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Matthew Restall and Kris Lane , Latin America in Colonial Times (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2011), pp. xv+304, £55.00, £17.99 pb; $90.00, $29.95 pb.
Reviews
Matthew Restall and Kris Lane present a compelling and readable introduction to the complex and diverse history of colonial Latin America. From Restall's expertise on the nature of Spanish conquest and both Maya and African-descended persons in Yucatán to Lane's work on piracy and early colonial Quito, the various, geographically broad, and deep research interests of each individual author inform much of the history presented here. While Mark Burkholder and Lyman Johnson's Colonial Latin America (8th edition, Oxford University Press, 2012) offers a more traditional political, economic and social history of the region, and Peter Bakewell and Jacqueline Hollier's A History of Latin America to 1825 (3rd edition, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) is more scholarly and detailed, Restall and Lane present a new social and cultural history of the creation of colonial Latin America in engaging narrative form. The core meta-narrative here, which determines the topics and themes on which the authors focus, is the argument that a 'new civilization' was born through the interactions of Native Americans, Iberians, west Africans and their mixed-race progeny in the Americas. This is no mere nod to the place of non-Europeans in the history of the colonial period; Restall and Lane place such groups at the heart of much of the history they recount and the anecdotes they provide to bring that history to life.
As the authors suggest, their treatment and understanding...