In this book, Terry Rugeley's fourth on southeastern Mexico in the nineteenth century, soggy Tabasco plays the starring role. Rugeley casts it as a “spoiler of empires,” lumping it together with Afghanistan and Vietnam as places that successfully defied great powers. The powers defied by Tabasco were not so great as those repelled by Afghanistan and Vietnam: Agustín de Iturbide's fledgling monarchy, a centralizing Mexico, the US navy of the 1840s, and Mexican allies of the French expedition in the 1860s.Rugeley credits Tabasco's success in these contests mainly to circumstance. He lists five factors that help spoilers of empires: a forbidding geography (in Tabasco's case, swamps); a peripheral location; a lack of resources, which reduces the effort that great powers will invest in conquest; a lack of governing institutions, which prevents a place from being conquered by crushing a single foe; and, lastly, ignorance on the part of outsiders about a place. Tabasco certainly had most of these going for it. Nineteenth-century Tabasco had its full share of internal violence as well as invasions. Its civil wars and rebellions were elite affairs, says Rugeley, unlike those in Yucatan or Chiapas. That difference derives from the ethnic composition of Tabasco, which had a smaller proportion of Indians than Yucatan. Its economy of cacao, cattle, and corn had led to the creation of a largely mestizo population, with considerable African ancestry, and too few Indians to support indigenous uprisings (again, unlike Yucatan). Ethnic mosaics in Tabasco made cooperation difficult across regions. So uprisings and rebellions remained small-scale, involving dozens or hundreds of men. Almost any hacendado could organize a rebellion.Rugeley sets the scene early in the book with discussions of geography and agriculture, religion and ethnography, pre-Columbian history, and the character and institutions of the Spanish empire after 1519. The early chapters set up the heart of the book nicely and introduce Tabasco effectively. The next few chapters provide a narrative of politics in Tabasco after 1821. It features a cavalcade of caudillos, clergymen, Cuban filibusters, cacaoteros, and one American commodore, Matthew Perry, of Japan fame. They engaged in an endless series of small-scale rebellions, repressions, and civil wars, often linked with foreign invasion or intervention. Charismatic men played outsized roles because raising a force of 50 might be enough for a modest rebellion. (The total population of Tabasco was a little more than 50,000, most of whom avoided politics as best they could.) The narrative has a certain opéra bouffe quality to it, which Rugeley plays up. He delights in colorful characters and comments wryly on the absurdities, hypocrisies, and peccadilloes of the Tabasco elite and foreign filibusters. At issue were the usual feedstocks of nineteenth-century Mexican politics: centralism versus federalism, the proper role of the church, and feuds among prominent families and individuals. Raw ambition and quests for glory, routinely cloaked in high principle (usually liberty), fueled continual violence in Tabasco. No one could control the swamps for long.The book ends with two chapters that quickly explore a banana and mahogany boom in the late Porfiriato, a return to violence during the Mexican Revolution, and, more quickly still, the last 80 years, when another export boom, based on oil, transformed Tabasco. The post-1880 story is much less detailed, more of an overview.Rugeley spices the narrative with snippets of shrewd analysis and ends most chapters with reflections on the meanings of his story. This is where the intellectual payload of the book is concentrated. Some readers will prefer to see more of it and less narrative. But general readers might prefer Rugeley's storytelling, which is often wry and amusing. The prose is lively throughout, and the book is accessible to anyone with a modest familiarity with Atlantic, Latin American, and Mexican history. At points Rugeley strives too hard (for my taste) for a striking or clever phrase, sneaking in an allusion to an Ernest Hemingway short story, for example, in referring to the Usumacinta as “the quintessential big two-hearted river” because it has a low and high season (p. 11), or referring to the cacao tree as the “diva of the forest” because it requires warmth and shade (p. 67). He is unduly fond of his phrase “Napoleonic free radical” (p. 112, for one example). Such carping notwithstanding, the book is more readable than 90 percent of university press tomes.Rugeley visited a dozen or more archives and repositories in Mexico, Guatemala, and the United States. He uses the archival sources heavily in every chapter: the book is a history built from the bottom up and constitutes a contribution to knowledge as well as an interesting read, despite the discouraging fact that “virtually any paper that did not find its way out of Tabasco before the 1880s has been destroyed” (p. 5).Scholars of nineteenth-century Mexico will need to read this book. Historians of nineteenth-century Latin America will probably want to read it. Anyone who enjoys a well-written story of political struggle, rampant violence, romantic adventure, and shameless hypocrisy should read it.