Smoldering Ashes

Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780-1840

Bibliographic Data

ID2827702
AuthorsDavid Cahill (UNSW Sydney, corresponding author)
Year2000
Volume80
Issue3
Pages618-620
Publication date2000-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-80-3-618
OpenAlexW2008157405
LanguageEN
Citations received8

Charles Walker has set out to write the history of the transition from ancien régime to republic in the Cuzco region. The chief practical obstacle to this aspiration is the disparity in the amount of extant documentation available: holdings for late colonial Cuzco are enormous, while those for the early republic are relatively meager. The author has negotiated this difficulty with considerable skill, no mean feat.This is an exceptionally well-written account, and a pleasure to read. Walker has an eye for the telling quote, an uncommon ability to distill complex debates cogently, and a fluid literary prose. He is well versed in the relevant theoretical and comparative literature, but the book is mercifully free of jargon. Walker is the first historian to systematically use the region’s early republican newspapers as a source, and does so with profit; he deploys other early printed materials tellingly. This book is, however, excessively reliant upon printed sources, though this is to some extent unavoidable for the republican era.The book commences with a tight synthesis of the Túpac Amaru rebellion, notable for a fine set-piece account of the Sangarará massacre. He argues, probably rightly, that rebel ideology was a creative synthesis rather than an inchoate version of Western thought, and he joins Florencia Mallon in characterizing the movement as proto-nationalist; the rebellion certainly had strong nationalist elements, but proto-words are always a worry. Walker accepts the contemporary estimate of 100,000 deaths in the combined tupamarista and katarista movements; this is usually considered to be highly exaggerated. Walker’s emphasis on discourse is welcome, and he returns time and again to the contemporary pejorative image of the Indian. This is very well done, but it might have been shortened: it is mainly the familiar colonial discourse carried over into the republican era. There are many good things in this book: a convincing portrayal of the justice system as political arena; the welcome attention given the “public sphere”; the new biographical treatment of Gamarra; the attention given to the poorly-understood 1815–24 interregnum; the sustained argument that caudillos ruled through the state apparatus and not above it; the emphasis on the tax system and its multiple effects on indigenous groups. Moreover, his succinct summaries of economic and fiscal conjunctures are deftly executed. Particularly welcome is the return to center-stage of narrative and military history, on which Walker writes vividly and usually convincingly.The author is principally interested in political history. There is not much social history in this book, and hardly any ethnohistory. This is surprising, in that the author explicitly places the Indians at the center of his concerns, even championing their cause. He condemns reductionist treatment of the Indians, but then gives us more of the same. Indian society in the Cuzco region was parsed in numerous ways, yet we hear little of this: there is constant mention of “Indians,” “peasants,” “communities,” and “mestizos,” but we are left none the wiser as to social differentiation within those categories. Similarly, while caciques/kurakas receive some attention, there is scarce mention of the numerous cabildantes, though Walker controversially argues that these were the principal beneficiaries of the disintegrating cacique network. In what is a political history, the role of the rural Cabildos de indios y de españoles deserved some space, though it is only fair to note that Andean sources on these institutions are scarce. Just as controversial is his argument that Indians were little affected or even better off after the failure of the Túpac Amaru rebellion, and (more convincingly) that the early republican era was relatively beneficial to them. Early on, he announces that he has read one thousand causas criminales, but mentions only a handful; it is a pity that he did not weave more of these into his analysis. He ascribes a high degree of autonomy and a clear anti-colonial intent to the Indian subalterns of southern Peru, and it would have been interesting to have seen these contentions backed up with a lot more hard data.Walker builds much of his analysis around the concept of an Andean utopia, coined by Manuel Burga and the late Alberto Flores Galindo, and John Rowe’s “national Inca movement” thesis, both of which the author endorses unreservedly. These notions turn inter alia on the search for an Inca redeemer, the presumed existence of a distinct colonial Inca culture, and the Inca symbolism apparent in the subversive movements and conspiracies of the era. However, Walker’s account overlooks Cuzco’s many hundreds of Inca nobles, their response to those movements, and the components of colonial Inca culture and their political dimensions. Plainly, analysis of the Inca nobility’s participation (or lack of it) in key political and cultural events is essential to sustaining any utopian or nationalist thesis.Overall, this is a fine piece of historical writing that is a significant addition to the literature on the transition era and the nature of the early colonial state. It deserves to be widely discussed, and will certainly be read with pleasure

Colonialism · Ideology · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American history and culture · Law

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