This book is a collective biography of the veterans of the battle of El Santuario (1829), which examines the history of the imperial conflicts that shaped politics and society in Colombia and Venezuela after independence from colonial rule. After the battle, an Irish mercenary in the Colombian service, Rupert Hand, murdered a rebel general, José María Córdova. The analysis, stretching from 1820 to 1854, situates this imperial murder and the battle it followed within its regional, national, and Atlantic contexts, and shows how local processes and imperial ambitions shaped the history of nation-building in the nineteenth century. Using the lives and writings of soldiers, lovers, diplomats, explorers, slaves, librarians and murderers, Brown here uncovers the history of nation-building and imperial expansion in Latin America during the nineteenth century.