Some one hundred years ago, the British Napoleonic specialist John Holland Rose opined that, insofar as the period 1799 – 1815 was concerned, the history of Napoleon was the history of the world. As the current reviewer has observed elsewhere, this remark was utter nonsense: Napoleon and his wars were a European phenomenon that only impinged tangentially, if at all, upon many contemporary developments in the wider world. That said, given that several of the powers engaged in the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were major colonial powers, confrontation in Europe was mirrored not only in traditional areas of contention such as the Antilles and India but also in new theaters of war in Africa and even Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, in certain areas of the European colonial empires, there was also a strong political echo, whether it was in Haiti, or the Spanish and Portuguese territories that laid claim to almost the whole of central and southern America, not to mention US states such as California, Nevada, Arizona, California, and Texas. We might assume, then, that over the years a whole series of historians would have addressed this worldwide dimension, but in reality very few works can be found that pay it more than lip service. Therefore the publication of this most interesting collection is to be welcomed, though it covers only the Atlantic world.For reasons of space, this review will confine itself to the book’s coverage of what must be regarded as the central contribution of the Napoleonic age to Atlantic history, namely the Latin American revolutions. Here the specialist will find a number of useful essays. Dominique Goncalves looks at the attitude of the Cuban plantocracy to the Spanish struggle against Napoleon; Timothy Hawkins at the response of the colonial authorities in Guatemala to the danger of French subversion; Matt D. Childs at a little-known outburst of anti-French rioting that gripped Havana in March 1809; Victor Peralta Ruiz at the travails of two senior Spanish josefinos with long experience of America; Felipe Angulo Jaramillo at the manner in which the French press reported the Latin American revolutions; and, finally, Roderick Barman, John Savage, and Monica Ricketts look separately at ways in which the Napoleonic model shaped the new republics.This is a somewhat eclectic collection, but two important themes emerge. First, despite the fact that from the very beginning of his intervention in the Iberian Peninsula Napoleon offered the American colonies favorable treatment in his new order, his blandishments awoke scarcely any response among their inhabitants. Collaboration in Buenos Aires, Caracas, Montevideo, and other cities was all but nonexistent, while in Spain only a handful of criollos went over to Joseph Bonaparte, it being apparent that the few that did so were men who were for one reason or another estranged from their parent societies. (An important subtext here is the utter inability of Napoleon, at least as emperor, to project his power beyond the shores of Europe.) All this, however, is known well enough. Much more interesting is the second pattern that can be discerned: as was the case with their counterparts in Spain, the colonial elites offered the war effort against France a strictly limited commitment. While they were ostensibly prepared to give it a strong measure of support, they were not prepared to do anything that might inconvenience them personally or risk their social and economic privilege. In Spain this attitude provoked serious social disorder throughout the patriot zone; the period from 1808 to 1810, in particular, was marked by an endless series of riots, uprisings, and other disturbances. Childs’s splendid essay on the Cuban riots of 1809 therefore shines forth on account of its very strong comparative dimension, however unconscious of this the author evidently was. We need much more of this; indeed, it is this reviewer’s very strong hope that Childs or some other equally well-qualified scholar will produce the monograph that we so sorely need on South America’s war against Napoleon.To conclude, this is an excellent book. It is not without its gaps — it is a shame, for example, that there was no contribution from Matthew Brown, the author of the excellent Adventuring through Spanish Colonies: Simón Bolívar, Foreign Mercenaries and the Birth of New Nations (2006) — but it is an important contribution to the literature.