Rogue Revolutionaries: The Fight for Legitimacy in the Greater Caribbean by Vanessa Mongey

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rogue Revolutionaries: The Fight for Legitimacy in the Greater Caribbean by Vanessa Mongey Michael Lawrence Dickinson Rogue Revolutionaries: The Fight for Legitimacy in the Greater Caribbean. By Vanessa Mongey. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 212 pages. Cloth, ebook. In her Rogue Revolutionaries, Vanessa Mongey pushes readers to reconsider political projects during the Age of Revolutions that historians have often dismissed as marginal failures worthy only of cursory mention rather than in-depth study. She challenges readers to relinquish traditional concepts of “failure” and “success” and emphasizes instead the range of goals and actions of her subjects, whose obscurity she attributes to their failure to conform to historians’ presuppositions concerning revolution. She argues that these “rogue revolutionaries”—whom she finds mostly in the decades after the Haitian Revolution—were motivated by “cosmopolitan patriotism” (6), which she defines as an allegiance to the best interest of humanity, as opposed to implicit loyalty to a nation-state or community. For Mongey, what sets these figures apart from traditionally celebrated revolutionaries is that their ideals led them to participate directly in multiple revolutionary conflicts and projects across geographic borders. As Mongey argues, to appreciate the significance of these rogue revolutionaries properly, historians “need a more expansive definition of revolution that includes various attempts to forcibly overthrow regimes and generate alternative social, economic, and political orders” (4). Though theoretically this is the widely held definition, Mongey maintains that scholars often disregard unsuccessful revolutionary activity as unworthy of examination. By contrast, she wants readers to see beyond imperial boundaries and the formation of nation-states to the horizons of possibility imagined by her subjects. In doing so, she argues against idealized, normative patterns of state formation and oversimplistic terms such as “failed state” and underscores the complexities and messiness of radical enterprises. According to Mongey, a broader conception would reveal the ways revolutionary ideology and fervor permeated the Atlantic beyond the major uprisings and formations of national governments that have been the frequent subjects of historical study. Rogue Revolutionaries therefore advances an important vein in recent scholarship: prioritizing those traditionally marginalized in narratives of the Age of Revolutions in order to better understand the period and its implications. Like many authors of recent works, Mongey uses the “Greater Caribbean” as her geographic frame of analysis, arguing that the region served as “a fertile ground for the cross-pollination of goods, ideas, and peoples; it [End Page 159] was a revolutionary rendezvous” (12).1 Though she never defines how she envisions the term, she persuasively demonstrates that the region functioned as a liminal space defying imperial boundaries, which fostered revolutionary zeal and facilitated radical ideation. Mongey’s historical actors include mostly men from Europe and the Caribbean, and only one individual featured was born in colonial North America—likely a deliberate decision made to decenter the United States. These were stateless actors, either by choice or as the result of exile, who participated in unsuccessful revolutionary projects. Most of the figures fought in major conflicts of the era, whether in the Latin American revolutions, the French Revolution, or smaller engagements such as the War of 1812 or warfare in and around Texas. Most shifted allegiances throughout their lifetimes and were involved in revolutionary activities across borders. For example, Saint Domingue–born Joseph Savary fought for Spanish American troops and later led fellow free men of color in the War of 1812 at the Battle of New Orleans. Likewise, Prussian native Henri Louis La Fayette Villaume Ducoudray-Holstein enlisted in the French army and later fought for the Texas Republic before serving Latin American revolutionary leader Simón Bolívar. For Mongey, they were no less emblematic of the revolutionary age than more well-known figures such as Thomas Jefferson, Simón Bolívar, or Toussaint Louverture. Mongey’s approach builds upon the work of scholars such as Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, who have uncovered the significant roles that ordinary and unheralded individuals played during the tumults and turbulence of late eighteenth-century uprisings.2 As she emphasizes, given the massive changes through which they lived, such figures had significant reason to imagine potential success. But those rebellions that...