Indians and the Political Economy of Colonial Central America, 1670–1810 . By Robert W. Patch. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. Pp. xi, 284. Maps. Tables. Bibliography. Index. $36.95 cloth.
For reasons not clearly articulated, the book ignores the participation of Africans. While information on Africans during the Central American conquest campaigns remains poorly studied, possibly offering an excuse for excluding them from those events, their essential roles as intermediaries between Spaniards and natives, and later as fundamentally important labor in concerns such as sugar plantations, argues for a serious treatment of Africans in colonial society. While Lovell and Lutz focus primarily on indigenous and Spanish interaction, those historical processes cannot be fully understood without including Africans in the discussion. Also, the book largely eschews theoretical prisms that would have strengthened arguments for the rise of a core and peripheries and indigenous agency. In a way the book offers a corrective to excessively theoretical works that employ psychoanalytic theories as universals for human behavior regardless of place and time, yet it ignores the writings of scholars such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Anibal Quijano and thereby limits its potentially wider appeal. However, these issues do not detract from the book’s thoroughly documented conclusions or its overall superlative quality.