Latin America in Colonial Times

Few milestones in human history are as dramatic and momentous as the meeting of three great civilizations on American soil in the sixteenth century. Latin America in Colonial Times presents that story in an engaging but scholarly new package, revealing how a new civilization – Latin America – emerged from that encounter. The authors give equal attention to the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors and settlers, to the African slaves they brought across the Atlantic, and to the indigenous peoples whose lands were invaded. From the dawn of empires in the fifteenth century, through the conquest age of the sixteenth, to the end of empire in the nineteenth, Latin America in Colonial Times combines broad brush strokes with the anecdotal details that bring the era to life.

Matthew Restall is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Latin American History at Pennsylvania State University. His areas of specialization include colonial Yucatan and Mexico, Maya history, the Spanish Conquest and Africans in Spanish America. Since 1995 he has published some forty articles and essays and a dozen books, including The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan (2009); Mesoamerican Voices (Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (2003). Professor Restall also serves as co-editor of the journal Ethnohistory.

Kris Lane is Professor of History at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. He has published widely on slavery, witchcraft, mining and piracy in the Andes region of South America and is the author or editor of multiple books, including Defense of the Western Conquests (2010), Colour of Paradise: Emeralds in the Age of Gunpowder Empires (2010) and Quito 1599: City and Colony in Transition (2002). Professor Lane has served as Visiting Professor at the National University of Colombia, Bogotá, and the University of Leiden, Netherlands, and currently edits the interdisciplinary journal Colonial Latin American Review.