About this Book

"The People Are King traces the transformation of Andean communities under Inca and Spanish rule. The sixteenth century Spanish resettlement policy, known as Reducción was pivotal to this transformation. Modeled on the Spanish ideal of República (self-government within planned towns) and shared sovereignty with their monarch, Spaniards in the Viceroyalty of Peru forced Andeans into resettlement towns. Andeans turned the tables on forced resettlement by making the towns their own, and the center of their social, political, and religious lives. Andeans made a coherent life for themselves in a complex process of ethnogenesis that blended preconquest ways of life (the ayllu) with the imposed institutions of town life and Christian religious practices. Within these towns, Andeans claimed the right to self-government, and increasingly regarded their native lords, the caciques, as tyrants. A series of microhistorical accounts in these repúblicas reveals that Andeans believed that commoner people, collectively called the común, could rule themselves. With both Andean and Spanish antecedents, this political philosophy of radical democracy was key to the Great Rebellion of the late eighteenth-century. Rather than focusing on well-known leaders such as Tupac Amaru, the book demonstrates through commoner rebels' holographic letters that it was commoner Andean people who made the late eighteenth-century a revolutionary moment by asserting their rights to self-government. In the final chapter the book follows the commoner-lead towns of the Andes from the era of independence into the present day of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. Ayllu, Reducción, ethnogenesis, Peru, Bolivia, cacique, Tupac Amaru, comunero, revolution, microhistory" --