The Cambridge History of Latin America is the first authoritative large-scale history of the whole of Latin America - Mexico and Central America, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean (and Haiti), Spanish South America and Brazil - from the first contacts between the native peoples of the Americas and Europeans in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to the present day. A major work of collaborative international schoarship, the Cambridge History of Latin America has been planned, co-ordinated and edited by a single editor, Dr Leslie Bethell, reader in Hispanic American and Brazilian History at University College London. It will be published in eight volumes. Each volume or set of volumes examines a period in the economic, social, political, intellectual and cultural history of Latin America.