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  • General Editors: Kris Lane, Tulane University, Louisiana, Matthew Restall, Pennsylvania State University

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102 results in Cambridge Latin American Studies

Page 1 of 6

Debts Unpaid
  • Two Centuries of Trouble and Conflict in Mexico's Economy
  • Louise E. Walker
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 2025
  • Power struggles between debtors and creditors about unpaid debts have animated the history of economic transformation from the emergence of capitalist relations to the recent global financial crashes. Illuminating how ordinary people fought for economic justice in Mexico from the eve of independence to the early 2000s, this study argues that conflicts over small-scale debts were a stress test for an emerging economic order that took shape against a backdrop of enormous political and social change. Drawing on nearly 1,500 debt conflicts unearthed from Mexican archives, Louise E. Walker explores rapidly changing ideas and practices about property rights, contract law, and economic information. This combination of richly detailed archival research, with big historical and theoretical interpretations, raises provocative new questions about the moral economy of the credit relationship and the shifting line between exploitation and opportunity in the world of everyday exchange.

Anchoring an Empire
  • Gender and Ethnicity in Colonial Panama
  • Bethany Aram
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Anchoring an Empire is a bottom-up exploration of how gender and ethnicity shaped the lived experience of Spanish subjects across the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century isthmus of Panama. Focusing on understudied historical actors, Bethany Aram sheds light on how indigenous Americans, Afro-descendants, and Europeans contributed to critical debates on race and gender. From the Caribbean port cities of Nombre de Díos and Portobello, to Panama Viejo on the Pacific coast, free, enslaved, and in-between women and men managed to become arbiters of Spanish and competing interests. Those who lived and died in these cities sustained them as hubs of interaction, communication, and commerce. Whether victims, beneficiaries – or both – of the slave trade, these individuals found ways to meet and to exploit the region's episodic demand for housing, provisions, and other services. Their expertise grounded global transport and trade, with a lasting impact on processes of mobility and globalization.

Hispanic Technocracy
  • From Fascism to Catholic Authoritarianism in Spain, Argentina, and Chile, 1945–1991
  • Daniel Gunnar Kressel
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Hispanic Technocracy explores the emergence, zenith, and demise of a distinctive post-fascist school of thought that materialized as state ideology during the Cold War in three military regimes: Francisco Franco's Spain (1939–1975), Juan Carlos Onganía's Argentina (1966–1973), and Augusto Pinochet's Chile (1973–1988). In this intellectual and cultural history, Daniel Gunnar Kressel examines how Francoist Spain replaced its fascist ideology with an early-neoliberal economic model. With the Catholic society Opus Dei at its helm amid its 'economic miracle' of the 1960s, it fostered a modernity that was 'European in the means' and 'Hispanic in the ends.' Kressel illuminates how a transatlantic network of ideologues championed this model in Latin America as an authoritarian state model that was better suited to their modernization process. In turn, he illustrates how Argentine and Chilean ideologues adapted the Francoist ideological toolkit to their political circumstances, thereby transcending the original model.

The Power of Dissent
  • Urban Political Culture and the Fall of Spanish Rule in Charcas
  • Sergio Serulnikov
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • The Power of Dissent examines the crisis of Spanish rule through the changing political culture of Chuquisaca (Bolivia), the most important city in the southern Andes. Sergio Serulnikov argues that in the four decades preceding the nineteenth-century wars of independence, a vibrant political public sphere emerged, both patrician and plebeian. It manifested itself in a variety of social domains: protracted legal battles, collective petitions, popular revolts, the culture of manly honor, disputes over the rights of city council members and university faculty to hold free annual elections to choose their authorities, clashes between urban militias and Spanish soldiers, and contested public ceremonies and rituals of state power. In the process, a discernible aspiration took shape: the full participation of the local population in public affairs. The culture of dissent undermined the very premises of Bourbon absolutism and, more broadly, imperial control.

Global Servants of the Spanish King
  • Mobility and Cosmopolitanism in the Early Modern Spanish Empire
  • Adolfo Polo y La Borda
  • Published online:
    20 February 2025
    Print publication:
    27 February 2025
  • From 1580 to 1700, low-ranking Spanish imperial officials ceaselessly moved across the Spanish empire, and in the process forged a single coherent political unit out of multiple heterogeneous territories, creating the earliest global empire. Global Servants of the Spanish King follows officials as they itinerated between the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Africa, revealing how their myriad experiences of service to the king across a variety of locales impacted the governance of the empire, and was an essential mechanism of imperial stability and integration. Departing from traditional studies which focus on high-ranking officials and are bounded by the nation-state, Adolfo Polo y La Borda centers on officials with local political and administrative duties such as governors and magistrates, who interacted daily with the crown's subjects across the whole empire, and in the process uncovers a version of cosmopolitanism concealed in conventional narratives.

The Shamanism of Eco-Tourism
  • History and Ontology among the Makushi in Guyana
  • James Andrew Whitaker
  • Published online:
    30 January 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • In the first book in English to focus specifically on the Makushi in Guyana, James Andrew Whitaker examines how shamanism informs Makushi interactions with outsiders in the context of historical missionization and contemporary tourism. The Makushi are an Indigeneous people who speak a Cariban language and live in Guyana, Brazil, and Venezuela. Combining ethnohistory, ethnographic fieldwork, and archival research, this book elucidates a shamanic framework that is seen in Makushi engagements with outsiders in the past and present. It shows how this framework structures interactions between Makushi groups and various visitors in Guyana. Similar to how Makushi shamans draw in spirit allies, Makushi groups seek human outsiders and form strategic partnerships with them to obtain desired resources that are used for local goals and transformative projects. The book advances recent scholarship concerning ontological relations in Amazonia and is positioned at the cusp of debates over Amazonian relations with alterity.

Plebeian Consumers
  • Global Connections, Local Trade, and Foreign Goods in Nineteenth-Century Colombia
  • Ana María Otero-Cleves
  • Published online:
    18 December 2024
    Print publication:
    05 December 2024
  • Plebeian Consumers is both a global and local study. It tells the story of how peasants, day workers, formerly enslaved people, and small landholders became the largest consumers of foreign commodities in nineteenth-century Colombia, and dynamic participants of an increasingly interconnected world. By studying how plebeian consumers altered global processes from below, Ana María Otero-Cleves challenges ongoing stereotypes about Latin America's peripheral role in the world economy through the nineteenth century, and its undisputed dependency on the Global North. By exploring Colombians' everyday practices of consumption, Otero-Cleves also invites historians to pay close attention to the intimate relationship between the political world and the economic world in nineteenth-century Latin America. She also sheds light on new methodologies and approaches for studying the material world of men and women who left little record of their own experiences.

Fallen From Heaven
  • The Enduring Tradition of Europeans as Gods in the Americas
  • Nicholas Griffiths
  • Published online:
    12 December 2024
    Print publication:
    19 December 2024
  • Debunking the so-called apotheosis myth, Nicholas Griffiths argues that Indigenous peoples in North America, Mexico, the Andes, and Hawaii during the early modern period (1492–1789) did not believe invading Europeans were gods. Instead, many perceived them as 'more-than-human' intruders of considerable spiritual power. By exploring the Indigenous context and terminology, using published primary and secondary sources, the book investigates what natives meant when they used words that Europeans translated as 'gods.' In contrast to traditional accounts, Griffiths centers native points of view and the dynamic interactions between European and Indigenous perspectives. Ultimately, both groups were fundamentally comparable since both interpreted their mutual contact in terms of their pre-existing mythology. The traditional contrast between the scientific, rational, and modern Europeans on the one hand, and the myth-bound, irrational, pre-modern Indigenous peoples on the other, is entirely misleading. The first book-length synthesis of this myth, Griffiths reinterprets ideas that have long been debated in various regional literatures.

The Coming of the Kingdom
  • The Muisca, Catholic Reform, and Spanish Colonialism in the New Kingdom of Granada
  • Juan F. Cobo Betancourt
  • Published online:
    29 November 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024
  • The Coming of the Kingdom explores the experiences of the Indigenous Muisca peoples of the New Kingdom of Granada (Colombia) during the first century of Spanish colonial rule. Focusing on colonialism, religious reform, law, language, and historical writing, Juan F. Cobo Betancourt examines the introduction and development of Christianity among the Muisca, who from the 1530s found themselves at the center of the invaders' efforts to transform them into tribute-paying Catholic subjects of the Spanish crown. The book illustrates how successive generations of missionaries and administrators approached the task of drawing the Muisca peoples to Catholicism at a time when it was undergoing profound changes, and how successive generations of the Muisca interacted with the practices and ideas that the invaders attempted to impose, variously rejecting or adopting them, transforming and translating them, and ultimately making them their own. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Peopling for Profit in Imperial Brazil
  • Directed Migrations and the Business of Nineteenth-Century Colonization
  • José Juan Pérez Meléndez
  • Published online:
    26 September 2024
    Print publication:
    13 June 2024
  • Peopling for Profit provides a comprehensive history of migration to nineteenth-century imperial Brazil. Rather than focus on Brazilian slavery or the mass immigration of the end of the century, José Juan Pérez Meléndez examines the orchestrated efforts of migrant recruitment, transport to, and settlement in post-independence Brazil. The book explores Brazil's connections to global colonization drives and migratory movements, unveiling how the Brazilian Empire's engagement with privately run colonization models from overseas crucially informed the domestic sphere. It further reveals that the rise of a for-profit colonization model indelibly shaped Brazilian peopling processes and governance by creating a feedback loop between migration management and government formation. Pérez Meléndez sheds new light on how directed migrations and the business of colonization shaped Brazilian demography as well as enduring social, racial, and class inequalities. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

A Colonial Book Market
  • Peruvian Print Culture in the Age of Enlightenment
  • Agnes Gehbald
  • Published online:
    16 November 2023
    Print publication:
    30 November 2023
  • This volume provides a wholly original social history of books in late colonial Peru. From the second half of the eighteenth century onward, workshops in Lima and transoceanic imports supplied the market with unprecedented quantities of print publications. By tracing the variety of printed commodities that were circulating in the urban sphere, as well as analysing the spatiality of the trade and the materiality of the books themselves, Agnes Gehbald assesses the meaning of print culture in the everyday lives of the viceroyalty. She reveals how books permeated late colonial society on a broad scale and how they figured as objects in the inventories of diverse individuals, both women and men, who, in previous centuries, had been far less likely to possess them. Deeply researched and profound, A Colonial Book Market uncovers how people in Peruvian cities gained access to reading material and participated in the global Enlightenment project.

Being the Heart of the World
  • The Pacific and the Fashioning of the Self in New Spain, 1513–1641
  • Nino Vallen
  • Published online:
    28 September 2023
    Print publication:
    12 October 2023
  • In this timely book Nino Vallen tells the story of New Spain's gradual integration into the Pacific Basin and challenges established views about identity formation among the elites of colonial Mexico. It examines how discussions about the establishment and desirability of transpacific connections interacted with more general debates over why some people deserved certain benefits over others. As part of these struggles, New Spain's changing place at the crossroads of transatlantic and transpacific routes became a subject of contention between actors moved by competing notions of a deserving self: the learned councillor, the veteran, the discoverer, the meritorious, the creole and the merchant. Reassessing current historiographical narratives on creole identities and worldviews, Being the Heart of the World contributes to a broader understanding of the early modern self and the ways in which it was shaped by the mobilities of an increasingly globalized world.

A Tale of Two Granadas
  • Custom, Community, and Citizenship in the Spanish Empire, 1568–1668
  • Max Deardorff
  • Published online:
    27 July 2023
    Print publication:
    10 August 2023
  • In 1570's New Kingdom of Granada (modern Colombia), a new generation of mestizo (half-Spanish, half-indigenous) men sought positions of increasing power in the colony's two largest cities. In response, Spanish nativist factions zealously attacked them as unequal and unqualified, unleashing an intense political battle that lasted almost two decades. At stake was whether membership in the small colonial community and thus access to its most lucrative professions should depend on limpieza de sangre (blood purity) or values-based integration (Christian citizenship). A Tale of Two Granadas examines the vast, trans-Atlantic transformation of political ideas about subjecthood that ultimately allowed some colonial mestizos and indios ladinos (acculturated natives) to establish urban citizenship alongside Spaniards in colonial Santafé de Bogotá and Tunja. In a spirit of comparison, it illustrates how some of the descendants of Spain's last Muslims appealed to the same new conceptions of citizenship to avoid disenfranchisement in the face of growing prejudice.

We, the King
  • Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish New World
  • Adrian Masters
  • Published online:
    02 March 2023
    Print publication:
    09 March 2023
  • We, the King challenges the dominant top-down interpretation of the Spanish Empire and its monarchs' decrees in the New World, revealing how ordinary subjects had much more say in government and law-making than previously acknowledged. During the viceregal period spanning the post-1492 conquest until 1598, the King signed more than 110,000 pages of decrees concerning state policies, minutiae, and everything in between. Through careful analysis of these decrees, Adrian Masters illustrates how law-making was aided and abetted by subjects from various backgrounds, including powerful court women, indigenous commoners, Afro-descendant raftsmen, secret saboteurs, pirates, sovereign Chiriguano Indians, and secretaries' wives. Subjects' innumerable petitions and labor prompted – and even phrased - a complex body of legislation and legal categories demonstrating the degree to which this empire was created from the “bottom up”. Innovative and unique, We, the King reimagines our understandings of kingship, imperial rule, colonialism, and the origins of racial categories.

Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century
  • Joseph M. H. Clark
  • Published online:
    19 January 2023
    Print publication:
    19 January 2023
  • In the seventeenth century, Veracruz was the busiest port in the wealthiest colony in the Americas. People and goods from five continents converged in the city, inserting it firmly into the early modern world's largest global networks. Nevertheless, Veracruz never attained the fame or status of other Atlantic ports. Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century is the first English-language, book-length study of early modern Veracruz. Weaving elements of environmental, social, and cultural history, it examines both Veracruz's internal dynamics and its external relationships. Chief among Veracruz's relationships were its close ties within the Caribbean. Emphasizing relationships of small-scale trade and migration between Veracruz and Caribbean cities like Havana, Santo Domingo, and Cartagena, Veracruz and the Caribbean shows how the city's residents – especially its large African and Afro-descended communities – were able to form communities and define identities separate from those available in the Mexican mainland.

A History of Chile 1808–2018
  • 3rd edition
  • William F. Sater, Simon Collier
  • Published online:
    20 October 2022
    Print publication:
    27 October 2022
  • As Chile has continued to grow and prosper in the twenty-first century, this new edition of the definitive history of the country brings the story of its political, social and cultural development up to date. It describes how Ricardo Lagos and Michelle Bachelet, both highly educated Socialists, modernized the country and integrated new interests into Chilean political life, and how the billionaire, Harvard-trained economist Sebastian Piñera, who succeeded Bachelet, addressed the problems caused by the 2010 tsunami. In the last twenty years Chile diversified its economy, replaced a number of Pinochet's organizations with more inclusive institutions, cultivated Chilean culture, modernized its constitution, and fomented reconciliation of the various political factions – until economic crisis in early 2018 caused political chaos and occasionally violent public protest. Based on new statistics to measure Chile's economic and social development, this volume celebrates Chile's achievements and dissects its failures.

The Dread Plague and the Cow Killers
  • The Politics of Animal Disease in Mexico and the World
  • Thomas Rath
  • Published online:
    05 August 2022
    Print publication:
    25 August 2022
  • Between 1947 and 1954, the Mexican and US governments waged a massive campaign against a devastating livestock plague, aftosa or foot-and-mouth disease. Absorbing over half of US economic aid to Latin America and involving thousands of veterinarians and ranchers from both countries, battalions of Mexican troops, and scientists from Europe and the Americas, the campaign against aftosa was unprecedented in size. Despite daunting obstacles and entrenched opposition, it successfully eradicated the virus in Mexico, and reshaped policies, institutions, and knowledge around the world. Using untapped sources from local, national, and international archives, Thomas Rath provides a comprehensive history of this campaign, the forces that shaped it – from presidents to peasants, scientists to journalists, pistoleros to priests, mountains to mules – and the complicated legacy it left. More broadly, it uses the campaign to explore the formation of the Mexican state, changing ideas of development and security, and the history of human–animal relations.

Islands in the Lake
  • Environment and Ethnohistory in Xochimilco, New Spain
  • Richard M. Conway
  • Published online:
    01 October 2021
    Print publication:
    14 October 2021
  • Now notorious for its aridity and air pollution, Mexico City was once part of a flourishing lake environment. In nearby Xochimilco, Native Americans modified the lakes to fashion a distinctive and remarkably abundant aquatic society, one that provided a degree of ecological autonomy for local residents, enabling them to protect their communities' integrity, maintain their way of life, and preserve many aspects of their cultural heritage. While the area's ecology allowed for a wide array of socioeconomic and cultural continuities during colonial rule, demographic change came to affect the ecological basis of the lakes; pastoralism and new ways of using and modifying the lakes began to make a mark on the watery landscape and on the surrounding communities. In this fascinating study, Conway explores Xochimilco using native-language documents, which serve as a hallmark of this continuity and a means to trace patterns of change.

Journey to Indo-América
  • APRA and the Transnational Politics of Exile, Persecution, and Solidarity, 1918–1945
  • Geneviève Dorais
  • Published online:
    30 July 2021
    Print publication:
    12 August 2021
  • The American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) was a Peruvian political party that played an important role in the development of the Latin American left during the first half of the 1900s. In Journey to Indo-América, GenevieÌve Dorais examines how and why the anti-imperialist project of APRA took root outside of Peru as well as how APRA's struggle for political survival in Peru shaped its transnational consciousness. Dorais convincingly argues that APRA's history can only be understood properly within this transnational framework, and through the collective efforts of transnational organization rather than through an exclusive emphasis on political figures like APRA leader, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. Tracing circuits of exile and solidarity through Latin America, the United States, and Europe, Dorais seeks to deepen our appreciation of APRA's ideological production through an exploration of the political context in which its project of hemispheric unity emerged. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Nationalizing Nature
  • Iguazu Falls and National Parks at the Brazil-Argentina Border
  • Frederico Freitas
  • Published online:
    08 March 2021
    Print publication:
    04 March 2021
  • Today, one-quarter of all the land in Latin America is set apart for nature protection. In Nationalizing Nature, Frederico Freitas uncovers the crucial role played by conservation in the region's territorial development by exploring how Brazil and Argentina used national parks to nationalize borderlands. In the 1930s, Brazil and Argentina created some of their first national parks around the massive Iguazu Falls, shared by the two countries. The parks were designed as tools to attract migrants from their densely populated Atlantic seaboards to a sparsely inhabited borderland. In the 1970s, a change in paradigm led the military regimes in Brazil and Argentina to violently evict settlers from their national parks, highlighting the complicated relationship between authoritarianism and conservation in the Southern Cone. By tracking almost one hundred years of national park history in Latin America's largest countries, Nationalizing Nature shows how conservation policy promoted national programs of frontier development and border control.

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