Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640

by Steve J. Stern

This second edition of Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest includes Stern’s 1992 reflections on the ten years of historical interpretation that have passed since the book’s original publication—setting his analysis of Huamanga in a larger perspective.

“This book is a monument to both scholarship and comprehension, comparable in its treatment of the indigenous peoples after the conquest only to that of Charles Gibson for the Aztecs, and perhaps the best volume read by this reviewer in several years.”—Frederick P. Bowser, American Historical Review

“ Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest is clearly indispensable reading for Andeanists and highly recommended to ethnohistorians generally.  In technical respects it is a job done right, and conceptually it stands out as a handsome example of anthropology and history woven into one tight fabric of inquiry.”—Frank Salomon, Ethnohistory

Genres: History, Latin American History, Nonfiction, Spanish History, Textbooks

352 pages, Paperback

First published August 31, 1982

About the author

Steve J. Stern is the Alberto Flores Galindo Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of books including Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989-2006, Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973–1988, winner of the Bolton-Johnson Prize (the Conference on Latin American History), and Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998.

Reviews

[mippers]

baby’s first full grad school book

[Julio The Fox]

An absolute masterpiece, combining the macrohistory of Indian ways in Huamanga, Peru, today's modern Ayacucho, with larger patterns of colonialism and global violence to the indigenous. Steve Stern examines the origins, breakup, and survival of Peru's Inca peoples before and after the cataclysm of the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century. How exactly does a conqueror go about dismantling a civilization that once formed part of an empire, complete with head of state, organized religion, warrior caste and functioning agricultural economy? Or, better still, the real question conquistadors always ask themselves, how can I get these people to work for me? Stern is up against two giant myths about the European conquest of the Inca. Peruvian nationalists insist to this day that the Inca empire featured a primitive welfare state which housed, clothed and fed all. Wrong. The first generation of scholars of the conquest, William Prescott and his epigones, vehemently insisted that after the fall of Cuzco and murder of Atahualpa the Spaniards gave orders and the Indians obeyed, or died; equally erroneous. The preconquest Inca provided for themselves through a complex system of mutual obligations between villages, providing labor and foodstuffs to one another in reciprocity. The Inca state had very little to do with this system of primitive communism. The Spanish conquerors re-orbited this world by making silver mining and large-scale agriculture, the hacienda system, the solar nexus of the economy. The Indian tribute labor system, the hated Mita or corvee, broke up those ancient ties of mutuality for the sake of primitive accumulation capitalism. Peru became a market economy for the Spaniards, in the service of Spain's transatlantic empire, and a bondage economy for the natives. The more that empire came into competition with Spain's enemies, chiefly England, the more the Indians sweated and bled. The indigenous of Huamanga reconstituted their society not by reviving the old ways of collective dependence but prying as much as they could in compensation for their labor. This new Indian laboring class stood midway from the native community and the Spanish world in language, dress, music and self-governing villages, subject to the Crown naturally. In this vivid sketch of the origins of Spanish Peru we glimpse the truth of Marx's dictum of how capitalism came to be born with violence for a midwife in the New World.

[Elinor Kleber Diggs]

I read this my Freshman year of college for my Colonial Latin America class.

I don’t think we completed the entire book. It wasn’t fun to read but it is important information.