Needless to say, I’m delighted and honored with this review of The Tupac Amaru Rebellion by Sir John Elliott in the New York Review of Books. The Regius Professor Emeritus in the University of Oxford, Honorary Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford and Trinity College, Cambridge, J. H. Elliott renovated Iberian history with smart, innovative, and accessible books such as The Revolt of the Catalans and Richelieu and Olivares. He is justifiably a venerated figure in Spain. His 2006 Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 is simply the best comparative history of British and Spanish Empires (I should use the word colonialism carefully–see the review).

I have never had the honor to meet him but I have only heard wonderful things about his collegiality and lack of pretension despite his many honors.

No es necesario decir que es un honor que Sir John Elliot haya escrito una extensa reseña de The Tupac Amaru Rebellion en la prestigiosa The New York Review of Books. El Regius Professor Emeritus de la Universidad de Oxford, Honorary Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford and Trinity College, Cambridge, renovó la historia de manera inteligente, innovadora y con libros accesibles como La revuelta de los catalanes y Richelieu y Olivares. Con toda razón, él es una figura muy venerada en España. Su libro de 2006, Imperios del mundo atlántico es simplemente la mejor historia comparativa de Gran Bretaña y el Imperio español (Y yo debería usar el término “colonialismo” con cuidado, según me lo aconseja en la reseña).

No he tenido el gusto de conocerlo en persona pero he escuchado comentarios maravillosos sobre su profesionalismo y ausencia de pretensiones pese a los muchos reconocimientos que ha recibido.

John Elliott
“The Huge, Ignored Uprising in the Andes”
The New York Review of Books (October 23, 2014)

Between 1780 and 1782, when the rebellion of the British colonists in North America was reaching its climax, a still more savage drama was being played out in South America. The Andes were in revolt, and Spain, like Britain, was faced with the prospect of losing one of its most prized overseas possessions. Since the overthrow of the Inca empire in the 1530s and the discovery of the silver mountain of Potosí in the high Andes in 1545, the viceroyalty of Peru had generated a substantial part of the wealth that enabled Spain to create and maintain its “empire of the Indies” and its position as a leading European power. Now suddenly in 1780 Spain saw its control of Peru placed in jeopardy by a minor Indian nobleman, José Gabriel Condorcanqui, who laid claim to the royal blood of the Incas as a direct descendant of the last Inca ruler, Tupac Amaru, captured and executed by the Spaniards in 1572.

The rebellion of Tupac Amaru II, as Condorcanqui came to style himself, was the largest and most dangerous rebellion faced by the Spanish crown in its American empire before the great upheavals of the early nineteenth century that culminated in its loss. Although there had been innumerable disturbances and uprisings over the course of some two and a half centuries of Spanish imperial rule, these had for the most part been fairly small-scale and localized, and were suppressed with relative ease. This was partly because of the coercive power at the disposal of the imperial authorities once they chose to deploy it, but much of the relative tranquility of the new multi-ethnic societies that emerged in the wake of conquest can be attributed to the system of government that evolved as Spain’s Habsburg rulers imposed elaborate judicial and administrative structures on the conquered territories.

Under this system, Spaniards and creoles (their American-born descendants), the indigenous peoples (all subsumed under the name of “Indians”), and a growing population of mestizos, of mixed Indian and European ancestry, with the further addition of African blood as increasing numbers of slaves were imported, were all nominally welded into one organic whole, whether in the viceroyalty of New Spain (Mexico) or in that of Peru. Each was conceived as a Christian commonwealth ruled by a distant but allegedly beneficent monarch and watched over by a ubiquitous church. Within this hierarchically organized society each section of the community theoretically possessed its own allotted space. A native elite of caciques, or kurakas as they were known in Peru, served as intermediaries between the royal authorities and the indigenous population; and every individual or community had the right of appeal up the bureaucratic chain to the king himself. This system left room for maneuver both to the rulers and the ruled.

How, then, did it come about that the system failed at the end of the 1770s, and that Spain, ruled by the Bourbons since the turn of the century, found itself confronted by a mass uprising that threatened the loss of vast areas of Peru? This is a question that has exercised generations of historians, and the literature on the rebellion of Tupac Amaru II is enormous. Some of these historians have focused on the charismatic figure of José Gabriel himself, and on the grievances that led him to raise the standard of rebellion. Others, particularly in recent years, have sought to relate him and his cause to the unique characteristics of Andean society and to the changes it was undergoing in the eighteenth century, in part resulting from the administrative and economic reforms introduced by the new Bourbon dynasty.

There is certainly no lack of documents on which historians can draw. The judicial inquiries and court cases that followed the capture of the leaders and the collapse of the revolt generated a vast amount of documentation, much of it preserved in the Archive of the Indies in Seville; and between 1980 and 1982 seven volumes of documents on the rebellion were published in Peru to celebrate the second centenary of the uprising. Yet in spite of this mass of material, many puzzles remain, and it is with these puzzles that Charles F. Walker has grappled in the first extended survey of the causes and the course of the Tupac Amaru rebellion to appear in English since 1966.

Walker, a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, is the author of two previous books on late colonial Peru: one, the more recent, was devoted to the middle years of the eighteenth century, and the other ran from the Tupac Amaru rebellion to the somewhat precarious establishment of an independent Peruvian republic in the nineteenth century. Although the first two chapters of the latter, Smoldering Ashes, are devoted to the rebellion and its background, most of it deals with the subsequent period as the embers of the conflagration died down, to be swallowed up in a still-greater conflagration as the viceroyalty found itself embroiled in the revolutionary Spanish-American wars of independence. With the Tupac Amaru rebellion as a potential point of transition between late-colonial and republican Peru, it must have seemed logical to link the two books with a close study of the violent events that brought death and tragedy to tens of thousands of inhabitants of the Andes in the 1780s.

The result is a lucid and accessible survey, in which Walker skillfully blends narrative with explanation to construct a harrowing story of violence and atrocities on an enormous scale. The narrative is well paced and efficiently written, although there are occasional stylistic infelicities, as when he writes that Tupac Amaru’s supporters “sought to right an out-of-sync system,” or tells us that the Spanish visitor general, José Antonio de Areche, “vented” the words that he goes on to quote. Some of his set pieces, in particular those describing the hideous deaths inflicted on Tupac Amaru and his wife, family, and followers, are painfully vivid, and he makes judicious use of his sources, pointing out, for instance, the need for careful reading of witness statements at judicial inquiries, as when an illiterate Indian repeats almost verbatim the words spoken by the judge on the previous day.

[Continues..]

The Huge, Ignored Uprising in the Andes, by John H. Elliot