The preface of The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History draws attention to the ‘unprecedented boom’ in Latin American historiography since the 1980s, which shows itself in both the growing number of historical studies and the widening of themes into different specialised sub-fields. This increase in historical research can be attributed to the rapidly growing number of professional historians both in Latin America itself and in the United States and Europe. Within the profession it has led to new specialisations and, in this process, to an increasing attention to theoretical reflection and methodological innovation.

The process in which Latin American history writing has expanded and diversified, and at the same time has become more reflexive and theoretical, has been the principal inspiration for the publication of this volume. It aims to map and discuss these new tendencies in the historiography of Latin America, but at the same time to show the historiographical continuities and the value of older approaches. The preface of the book somewhat ironically points to today's ‘explosion of self-proclaimed newness’, but at the same time it acknowledges that these new labels are a clear sign of the intellectual effervescence and the significant transformations in the discipline.

The volume starts with a useful essay by José Moya on the arguments in favour of studying Latin America as a more or less homogeneous area. His conclusion that Latin America should be studied as a part of the West is a little more controversial. He wants to demonstrate that simple contrasts between Latin American and Western history are unwarranted, but, in doing so, he tends to underrate some distinctive elements in the history of Latin America, both in the development of its multiraciality (his own term) and its developmental problems. His views are certainly not backed up in most of the essays in the book, for instance in the essay by John Coatsworth, which explicitly starts out from the specific socio-economic developmental problems of Latin America.

Apart from this introduction, the Handbook consists of 16 chapters. The first four chapters concern the historiography of colonial Latin America, including one on Brazil. The fifth contribution focuses on the Independence era. The remaining 11 chapters, two of which are specifically on Brazil, look at the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and are organised thematically. However, only a few chapters explicitly focus on one of the new historical sub-disciplines mentioned in the preface. This focus is clearest in the penultimate chapter on disease, medicine and health, but also in the two chapters on gender and sexuality. Others, such as those on labour history and popular religion, have roots that go much further back in time.

It is impossible to do justice to all the contributions and the wealth of ideas and debates they present. Considering that this must have been a long-prepared and tightly organised project, it is striking how different the contributions are. Some, such as the first chapter on New Spain, are hardly more than bibliographic essays presenting, if not inventorying, the existing literature. Another example is the chapter on slavery in Brazil, which has 15 pages of text and the same number of pages of references! Others are interpretative essays in which the bibliographic completeness is less important than the interpretation chosen by the author. Jeremy Adelman's piece on Independence, for example, is a wonderful essay, but with a specific interpretative basis that leaves out most of the literature on what is generally called ‘popular nationalism’ today. That gap is filled by Florencia Mallon's very interesting chapter on the relationships between the indigenous populations and the emerging nation-state, which, in its final paragraph, tries to explain today's ‘revitalization’ of indigenous movements. This is also more like a ‘normal’ academic article which even presents some primary source material. There are a few somewhat disappointing pieces which are too short and not very illuminating or original. And sometimes there is some unnecessary repetition, such as in the two articles on the African-American presence in Latin America.

The contribution I liked most was the piece on the ‘New Economic History’ by John Coatsworth and William Summerhill. This may be influenced by my relative ignorance of this topic, and the fact that this is the only piece on economic developments amidst a multitude of cultural themes. Nevertheless, it is a well-balanced, very clearly designed essay that succeeds in complementing the need for a general overview with a clear conceptual perspective, combining broad categories with more anecdotal case studies. The overview of the existing literature and debates leads to a final section which points at possible new directions of research. The drawback of this very specific approach is a quite eclectic reference section.

All the contributions are written by well-known scholars. They all succeed in giving a good overview of the historiography for specific themes, although they do so in different ways. All but one of the authors teach at US universities, and there are no Europeans among them. Although there is no doubt that the field of Latin American studies is dominated by US academia, it may be asked whether the Handbook would not have benefited from a more balanced range of authors such as there was, for instance, in the multi-volume Cambridge History of Latin America published in the 1980s and 1990s. This is a complex issue, in a world where academic discussions and networks have become utterly global. Nevertheless, without taking anything away from the quality of the essays, there is a distinct US flavour to most of the essays and the volume in general. Most lean heavily on US authors and publications, and they are implicitly presented as leading in the field. More specific Latin American or European debates are missing. This is very clear for the French historiography, which hardly produces any English-language publications, but it is also true for European historiography in general, which emerges only sporadically in the references of the Handbook. More specific Latin American debates are also absent, such as the debates about regional differences within countries and the historical background and consequences of the military regimes of the second half of the twentieth century. The historical development of the smaller Central American and Caribbean nations is also largely absent. In general, there is very little explicit attention to the political history of modern Latin America. There is no word, for example, on the origins and significance of the Bolivian and Cuban revolutions.

The ambitious, almost grandiose, title of this volume, The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History, cannot help but raise high expectations, which I am not sure are completely fulfilled. There is no doubt that most of the essays in and of themselves are well-written, useful and erudite. In that sense, the book will certainly find its way into specialised Latin American libraries, and possibly also into less specialised libraries in history departments. It is not clear to me, however, what kind of readership the book is aiming for. For specialists, the particular essays on their specific topic will not provide much new information. For most students, the essays may be too short and too dense to be useful as a general introduction. Perhaps the essays are most useful for university teachers who need a quick and recent overview for a specific topic in Latin American history.

In this respect the most disappointing element of the Handbook is the fact that the bibliographies of many articles were already quite outdated at the moment of the book's appearance. History as a discipline is less prone to write off older studies, but it is surprising that quite a number of contributions have only a few references to publications after 2000. Sometimes that can be explained by the fact that the topic has largely gone out of fashion, which may be the case in the chapter on rural history. In most cases, however, it appears to have been the result of the arduous and drawn-out labour that the organisation of such a book entails. Many of the essays published here appear to have been lying on the editor's desk for quite some time. This is almost unavoidable in projects like this, which usually move at the pace of the slowest contributor, but it must certainly be considered a drawback for this very welcome and useful initiative.

One wonders whether, in today's electronically dominated world, such a project should still be organised in a book publication. What about designing it as an internet venture in which interested readers could download the chapters in which they are interested, and authors could easily update their text and bibliographies? Perhaps Oxford University Press could think of such a project in a year or two, in which the updated versions of these chapters would be available on the internet. That would be really wonderful and certainly in accordance with the innovation and dynamism of today's Latin American historiography.