From Frontiers to Football tells the history of Latin America's engagement with global empires from 1800 to today. It is a story of repeated cycles of lessons learned and unlearned, continued dependency, victimhood and thwarted dreams. It is also a narrative of overthrown imperial designs, colonial armies defeated and new hopes expressed inspiration for other colonized peoples across the globe. This book redresses the absence of cultural history, giving as much attention to Shakira and Pele as to coffee producers, copper miners, government policies and covert imperialism. It avoids the polemical invectives of political interpretations, presenting a clear, readable and absorbing introduction to the history of Latin America's interactions with the world over the last two centuries.