John F. López's excellent anthology on Mexico City's history is the third volume in Brill's Companions to the Americas series. It offers a broad selection of “state of the field” essays on a wide range of topics (p. 5). As editor, López has achieved a great deal of thematic unity across the volume, which emphasizes both the kaleidoscopic complexity of Mexico City's cultural heritage and the global dimensions of historical changes during the viceregal era, which turned the city into a cosmopolitan center.

The book consists of an introduction and 19 chapters written by scholars based in Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Their contributions span the entirety of the colonial or viceregal period (the editor uses the terms interchangeably). The chronological coverage is well distributed, with a slight emphasis on the eighteenth century. The sustained attention to the oft-neglected seventeenth century is to be welcomed, and one outstanding chapter,...

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