The Penguin History Of Latin America

Traces 500 years of history from the time of Columbus and the Spanish Conquest to the present day. Shows how the turbulent modernization which started in the eighteenth century continued into the twentieth century.

A single-volume history of Latin America. Professor Williamson starts with the pre-Columbian Indian peoples and the slow, often savage process of colonization by which Spaniards and Portuguese came to control territory many times the size of Spain. Indeed, it was not until the age of the Enlightenment, dynastic shifts, imperial reforms and Napoleonic conquests in Europe that the scene was set for independent republics. Our own century has witnessed both the long decline of Argentina and the dynamic corporatism of Mexico, lurches between dictatorship and democracy in Brazil and Chile, and utterly distinct developments in Cuba. All this is summarized and surveyed in this book.