Research on the Central American colonial experience - long overshadowed by the scholarly focus on Mexico and Peru - has begun to blossom, greatly expanding our knowledge of land and life in the region under Spanish rule. The first bibliography of its kind, Demography and Empire offers a comprehensive survey of recent literature in Spanish and in English pertaining to the population history of colonial Central America.

In their introductory chapter, Lovell and Lutz examine contact-period demography, native survival and demise, race mixture, and ethnic composition. They then make use of over two hundred entries to discuss the salient findings of population research to date and to provide an accessible bibliographic synthesis of a rich, diverse, and evolving literature.