The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492-1700

This fascinating history explores the dynamic relationship between overseas colonisation and the bodily experience of eating. It reveals the importance of food to the colonial project in Spanish America and reconceptualises the role of European colonial expansion in shaping the emergence of ideas of race during the Age of Discovery. Rebecca Earle shows that anxieties about food were fundamental to Spanish understandings of the new environment they inhabited and their interactions with the native populations of the New World. Settlers wondered whether Europeans could eat New World food, whether Indians could eat European food and what would happen to each if they did. By taking seriously their ideas about food we gain a richer understanding of how settlers understood the physical experience of colonialism and of how they thought about one of the central features of the colonial project. The result is simultaneously a history of food, colonialism and race.

Author: Rebecca Earle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 02/20/2014
Pages: 278
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.83lbs
Size: 9.02h x 5.98w x 0.58d
ISBN13: 9781107693296
ISBN10: 1107693292
BISAC Categories:
- History | Latin America | South America
- History | Europe | Renaissance

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