Seeking to understand the complex racial dynamics of the Americas with a panoply of analytical tools ranging from organic fibers to religious rhetoric, Ruth Hill has alighted upon degeneration as a semantic, biological, and hierarchical shorthand for this process, arguing that today's understanding of race has buried a richer, more complex genealogy that understands racial classifications - including blancos , pardos , mestizos , and mulatos - as categories ever under construction, fluctuating with meaning and signification throughout the colonial period. By eschewing the idea that corporeal identities were fixed and fatalistic, Hill adds nuance and subtlety to pre-Darwinian ideas of diversity as she expansively interprets the archive of racial thinking to include adages and animals alongside leprosy and moral philosophy. 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, author of Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America.