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Published to mark his 80th birthday, this volume consists of seven essays by Leslie Bethell on major themes in modern Brazilian history and politics: Brazil and Latin America; Britain and Brazil (1808-1914); The Paraguayan War (1864-70); The decline and fall of slavery (1850-1888); The long road to democracy; Populism; The failure of the Left. The essays are new, but they draw on book chapters and journal articles published (mainly in Portuguese) and public lectures delivered in the ten years since his retirement as founding Director of the University of Oxford Centre for Brazilian Studies in 2007. In an autobiographical Introduction (Why Brazil?) Professor Bethell describes how, from the most unlikely of backgrounds, he became a historian of Brazil and how he came to devote much of his long academic career to the promotion and development of Brazilian studies in UK (and, to a lesser extent, US) universities.

The Cambridge History of Latin America is a large scale, collaborative, multi-volume history of Latin America during the five centuries from the first contacts between Europeans and the native peoples of the Americas in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to the present. Latin America: Economy and Society since 1930 brings together chapters from Parts 1 and 2 of Volume VI of The Cambridge History to provide a complete survey of the Latin American economies since 1930. This, it is hoped, will be useful for both teachers and students of Latin American history and of contemporary Latin America. Each chapter is accompanied by a bibliographical essay

Pt. 1: Economy and society. - 1994. - XIV,635 S., graph. Darst., Tab. - ISBN 0-521-23266-0.; Pt. 2: Politics and society. - 1994, - XIV,736 S., graph. Darst., Tab. - ISBN 0-521-46556-7

In his autobiography Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life, published in 2002 when he was eighty-five years old, the historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) wrote that Latin America was the only region of the world outside Europe which he felt he knew well and where he felt entirely at home. He claimed this was because it was the only part of the Third World whose two principal languages, Spanish and Portuguese, were within his reach. But he was also, of course, attracted by the potential for social revolution in Latin America. After the triumph of Fidel Castro in Cuba in January 1959, and even more after the defeat of the American attempt to overthrow him at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, 'there was not an intellectual in Europe or the USA', he wrote, 'who was not under the spell of Latin America, a continent apparently bubbling with the lava of social revolutions'. The Third World 'brought the hope of revolution back to the First in the 1960s'. The two great international inspirations were Cuba and Vietnam, 'triumphs not only of revolution, but of Davids against Goliaths, of the weak against the all-powerful'.