A major reassessment of Philip V's leadership and what it meant for the modern Spanish state Often dismissed as ineffective, indolent, and dominated by his second wife, Philip V of Spain (1700–1746), the first Bourbon king, was in fact the greatest threat to peace in Europe during his reign. Under his rule, Spain was a dynamic force and expansionist power, especially in the Mediterranean world. Campaigns in Italy and North Africa revitalized Spanish control in the Mediterranean region, and the arrival of the Bourbon dynasty signaled a sharp break from Habsburg attitudes and practices. Challenging long-held understandings of early eighteenth-century Europe and the Atlantic world, Christopher Storrs draws on a rich array of primary documents to trace the political, military, and financial innovations that laid the framework for the modern Spanish state and the coalescence of a national identity. Storrs illuminates the remarkable revival of Spanish power after 1713 and sheds new light on the often underrated king who made Spain’s resurgence possible.

Angel Rama (1926-1983) is a major figure in Latin American literary and cultural studies, but little has been published on his critical work. In this study, Jose Eduardo Gonzalez focuses on Rama's response to and appropriation of European critics like Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Georg Lukacs. Gonzalez argues that Rama realized the inapplicability of many of their theories and descriptions of cultural modernization to Latin America, and thus reworked them to produce his own discourse that challenged prevailing notions of social and cultural modernization.