"Reckoning with Race in New Worlds" by Ruth Hill! 2026

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A landmark treatment of a pivotal historical question, 'Reckoning with Race in New Worlds' reveals how the empires of Spain and Portugal debated and came to determine who was white and who was not during their colonial era. How did free people with partial Native American, Asian, or African lineage either become or cease to be blancos or brancos—white people? Ruth Hill explains how, in unexpected ways, science and religion joined forces in the early modern era to shape the concepts of purity, mixture, and degeneration that would decide these questions. Fixing the thresholds of whiteness—degrees of blood, generations spent in a foreign environment—instigated centuries-long controversies with enormous consequences. By putting into dialogue archival sources as well as extensive engagement with secondary literature, paintings, and maps, 'Reckoning with Race in New Worlds' crafts a history of human diversity in the colonial era, with profound implications for our understandings of the natural and social sciences and of our racial present. "From Spanish and Portuguese America to the British Caribbean, from Benito Jerónimo Feijóo to Benjamin Rush, 'Reckoning with Race in New Worlds' is an essential and comprehensive account of how eighteenth-century racial concepts came to be created across a stunning array of geographies, doctrines, and disciplines." —Neil Safier, Brown University "Its historical reach and multilingual archival breadth are encyclopedic; its scholarly erudition and cross-disciplinary exigence are nothing short of breathtaking." —Ralph Bauer, University of Maryland https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/10164/ #colonialism #race #whiteness #blackness #history #EarlyAmerica #books #ReadUP