New World, First Nations

"This multi-faceted volume on indigenous experience in the Americas ... not only covers both Mesoamerica and the Andes as the subtitle indicates, but also stretches from the time before contact with Spain to the political break with that nation that occurred in the early nineteenth century. ... As all conference-based volumes must, the book struggles against the twin threats of dissonance and incoherence, but it does so successfully in large measure and ends by making a valuable contribution to the literature." --The Americas
"Besides a short introductory essay by David Cahill and Blanca Tov?as, the book contains ten articles that reassess in a variety of ways the social and ethnic changes that occurred in the Andes and Mesoamerica with the Spanish Conquest, the imposition of the colonial order, and the coming of independence. Thus, the unifying message of these essays is the need for flexibility in considering the historical complexities of indigenous peoples under Spanish colonialism and the dangers of overgeneralization. Selective reading of the articles will reward most Andeanists and Mexicanists." --Choice
"This edited volume, created out of a 2002 conference at the University of New South Wales in Australia, compares conquest and colonialism in the Andes and Mesoamerica. The editors have grouped the essays - five for each area - in roughly chronological order, covering military conquests and an initial sizing up between indigenous peoples and Europeans in the sixteenth century; the solidifying of a colonial system in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; and the transition to nationhood in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. ... The predominance of historiographical essays and summations of already-published work makes New World, First Nations most useful, perhaps, to those wanting to assess the state of a field outside their own - the point of this comparative exercise." --Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History