A great challenge of postcolonialism has always been the question, “After colonialism, what then?” How does one begin to approach such a vast and fragmented subject? The essays in Interpreting Spanish Colonialism investigate the wide-ranging perceptions of Spanish colonialism that existed in the colonies and externally in Spain and the United States. The editors face the difficult problem of tying together a volume with immense geographical and topical scope: the chapters range from the period immediately prior to the independence of the Philippines and the Antilles, through the independence battles of Colombia and Argentina, to twentieth-century Spanish linguistic diplomacy and historiography and North American borderlands epics. Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips take a thematic approach in order to guide the reader through potentially bewildering geographical, topical, and temporal leaps, dividing the book into two parts: “Modernity among the Ruins” and “Colonial Pasts and National Presents.” They reject a temporal division into colonial and postcolonial, because “continuities and connections across epochs are immediately evident” (p. 21). In essence, the work is more a history of historiography than a history of Spanish colonialism, emphasizing the Interpreting rather than the Spanish Colonialism of the title.This structure does harbor a weakness. The final essays indicate that the editors compiled the book primarily with a U.S. readership in mind — unfortunate, considering Samuel Truett’s investigation of Bolton’s transnational histories. Truett also mentions a reviewer with “wider horizons” who asserted that “it was fit and proper for historians to tell new tales” and expand out from a U.S.-centered national history (p. 224). The editors’ focus is not surprising, given that an anthology of essays dedicated to the genre of post-colonial studies in Hispanic America must necessarily consider the concomitant growth of U.S. “colonial” interests in the region. Part of the problem, however, is that the book’s numerous and laudable achievements — broad-reaching investigations of the Black and White legends; the links between historiography and nation building; and perceptions of colonialism, both Spanish and others — are summarized in the afterword within a U.S.-centered, microcontext of Latino immigrants and communities in the United States. Despite its interesting insights, this approach fails to do justice to the greater international relevance of the collection. The majority of the studies do have “transnational” potential, but the choice to locate the final U.S.-oriented chapters together with the afterword overshadows this.A quick recap through the chapters should remind the reader that this weighting is not an altogether fair impression. On the one hand, it is clear that the work is well placed within contemporary debates of North American postcolonial studies. On the other, for those of us based outside U.S. frontiers, there is still plenty of additional material of interest to be found in the collection. The essays are so diverse that there are bound to be questions that will engage an interested reader. For example, Dale Tomich’s exploration of the economic and political writings of the Cuban Francisco Arango y Parreño is both surprising and thought-provoking. Tomich draws comparisons between the political thought of Adam Smith and Arango and argues convincingly that liberal modernity, economic progress, and the continuation of slavery were not considered poles apart. Both theorists originally drew from similar intellectual sources, and Arango relied on Smith to develop his own vision of a prosperous modern Cuba. Arango was liberal and his vision of Cuba progressive; yet, using the theories of Adam Smith, he still could reconcile modernity with the continuation and even expansion of the slave trade. For those of us raised on the simplistic historical notion that Smith’s theories and the subsequent nineteenth-century liberal movement were incompatible with slavery in both practical and economic terms, this is an exciting revelation; it certainly encourages scholars to question the established interpretation of liberal history. Antonio Feros’s chapter on the Spanish historical attempt to portray and understand the Hispanic world as a culturally cohesive mestizo nation (whatever the reality) similarly undermines the common idea that Western colonialism in the nineteenth century was united in its positivist construction of an imperial ideology based on the notion of racial superiority. It is interesting to compare this, for example, with works such as Irene Silverblatt’s Modern Inquisitions (Duke Univ. Press, 2004) that attempt to link the origins of “racial thinking” to earlier notions of modernity within the Spanish colonial project.Whether for dipping into by readers with specific interests, or as a broad, multidisciplinary investigation of the perceptions surrounding Spanish colonialism, Interpreting Spanish Colonialism is a worthy contribution to the field of postcolonial studies.