Table of Contents

List of Key Figures
Introduction. Foreigners of Desperate Fortune
Chapter 1. Ghostly Governments: Statehood and Sovereignty
Chapter 2. Traveling Words: Communication Circuits
Chapter 3. American Freedom Fighters: The Struggle for Equality
Chapter 4. Revolutionary Dreams: Diplomatic Games and International Politics
Chapter 5. Crocodiles and Country Houses: Revolutionary Memories
Conclusion. Monitoring the Contagion of Revolution
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

Promotional Information

In Rogue Revolutionaries, Vanessa Mongey revives a lost and fleeting world of cosmopolitan radicalism through the stories of "foreigners of desperate fortune" who sought to ignite revolutions and create their own independent states. Their quest for recognition clashed with the growing power of nation-states and a new international order.

About the Author

Vanessa Mongey is a historian based in the United Kingdom.

Reviews

Vanessa Mongey's fascinating book joins those works that analyze the Age of Revolutions from the margins; she draws a rich and complex picture of neglected men (ship captains, teachers, printers, enslaved soldiers, and military veterans) who, although forgotten by national (often-triumphalist) historical narratives, played a significant part in planting the political seeds of a new era...This is an excellent history that brings stories of failed attempts and lost causes that, as Mongey successfully argues, were also part of the revolutionary experiment. (Hispanic American Historical Review) In five beautifully crafted chapters, Mongey not only introduces us to a number of key actors and episodes but also highlights key dimensions of legitimate and failed state-building during the age of revolutions...The most powerful argument that emerges from Mongey's analysis is about how to tell the history of the age of revolutions in a way that does not fall into the trap of later quasi-official accounts that would reduce this era to an automatic movement from empire to nation-state. Against the teleological version of the past as told by the victors, she brings back to life the many alternative visions and schemes, expectations, and 'futures past' (Reinhart Koselleck) that swirled around and that many contemporaries regarded as no less likely than the paths eventually taken. Her book invites us to think more systematically about what were the major ingredients of success and failure during a historical moment of major uncertainty. (Connections) By focusing on the lives of adventurers who wandered through the Greater Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions, Vanessa Mongey's excellent book offers an interpretation of the transition from empires to nations that can help us rethink the presumed inevitability of this transition. Her analysis of these failed revolutionary adventurers makes it possible to imagine an alternative political map of the Americas, in which small republics that ended up being ephemeral could have coexisted with the national states of our own present. (Ernesto Bassi, Cornell University) Rogue Revolutionaries is a surprising and enlightening book. Vanessa Mongey has given us a panoramic history of the ephemeral cosmopolitan revolutions that repeatedly bloomed and faded in the post-Haitian Revolution Caribbean. Historians of the early United States, and scholars of the revolutionary era more broadly, will want to reckon with the story she tells. (Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, University of Southern California)