[6] The Southern Historical Association has established the Murdo J. MacLeod Prize for the best work in Latin American, Caribbean, Borderlands, or Atlantic World History.
It treats Central American history in three broad periods, the conquest and early colonial era, 1520–1576, the search for economic diversification, ca.
It was well-reviewed by distinguished historian Charles Gibson, who called it "a work of very substantial scholarship, the result of prolonged researches in Central American and Spanish archives … Again and again, MacLeod gives us new insights, fresh interpretations, and the well-digested results of investigations into subjects not examined before … this is a book of scrupulous and unusual honesty, in which nothing is claimed in excess of the evidence, and where the author 'levels' with the reader at every opportunity.
"[9] In a review of a co-edited volume, Spaniards and Indians in Southeastern Mesoamerica: Essays on the History of Ethnic Relations W. George Lovell notes that MacLeod's "forte has characteristically been that rare ability to give shape and explanation to an accumulated drift of events.
MacLeod identifies several profound and enduring processes at work, and sees them operating in such a way as to produce patterns which reflect a marked diversity and regional variation in the nature of the colonial experience.