The New Kingdom of Granada

“Santiago Muñoz-Arbeláez takes the unusual step of using objects such as paper documents, textiles, maps and paintings as well as people or groups of people as focal points for telling a richly contextualized story of the building of the New Kingdom of Granada. Impressively intertwining the multiplicity of ways to narrate and analyze the construction of the Spanish empire in the early modern period, Muñoz-Arbeláez makes a superb contribution to our understanding of colonial Latin America.” - Joanne Rappaport, author of The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada

“The New Kingdom of Granada introduces readers to colonial Colombia in an entirely new register. Ranging from highlands to lowlands and across social strata, Santiago Muñoz-Arbeláez defines the stakes of this particular Spanish colonial endeavor—and the fight against it—from many points of view. It is a story of lurching incursions, the veneer of conquest, and institutions stranded in the seeming ‘middle of nowhere,’ linked to the metropolis by nothing but a stream of letters. It is also a story of Indigenous resistance, adaptation, and resilience. The ‘colony’ that emerges at the end of this book bears little resemblance to what came before, and yet continuities creep back in. This is a subtle history of an impossibly broken land.” - Kris Lane, author of Potosi: The Silver City That Changed the World

"The New Kingdom of Granada is an original and revelatory piece of scholarship." - Yanna Yannakakis, The Americas

"Muñoz Arbeláez offers a luminous, imaginative, and bold rewriting of early Colombian history. This will be required reading for Colombianistas, Latin Americanists, and, more generally, any scholar interested in Indigenous history and the long history of anticolonialism in the Americas." - Pablo F. Gómez, Hispanic American Historical Review