The second edition of this book, initially published in 2012, covers 216 years of Colombian history, from around 1800 to the present. The major change in that time span, and the reason that LaRosa and Mejía decided to update the book, was the signing of the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-Popular Army), in August 2016, after four years of negotiations in Havana. In the following weeks, a referendum to endorse the agreement previously reached between the two parties was lost, and the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to former president Juan Manuel Santos. A revised deal sanctioned by both houses of Congress in November 2016 ensued.

With about 500 social leaders assassinated between the signing of the agreement and April 2019, La Rosa and Mejía's conviction that Colombia, notwithstanding its social and economic inequality as a nation, “has in fact turned a corner” (1) remains uncertain. Although the consolidation of peace continues to require work and commitment by both Colombia and the international community, the main contribution of this book rests in its effort to overcome the limited scope of much of the bibliography written on Colombia in past years—a bibliography narrowly focused on an oversimplified view of the country as a violent place, a byword for terrorism, drug-trafficking, and kidnapping. Thus, this book departs from a longstanding narrative underpinning scholarly work, headlines of global media, and products of the entertainment industry, which has shaped an overall perception of Colombia “as a country on the brink of failure” (4).

This book also avoids explicit comparisons between Colombia's path of development and the North Atlantic model of development, as if the latter were the paradigm everybody else ought to follow. Accordingly, if LaRosa and Mejía draw on the comprehensive works of historians such as David Bushnell, Marco Palacios, and Frank Safford, among others, they also distance themselves from those scholars’ treatment of Colombian history through the prism of a North Atlantic model, whereby interpretations of this South American country as a “nation in spite of itself,” “fragmented,” and “divided” are a clear consequence. In the authors’ view: “While we have no intention of whitewashing Colombia's contentious contemporary history, we stress those enduring institutions, cultural mechanisms, and economic patterns that have sustained the nation over the decades.” “Rather than focus[ing] on [a] catastrophic vision of Colombian history … we have written about a Colombia that endures.” Despite all the problems, they ask, “How is it that the nation stays together? What are the factors that have helped unify Colombia throughout the decades?” (4–5).

Organized thematically rather than chronologically, through its 12 well-thought-out and wide-ranging chapters, this book provides a multidimensional view of the country in a succinct manner, covering topics ranging from politics and the economy and high and popular culture to the Colombian diaspora and perceptions of Colombians abroad. It explores not only the complexity of the Colombian armed conflict, but also the enduring and creative search for peace that has driven Colombians for many decades. Particularly appealing in the book is its photo essay, providing through pictures—many taken by the authors themselves—a survey of the country's history and geography and people's daily lives.

This book is a welcome contribution to the scholarship on Colombia, due not only to its refreshing outlook but also to the fact that it fills a significant void, namely, the absence of a succinct contemporary history of Colombia in English. Bushnell's book The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself (1993) was the first exhaustive approach to Colombian history written in English by a US historian; LaRosa and Mejía's book provides the first succinct history of contemporary Colombia, in English.

One of the main theses of the book is that “what emerges out of the depths of Colombia's republican history is a state that constructed the ‘nation’” (65) and not the other way around, that is, it is a history of a unifying culture that would give rise to the state. It could, therefore, be argued that despite its many merits, by stressing the significance of homogeneity as a pre-condition for the emergence of the modern nation, this book tends to overlook the simultaneous need for and denial of heterogeneity as a constitutive paradox of nation-making (Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1997). It interprets nation-building as a process of homogenization, which, in the case of Colombia, more or less neglected to recognize difference until the advent of the 1991 Constitution, when Colombia was no longer understood as Hispanic, as had been the case in the 1886 Constitution, but rather as a multiplural nation.

Undoubtedly, as the authors correctly state, the situation in terms of political and civil rights has evolved from the democracy established in the first decades of the nineteenth century. However, perhaps due to the very goal of the book, that is, the presentation of a succinct version of the history of Colombia, it oversimplifies the complexity of nineteenth-century Colombia. It does so by overlooking significant differences in both the conception of the nation and the composition of the public sphere between the middle and the closing stages of the nineteenth century, in other words, between the Chorographic Commission and the liberal reforms on one hand, and the Regeneration and the 1886 Constitution on the other.