The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (31 page)

them liable to pay tribute to the state. Imperial extraction therefore

encouraged young men to either establish informal relationships

with women or put off marriage. Similarly, the
mit’a
labor sweep

led many to fl ee their
ayllus
entirely. The 1560 census found that

almost half of the women in Peru’s most populous province were

unmarried.43

Spanish

Peru 157

Far from reinforcing patriarchal supremacy, Spanish imperial rule

actually undermined the infl uence of common men. Backed by the

power of empire, the Spaniards used their prerogatives to monopolize Andean women, which led Don Felipe to complain that women

“no longer love Indians but rather Spaniards, and they become big

whores.”44 Andean chroniclers condemned Andean women for their

disloyalty, but conjugal relations with the conquerors taught them

Spanish and provided a more sophisticated knowledge of imperial society. Don Felipe’s lament that “the Indians are disappearing

because they have no women” refl ected the reality that many women

fl ed the patriarchal restrictions of life in the
ayllus
to pursue commercial opportunities in Peruvian cities.45 Predictably, some Andean

men responded aggressively to this increased female autonomy,

which helps to explain why domestic violence and sexual disputes

were a signifi cant cause of homicide in eighteenth-century Peru.46

This was hardly what the architects of Spanish imperial rule in Peru

had in mind when they attempted to restructure Andean society.

The proliferation of
castas
was an even bigger problem. Resulting

from the insistence of Spanish men on asserting their sexual power

over female slaves and Andean subjects, these mixed identities further

undermined the Peruvian state’s attempt to create a bounded and stable

Indian republic. Theoretically, the Republic of the Spaniards, which was

the mirror of the Republic of the Indians, was exclusively European,

but the growing population of mixed Andean, African, and Spanish offspring had no place in the Republic of the Indians. By default, they were

interlopers in the Spanish Republic. The original mestizo children of the

conquistadors often became Spaniards in good standing, but later generations with less aristocratic origins faced institutional discrimination.

This inability to maintain a clear distinction between rights-bearing citizens and exploitable subjects imperiled the Spanish empire in

the Andes. Writing in the immediate decades following Pizarro’s victory at Cajamarca, Cieza recorded a conversation between an Andean

noble and a Spanish friar: “Father, you must know that God became

tired of tolerating the great sins of the Indians of this land, and He

sent the Inkas to punish them; they did not last very long either, and

by the their fault God also tired of tolerating them, and you came and

took their land in which you are; and God will also tire of tolerating

you, and others will come who will replace you, as you deserve.”47

Cieza’s informant correctly predicted the demise of the Pizarrists, but

158 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

it took almost three centuries for God to tire of Spanish rule in Peru.

The blurred lines of subjecthood in imperial society were at the root

of the problem.

As in the Roman Empire and the Umayyad Caliphate, the Spanish Empire in the Americas was not overthrown by a revolution

from below. Rather, it evolved over the course of the centuries into

a transoceanic state that bore little resemblance to the early modern

Habsburg Spanish Empire that had sanctioned Pizarro’s conquest of

the Andes. The War of the Spanish Succession in the early eighteenth

century, which brought the Bourbon dynasty to the Spanish throne,

stripped Spain of the last of its European empire. The decline of Spanish naval power, smuggling by European rivals, and assertive creole

settlers in the Americas undermined the metropolitan government’s

control over what remained.

The absolutist Bourbon kings sought to revitalize their truncated

empire by creating more effi cient bureaucratic and military institutions and enforcing the rules that closed the colonies to foreigners.

This ambitious agenda depended on the wholesale reform of Spain’s

antiquated imperial institutions. But the Viceroyalty of Peru, which

encompassed the old Inkan Empire, was not in any condition to pay

for the changes. Andean opposition to the
mit’a
labor demands and a

shortage of mercury for refi ning meant that Peruvian silver production dropped from the equivalent of seven million pesos to two million pesos per year between 1600 and 1700.48 Institutional corruption

further undercut government revenues.
Corregidors
falsifi ed census

records and tax rolls to disguise the fact that they kept Andean labor

for themselves and embezzled state funds. The latter practice became

so widespread that audits uncovered million-peso revenue shortfalls.

The viceroyalty therefore lacked the capital to develop alternatives to

the dilapidated mining economy and had to borrow heavily to cover

its basic operating costs.

The Bourbon reformers tried to address these problems by bringing Peru and the other American territories under more direct control

by dispatching teams of investigators to audit territorial governments.

In 1783, they replaced the bureaucracy of Toledo’s outdated Indian

republic with specially appointed metropolitan intendants and subdelegates who supplanted the venal
corregidors
in the highlands. On

paper, the intendancy system appeared to make imperial rule more

accountable, but corruption persisted because the subdelegates still

Spanish

Peru 159

took their salary as a share of collected tribute. The reformers also

shied away from making changes in the
mit’a
system, even though it

had become so embarrassingly oppressive that several viceroys asked

for permission to abolish it.

More signifi cantly, the absolutist Bourbon agenda fl oundered

because it alienated the Peruvian creoles. According to the 1795

census, a bit more than 12 percent of the approximately one and a half

million people in the viceroyalty were of European origin.49 The vast

majority of these were locally born creoles who distinguished themselves from recently arrived metropolitan
peninsulares
. After multiple generations in the New World, the Spanish settlers evolved into

European Americans who were content to remain within the Spanish

Empire as long as the Crown’s administrative reach was too short to

stretch across the Atlantic. Spanish policy theoretically barred them

from serving in the imperial administration on the assumption that

their self-interest would lead to corruption. This was unrealistic and

unenforceable, and creoles steadily infi ltrated the
audiencias
, viceregal

bureaucracy, clergy, urban militias, and rural administration over the

course of the seventeenth century. Not surprisingly, these entrenched

imperial interests resented the Bourbon Crown’s reassertion of metropolitan authority. Powerful creoles balked at paying higher taxes to

fund the Spanish military buildup in the Americas and resented the

superior airs of the
peninsulares
who arrived in Peru as intendants

and senior military offi cers.

Although they had a pronounced inferiority complex in relation

to Old World Spaniards, the creoles were the real rulers of Peru. With

virtually uncontested control over the agricultural and mining sectors, they jealously defended their privileges against peninsular pressure from above and Andean challenges from below. As the premier

imperial interest group in Peru and the true heirs of the Pizarrists,

they insisted on total supremacy over the Indian, African, and
casta

peoples who constituted roughly 88 percent of the population in the

eighteenth century.

This was a Peru that was markedly different from the realm of the

Inkas. The Andean societies that the conquistadors violently dragged

into the Spanish empire largely disappeared as coherent corporate

institutions in the late sixteenth century under the hammer blows of

pestilence, Spanish tribute demands, and blurred imperial identities.

Preconquest British and Iberian societies also had faded away under

160 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

the weight of imperial subjecthood, but those were centuries-long

evolutionary processes. The Inkan imperial collapse was a cataclysmic disaster that occurred virtually overnight, but the Andeans did

not descend into a self-destructive spiral of depression and anomie,

as some historians have suggested. Instead, the survivors adapted

Andean culture to the realities of Spanish imperial rule.50

A new heterogeneous ruling class in the highlands emerged by the

early eighteenth century through the fusion of the surviving Inkan

nobility, wealthy mestizos, and Spaniards still willing to marry across

the imperial social frontier. Centered in Cuzco, as opposed to creoledominated Lima, these “mixed-blood”
principales
(important people)

were primarily wealthy landowners, merchants, and skilled artisans.

Some were descended from prosperous
kurakas
, but the infl uence of

these princes of the Indian republic declined along with Andean institutions of reciprocity. The
principales
eclipsed those lesser
kurakas

who had to borrow money and sell community land to meet tribute

obligations as their communities disintegrated. The offi ce of
kuraka

became so unpopular in the eighteenth century that it lost its noble

status and often fell into the hands of simple Spanish tax collectors.

The cash economy and privatization of wealth transformed common

Andeans into “estate Indians” living on creole plantations, urban

wage laborers, and “community Indians” who remained in what survived of the
ayllus
. Over time, many fi nally came to see themselves

as Indians rather than as members of a particular community.

The development of this pan-Andean Indian identity was not a

boon for Spanish imperial rulers, for it made their subjects harder to

govern. Far from accepting their assigned role in Peruvian society, the

peoples of the highlands, whether Andean, Indian,
casta
, or African,

continued to contest their subjecthood. In fact, the Spanish never succeeded in pacifying the highlands fully. Frontier peoples defi ed the

authority of Lima, and imperial offi cials still risked murder if they

meddled too deeply in highland communities. The relative weakness

of the creole militias left the Spaniards in constant fear of conspiracies

and revolts, and in 1666 they actually uncovered a mestizo/Andean

plot to burn down Lima.

The eighteenth century was even more turbulent. The weight

of the Bourbon reforms fell most heavily on the highlands through

oppressive demands for tribute and discriminatory tariffs that disrupted the growing inter-Andean trade. Between 1730 and 1814, there

Spanish

Peru 161

were more than one hundred organized revolts against the Peruvian

government and the privileged creole minority. Generally speaking, they followed a common trajectory in which local disputes grew

into revolts that sometimes merged into mass rebellions. Common

features of this basic template included murdering the
corregidor
,

attacking clergymen, burning churches and government buildings,

and displaying Inkan symbols. This nostalgia for the Inkan Empire is

particularly interesting given that many of the leaders of the revolts

were mestizos or the descendants of some of the Inkas’ more embittered opponents. Groups such as the Canari, who had suffered heavily

under the Inkan imperial yoke, now looked back on the Inka era as an

Andean golden age. Eighteenth-century Peruvians knew relatively

little about the Inkan Empire, but they used nostalgia as a powerful

anti-imperial ideology to provoke unrest by promising that the Sapa

Inkas would return to drive out the Spaniards.

The Peruvian authorities took these romantic prophecies seriously

and tried to ban Inkan clothing, fl ags, conch shell horns, and even

Garcialaso de la Vega’s
Royal Commentaries of the Inkas
. Their concerns were well founded. The three most serious revolts in the eighteenth century all invoked the Inkas to attract followers and establish

their legitimacy. In the lowland jungle regions of the eastern Andes,

a charismatic leader calling himself Juan Santos Atawallpa organized

a coalition of Andeans,
castas
, escaped slaves, and forest peoples

that held off repeated Spanish attacks between 1742 and 1746. Juan

Santos’s rebel state collapsed after he died and left no lasting impact

on the highlands, but he gave other Andean groups an opportunity

to rebel by distracting the Peruvian government and tying down its

military assets.

In 1750, migrants from the province of Huarochiri organized an

uprising in Lima timed to coincide with a feast day celebration. The

plot called for armed bands to attack government buildings and murder prominent citizens. Although conspirators made extensive use