Could European bodies thrive in the Indies? Would Indians turn into Spaniards if they ate Spanish food? This fascinating history of food, colonisation and race shows that attitudes about food were fundamental to European colonialism and understandings of physical difference in the Age of Discovery.

The decades since the 1980s have witnessed an unprecedented surge in research about Latin American history. This much-needed volume brings together original essays by renowned scholars to provide the first comprehensive assessment of this burgeoning literature. The seventeen original essays in The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History survey the recent historiography of the colonial era, independence movements, and postcolonial periods and span Mexico, Spanish South America, and Brazil. They begin by questioning the limitations and meaning of Latin America as a conceptual organization of space within the Americas and how the region became excluded from broader studies of the Western hemisphere. Subsequent essays address indigenous peoples of the region, rural and urban history, slavery and race, African, European and Asian immigration, labor, gender and sexuality, religion, family and childhood, economics, politics, and disease and medicine. In so doing, they bring together traditional approaches to politics and power, while examining the quotidian concerns of workers, women and children, peasants, and racial and ethnic minorities. This volume provides the most complete state of the field and is an indispensible resource for scholars and students of Latin America.

In Science in the Vanished Miguel de Asúa provides the first modern comprehensive account of Jesuit science in the missions of Paraguay and the River Plate region during the 17th and 18th centuries. Focusing on individual Jesuits and underlining the relationships of their work to the religious goals of the Society of Jesus, the book covers the disciplines of natural history, cartography, medical botany, astronomy and the topics pursued by the former missionaries in their Italian exile. Based on many so far unexplored manuscripts and a vast corpus of primary sources, the book argues the existence of a tradition of research on nature consistent with universal Jesuit science and at the same time original in its articulation of Western learning and aboriginal lore on nature.

The Complexity of Religious Life in the Hispanic World (16th-18th centuries) offers a vision that demonstrates the diversity of Hispanic religious and cultural life in the Early Modern Age.