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 of conquest provides a metaphor for their conceptualisation of the creation of Latin American civilisation as a whole. They begin and end their study with the age-old question: how were so few Iberians able to ‘conquer the great and powerful empires of the Aztecs and the Incas’ (p. xiv)? Their answer: Iberians did not do so alone. Native American political realities, indigenous allies and auxiliaries, and small numbers of black conquistadores (as well as pathogens) played fundamental roles in those conquests. Similarly, then, Restall and Lane would argue that Native Americans and Africans were fundamentally important to the histories of how ‘small numbers of Spanish and Portuguese settlers were able to build, maintain, and defend such vast colonies across three hundred years’ (p. xiv). This is more than a history of how the Spanish built and maintained their colonies with the blood, sweat and tears of the subjugated indigenous and African-descended populations. The authors seek to explore and explain how those groups lived within, experienced and ultimately shaped colonial realities. The text, then, discusses the various economic, social and cultural (especially religious) manifestations of these processes of contact and exchange.

The book is divided into four sections: ‘Before the Encounter’ explores Native American, Iberian and west African civilisations and societies before their collision in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; ‘The Long Conquest’ treats the imperial dawn of Iberia (specifically Castile and Portugal), Mexica and Inca imperial expansion in the fifteenth century, and the conquest of the Americas; ‘The Colonial Middle’ focuses on the labour, religious and cultural experiences of Native Americans, Africans, Iberians and their descendants across the long seventeenth century; and ‘The Age of Change’ quickly treats European imperial competition and war in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, the Pombaline and Bourbon reforms, late colonial rebellions, and the independence of Latin America. The authors’ focus on pre-Atlantic slave trade Africa and the chapter on ‘Black Communities’ are particularly laudable, but can tend towards traditional discussions of the slave trade, slavery as an institution, and slave resistance. The experiences of individual enslaved and free people of African descent could be included here to provide a depth and richness equal to that given to Native Americans throughout the text.

Each chapter opens with a brief timeline and an epigraph from a primary source to introduce the topic at hand. One strength of the book is the inclusion of numerous visual sources from the colonial period in a series of ‘In Focus’ discussions where the authors provide more depth on select subjects. One of the best of these presents the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, a pictorial representation of the participation of Nahua-speaking Mesoamericans in the conquest of the Maya in modern Guatemala, as an example of native participation in Spanish conquests. The inclusion of some of these images in colour and additional textual primary sources would be welcome additions.

Despite its strengths, particularly in terms of a ‘bottom-up’ survey of Latin American history, there are areas that could be expanded. For example, the authors dedicate just over a single page to race or casta in the colonial period, despite their continued focus on Native Americans, Africans and their descendants throughout the text. While the authors correctly argue that ‘modern concepts of race did not exist’ in colonial Latin America (p. 204), recent scholarship indicates that socio-racial categories did have some, though not totalisingly restrictive, salience in colonials’ lives. This is but one example of where the authors might give a nod to ongoing scholarly debate rather than presenting their perspective as representative of broader consensus. Similarly, while the stories of individual women like Micaela Bastides, a famous Andean rebel and the wife of Tupac Amaru II, and Catalina de Erauso, a Basque woman who participated in the conquest of Chile cross-dressed as a man and who eventually received Papal dispensation to live out her life in New Spain as a man, abound in the text, there is no specific discussion of women and gender (nor does either term appear in the index). Race and gender can often represent significant components of survey courses on colonial Latin America and thus deserve more attention in this book. The history of colonial Brazil, both in terms of its particularities and how it fits within broader patterns of Iberian colonialism in the Americas, could be more fully integrated as well.

Latin America in Colonial Times can be used to good advantage in survey-level courses, particularly those interested in exploring colonial Latin America as a ‘new civilization’ resulting from the clash and eventual intermingling of Native American, Iberian and west African peoples and cultures. This is a student-friendly book, one that can easily be supplemented with articles, monographs and primary source readings.