northern Italy, joined various movements for Spanish American independence; he became a cartographer and reinvented himself as a Venezuelan patriot; his remains were interned in Venezuela's national pantheon and Columbia's national institute of geography bears his name. Codazzi's compatriot, Costante Ferrari, returned from South America struggles to his home in Italy; he fought in the Greek war of independence and lived long enough to lead a battalion of volunteers in the Italian Revolution of 1848. A plaque on the wall of his farm honors the Italian patriot, noting in passing his role as “a solider of liberty” (134) in South America. His memoirs, however, told a story of disappointment.

By connecting detailed micro-studies to broader processes at work across the revolutionary Atlantic, Mongey gives coherence to a short but wide-ranging study. Historians of Britain should be keen to engage with the overarching issues she touches on in the introduction and conclusion, relating to the right of revolution, political legitimacy, sovereignty, and the modern nation state, and to which the rest of Rogue Revolutionaries gives substance.