This volume promotes Amazonian history as a legitimate and recognized academic discipline. Works in anthropology, ethnohistory, and environmental studies have shaped the field of Amazonian studies, leaving historians with ample room to contextualize earlier works while calling for more interdisciplinary research. Four of the five articles in this volume were presented in 1994 at a conference in Sweden, and most of the authors are affiliated with Spanish universities. The project coordinator, Pilar García Jordán, focused this volume on the period between 1820 and 1960, a period that exhibits both strong continuities and important changes as the transition from colony to republics incorporated the peoples and lands of the eastern Andean slopes and the Amazonian basin into Peru and Ecuador.
García Jordán contributed the first article in this collection, “Las misiones católicas en la Amazonía peruana.” Here the legacies from the colonial period are strong in language, culture, and approach. Franciscan...
