   *     *     [266]  [266] Isidro Vanegas, ed. El siglo diecinueve colombiano. Bogotá: Ediciones Plural, 2017. 243 páginas. doi: 10.15446/achsc.v45n2.71035 Political history was fairly recently seen as a moribund ield, the study of machinations among elites that had little connection to culture and society. Over the past couple of decades, however, political history has transformed itself by focusing on larger issues of the culture of politics and by incorporating the experience and agency of subalterns into the story of state and nation for- mation. his valuable volume of eight essays and an introduction reveals how much political history has changed and how these changes have revolutionized our understanding of the nineteenth century. For a collection of essays, the volume is unusually coherent in its themes, the essays as a whole sustaining an argument about the vibrancy and inventiveness of Colombian nineteenth- century political culture. As Isidro Vanegas notes in his excellent introduction, the Colombian nineteenth century has long been seen as a failure, both in nation and state building. However, this sense of failure and stagnation was not the view of many in Colombia during the nineteenth century, especially before the Regeneration. Instead, many politicians, letrados, and even everyday people (Liberals especially, but also some Conservatives), saw Colombia as a political success in comparison with Europe and the United States. Beyond this rejection of the nineteenth century as a “failure,” a number of themes bind the essays together. All are concerned with the “new” politi- cal history that moves beyond studying how competing elites controlled the state, instead focusing on how multiple actors used politics to deine society and how this politics shaped people’s social, economic and cultural lives. Another recurrent theme of the volume is how ordinary people, or subal- terns, were not just “carne de cañón o carne de urna” but participated in politics in a rich variety of ways (p. 16). A theme uniting many of the essays in the volume is a welcome focus on the Cauca, a region of critical importance to understanding the nineteenth century, but one that still has received less attention than Bogotá, the eastern highlands, or even the Caribbean coast in Colombian historiography. he essays proceed more or less chronologically, covering the whole of the nineteenth century, beginning with Vanegas’ “Revolución neogranadina: La feliz catástrofe.” Vanegas argues, contrary to so much history that empha- sizes continuity between Colony and Republic, that the political actors of the time certainly saw “La Revolución Neogranadina” as completely transforming