The three editors of this work have created an essential textbook for students and teachers of the history of Latin America. The book is arranged chronologically in 26 chapters, each containing an introductory timeline, an exemplary primary source, and up-to-date suggestions for further reading. It includes an epilogue, glossary, and engaging maps and images to help students. As the preface explains, this textbook has three key themes: Iberian institutions, identity, and the global context. Significantly, it focuses on the exploitations that developed in Latin America from the start of the colonial period, and the ways in which they created the structural inequalities that are still part of the story of Latin America today.

The book brings into focus the prevalent issues of inequalities, not only economic, but also social, racial, political, cultural, and environmental. It considers the construction and intersection of the axes of inequality: race, gender, and class. Alongside explanations of the economic and political causes of inequality, it addresses cultural and social history to represent how these inequalities were experienced in people's daily lives. It is informed by contemporary scholarship on inequality, exploring the ways inequalities are constructed, experienced, and spatialized in rural and urban environments. Significantly, the textbook represents the histories of people who have often been marginalized: Amerindians, Africans, and poor Europeans.

By focusing on exploitation and inequality in the history of Latin America, the book could be accused of contributing to the controversial “Black Legend” of the Spanish empire. Instead, it offers a longue durée approach and situates Latin America within a global context. The editors begin with the pre-Columbian Americas, observing that there was slavery in the Americas before conquest, and end with a reflection on how the forces of neoliberalism and globalization are maintaining inequality in the Americas today. This approach equips students for thinking about the relationships between the history of Latin America and global history, and in doing so brings inequalities into sharper focus. For example, many global histories have examined the commodity chains of Latin American products such as tobacco and coca. Here we are reminded that these were stimulants used by workers so that they continued working for low wages in poor conditions (146). Yet, this book is not a history of victims; it also highlights strategies of resistance. It considers how subjugated peoples drew upon linguistic and cultural resources, including religion, to acquire and redistribute resources. For example, it highlights the diverse benefits offered by confraternity membership in the Americas.

The book does not create a genealogy of inequality in Latin America from conquest to the present day, and at times the editors could have done more to draw diachronic connections and signpost the long-term causes of inequality. That said, this is first and foremost a textbook for students, rather than a research monograph. Given the scale and aims of this textbook, depth of analysis is sometimes sacrificed for breadth of approach, but the editors should be commended for coordinating extensive resources around such important key themes as exploitation, inequality, and resistance. The book is not only a concise introduction to the history of Latin America but also raises important questions that, one hopes, will inspire students' interests in these topics and the historical causes of today's global inequalities.