The Cambridge History of Latin America, Volume 1: Colonial Latin America

Volume 1 in The Cambridge History of Latin America looks at the history of colonial Latin America.

Spain's conquest of America created the possibility of the first genuinely world-wide empire in human history. The New Laws of 1542 institutionalized the new vice regal system of government: the kingdoms of Peru and New Spain are to be ruled and governed by viceroys who represent the royal person.

The Cambridge History of Latin America is the first authoritative large-scale history of the whole for Latin America - Mexico and Central America, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean (and Haiti), Spanish South America and Brazil - from the first contacts between the native peoples of the Americas and Europeans in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to the present day.

A major work of collaborative international scholarship, the Cambridge History of Latin America has been planned, co-ordinated and edited by a single editor, Dr. Leslie Bethell, reader in Hispanic American and Brazilian History at University College London. It will be published in TEN +1  volumes. 

Each volume or set of volumes examines a period in the economic, social, political, intellectual and cultural history of Latin America.

An important feature of The Cambridge History of Latin America is the bibliographical essays which accompany each chapter. The essays from Volumes I–X, revised and updated, are brought together in Volume XI: Bibliography.