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The People Are King
The People Are King
The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics
S. E L I Z A B E T H P E N RY
1
1
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the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
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© Oxford University Press 2019
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Penry, S. Elizabeth, author.
Title: The people are king : the making of an indigenous Andean politics / S. Elizabeth Penry.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2019. | Summary: “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”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019015748 | ISBN 9780195161618 (paperback) | ISBN 9780195161601 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780190073923 (epub) | ISBN 9780199721900 (updf)
Subjects: LCSH: Indians of South America—Relocation—Andes Region. | Indians of South America—
Andes Region—Politics and government. | Indians of South America—Cultural assimilation—
Andes region. | Power (Social sciences)—Andes Region—History—18th century. | Andes Region—
Politics and government—18th century. | Spain—Colonies—America—Administration.
Classification: LCC F2229 .P448 2019 | DDC 980—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019015748
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
To the people of the markas and ayllus of the Andes, the heirs of the comuneros
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments  ix
A Note on Terminology  xiii
Introduction: The Genesis of an Andean Christianity and Politics  1
PART I INCA AND E ARLY SPANISH PERU  
1. Inca and Asanaqi in Qullasuyu  29

2. Spanish República and Inca Tyranny  43
3. Resettlement: Spaniards Found New Towns for “Indians”  53
PART II THE ANDE ANIZ ATION OF SPANISH

INSTITUTIONS AND CHRISTIANIT Y  
4. Andeans Found Their Own Towns: The Andeanization of

Reducción  79
5. Cofradía and Cabildo in the Eighteenth Century: The Merger of
Andean Religiosity and Town Leadership  101
6. Rational Bourbons and Radical Comuneros: Civil Practices That
Shape Towns  124
viii Contents
PART III THE REVOLUTIONARY COMÚN  
7. Comunero Politics and the King’s Justice: The Común Takes

Moral Action  145
8. A Lettered Revolution: A Brotherhood of Communities  167
Conclusion. The Resilience of the Común and Its Legacy  200
Notes  221
Bibliography  261
Index  281
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With a project that has taken so many years to complete, I have incurred many
debts and have many, many people to thank. At the University of Miami where
I wrote the dissertation that this book is based on, Noble David Cook, Guido
Ruggiero, and the late Robert Levine were helpful in the foundation of the pro-
ject. Above all, this has been a labor of years spent in archives and poring over
documents, and the much too infrequent moments of sharing tidbits and inter-
pretive angles with other researchers at those archives and in conferences.
First, I would like to thank the wonderful staff at the Archivo y Biblioteca
Nacionales de Bolivia (ABNB). I was fortunate to begin my research with the
late Don Gunnar Mendoza, director extraordinario. His over forty years of
dedication to cataloging and organization of the archive made the ABNB one
of the finest archives in the world. The late Dr. Josep Barnadas, who followed
Don Gunnar as director of the ABNB and was the first director of the Archivo
y Biblioteca Arquidiocesanos de Sucre (ABAS) was also instrumental in
guiding my research. Archivists Sra. Judith Terrán, formerly associate director
of the ABNB and the late Doña Anita Forenza were generous with their time
and great expertise. They and other members of the ABNB staff were my sur-
rogate family during my time in Sucre. Fellow researchers in the ABNB, espe-
cially Ana María Presta, Emma Sordo, and Heather Thiessen-Reilly (whose time
in Sucre overlapped with much of mine) and others who worked for briefer
times, including David Garrett, the late Catherine Julien, Karen Powers, Cynthia
Radding, and the late Ward Stavig, all made the sometimes lonely experience of
archival research more rewarding. Especially appreciated were the monthly pot-
luck dinners sponsored by anthropologist Verónica Cereceda and her late hus-
band Gabriel Martínez which brought together historians and anthropologists
working in the Sucre area for dinner and some very animated discussions.
Over many research trips in twenty years of working in the Archivo General de
Indias in Seville, the archival staff have been incredibly helpful. Living in Seville
ix
x Acknowledgments
is a privilege, and I was fortunate that in my first time there I was introduced to
Andalusian life in the Santa Cruz neighborhood home of Doña Carmen Moguel,
who treated me as her daughter. It was also while living in Spain that I realized
how many things that I took to be “Andean” had multiple roots.
I have also been fortunate to have been able to spend a significant amount
of time in Buenos Aires working in the Archivo General de la Nación. Helpful
archivists, staff, and friends there made my time more productive than it other-
wise would have been. I wish to thank Ana María Presta of the Universidad de
Buenos Aires, and her team of researchers, especially María Carolina Jurado, for
their help.
The Archivo del Arzobispal de Lima houses a wealth of documentation on
local indigenous communities, and I was privileged to work there during re-
search trips to Peru. Director of the archive, Srta. Laura Gutiérrez, was especially
helpful. I also thank Pedro Guibovich, who introduced me to Srta. Gutiérrez.
His great knowledge of Peruvian archives facilitated my research there.
During a year at the John Carter Brown Library as a National Endowment for
the Humanities Fellow I completed early drafts of chapters 4 and 5. I have fond
memories of the weekly lunches and talks given by other fellows. Former Director
Norman Fiering was helpful in many ways during my time in Providence.
There are many other individuals, institutions, and archives that have helped
me in countless ways as I worked to understand the lives of the comuneros. A spe-
cial thanks to Cristina Bubba who provided me with a copy of the document
of the foundation of Tolapampa. Anthropologist Krista van Vleet graciously
allowed me to accompany her to her field site near Pocoata where we witnessed
a tinku battle. I also thank three wonderful historians, now retired, who offered
support and encouragement at key moments in my work, historians of Spain
Richard Kagan and the late Helen Nader, and historian of Mexico William
B. Taylor. Although the list is far from complete, among the many others who
provided help in myriad ways through informal chats, or comments at confer-
ences as fellow panelists or audience members, or who shared their work with
me are Kenneth Andrien, Jovita Baber, Kathryn Burns, Juan Cobo, Natalie
Cobo, Noble David Cook, Mercedes del Rio, Simon Ditchfield, Lee Douglas,
María Elisa Fernández, David Garrett, Karen Graubart, Pedro Guibovich, the
late Olivia Harris, Tamar Herzog, Alex Huerta, Christine Hunefeldt, Amy
Huras, Marta Irurozqui, the late Sabine MacCormack, Jane Mangan, Kenneth
Mills, Scarlett O’Phelan Godoy, Karen Powers, Tristan Platt, Susan Ramírez,
Joanne Rappaport, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Gilles Riviére, Stuart Rockefeller,
Rafael Sánchez, Lynn Sikkink, Irene Silverblatt, Karen Spalding, Patricia Spyer,
and Sinclair Thomson.
A special thank you to Akira Saito of the National Museum of Ethnology
(Osaka, Japan) who invited me to participate in two long-term interdisciplinary
Acknowledgments xi
projects reevaluating reducciones. My deep appreciation goes to the team of in-

ternational researchers involved in the reducción projects, especially Tetsuya
Amino, John Charles, Alejandro Diez Hurtado, Luis Miguel Glave, Clara López
Beltrán, Jeremy Mumford, Stella Nair, Parker VanValkenburgh, Steve Wernke,
Guillermo Wilde, Marina Zuloaga, and Paula Zagalsky. Discussions over many
years with these historians, anthropologists, art historians, and archaeologists
working on the reducciones projects were key in helping me to refine my own
interpretation of resettlement.
My colleagues in the history department at Fordham University have been
very supportive, above all Kirsten Swinth, who as chair was instrumental in
bringing the book to publication. Colleagues, especially Barbara Mundy and the
late Chris Schmidt-Nowara, in the Latin American and Latino Studies Institute
at Fordham have provided a warm intellectual home. I also wish to thank the
students, both graduates and undergraduates at Fordham University, from
whom I have learned so much.
I have had extraordinarily generous support for research and writing from
many sources. I thank the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological
Research (Grant # 5634); Fulbright/IIE; the National Endowment for the
Humanities Dissertation Fellowship; the Albert J. Beveridge Grant for Research
in the Western Hemisphere from the American Historical Association; the Lewis
Hanke Award from the Conference on Latin American History; the Advanced
Study Center and International Institute at the University of Michigan; the
Fulbright Senior Research Award; the National Endowment for the Humanities
Senior Scholar Fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library; the Program for
Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry for Culture and US Universities;
the Short-Term Research Grant from the International Seminar on the History of
the Atlantic World at Harvard University; and the National Ethnology Museum,
Osaka, Japan. Also thank you to the generous offers of fellowships that I had to
decline due to time conflicts: the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation
Fellowship of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the
American Fellowship from The American Association of University Women.
Thank you to Fordham University for Faculty Fellowships (2002–2003; 2009–
2010) and Faculty Research Grants (1998, 2000, 2001, 2015), for time away
from teaching obligations and funds to travel to archives.
Chapter 8 contains material originally published in Colonial Lives: Documents
on Latin American History, 1550–1850 edited by Richard Boyer and Geoffrey
Spurling, 2000, and has been reproduced by permission of Oxford University
Press. An early version of parts of chapter 4 was published in The Council
of Trent: Reform and Controversy in Europe and Beyond, (1545–1700): Vol.3
Between Artists and Adventurers, edited by Wim François and Violet Soen, 2018,
and has been reproduced here by permission of Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht
xii Acknowledgments
GmbH & Co.KG, Göttingen, Germany. Chapter 4 is a revised version originally

published in Reducciones: la concentración forzada de las poblaciónes indígenas
en el Virreinato del Perú, edited by Akira Saito and Claudia Rosas Lauro, 2017,
and has been reproduced here by permission of Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia
Universidad Católica del Perú and the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka,
Japan. Portions of the introduction have been revised from material origi-
nally published in Collective Identities, Public Spheres and Political Order: Latin
American Dynamics edited by Luis Roniger and Tamar Herzog, 2000, and have
been reproduced here by permission of Sussex Academic Press.
Susan Ferber, my editor at Oxford University Press, has been extraordinarily
supportive every step of the way and, fortunately for me, never gave up on this
very long-term project. Her encouragement and editing made this book much
stronger.
Much of the final draft was completed in Toro, Spain. I thank my dear friends
there for their support. Evenings spent in Javier and Frans’s patio, or on the
plaza with Marisol, Fernando, and Tony or Consuelo and Ata are priceless and
a much-appreciated distraction from work. Nicola, who welcomed us into her
home as family, is truly a force of nature.
Finally, I thank Tom Abercrombie, my partner in life, my soul’s companion,
and fellow Andeanist, whose own work is an inspiration to me. Tom generously
offered his time and expertise to read and comment on many drafts of this ac-
count of the comuneros. To my great sorrow Tom did not live to see the final
product of our many conversations, yet I feel his presence on every page. I also
thank Tom’s students who enveloped me in their love as an extended family
in the painful time after his death, especially Ulla Berg, Lee Douglas, Sandra
Rozental, Augusta Thomson, and Alex Huerta who graciously proofread parts
of the final manuscript. The remaining faults and shortcomings in the book are
my own.
A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY
In The People are King, I use the terms “Andeans,” “indigenous people,” and
“Indian” to refer to the native people of the Andes, aware that, to varying
degrees, these are problematic terms. Creole Spaniards born in the Andes, were
also “Andeans.” “Indigenous people,” a nineteenth-century term, is anachronistic
and when invented carried a racial stigma as a “scientific” means of categorizing
humans. Today “Indian” in Spanish (indio) is an insult term, and was sometimes
used as such in the colonial period.
Other terms are also problematic. Some scholars have used “natural,”
a common colonial term, but it carried the same racial significance as
“Indian” for Spaniards. Other scholars have used runa, (Quechua: “human”
or “people”) but there is little evidence that colonial or contemporary
Andeans referred to themselves as runa or the Aymara language equiva-
lent, jaqi. Since the Bolivian agrarian reforms of the mid-t wentieth century,
which sought to efface racial terms, campesino, or “peasant” has been the
preferred term. Although campesino is plainly a euphemism for Indian, it
is unquestionably a more polite term. However, it suggests an economic in-
terpretation that is anachronistic; Andeans were not uniformly subsistence
farmers, and Spaniards (or Creoles) were not always targeted as economi-
cally oppressive colonizers. Just as importantly, contemporary indigenous
people of Bolivia object to the term because it also diminishes their “iden-
tity as a ‘people.’ ”1
Given all these problems with the typical nomenclature, and although some
Andeans are now proudly reclaiming the name Indian for themselves, in the
chapters where I treat the early colonial period, I will generally use the terms
1
Albó, “Our Identity,” 24.
xiii
xiv A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY
“Andean” or “indigenous.” When writing from a Spanish colonial viewpoint,

I will use the term “Indian.” For the chapters dealing with the eighteenth cen-
tury, where I can be certain that words deriving from “común” were used with
frequency, I opt to use the only terminology that derives from words I know
eighteenth-century rebels used for themselves: comunero.
The People Are King
Introduction
The Genesis of an Andean Christianity and Politics
The night of October 14, 1774 was clear and cold, and the moon had risen early,
illuminating San Pedro de Condocondo, an indigenous town nuzzled against the
mountains on the edge of the high Andean plain in the Spanish viceroyalty of
Peru. Gregorio Llanquipacha, cacique (native hereditary lord) and governor for
the Spanish crown of the town of Condocondo and its vast municipal jurisdic-
tion, had retired early for the evening. Llanquipacha had premonitions of trouble,
for he had asked a half dozen men of the village to sleep at his home that night.1
Two seemingly separate events had led Llanquipacha to take this precaution.
That afternoon a dispute had erupted into a bloody fight between two elected
town leaders. Llanquipacha’s relations with these men, Julián Taquimalco but es-
pecially Ignacio Rudolfo Choque, were as strained as their relationship with each
other. The previous year town authorities had accused Llanquipacha of stealing
tax money.2 However, as governor and highest authority of Condocondo,
Llanquipacha would be compelled to intervene the next day to settle the dispute
between the two men, whatever its nature.3
Another incident that afternoon had also left Llanquipacha with a sense of
disquiet. Father Joseph Espejo, the widely respected priest of Condocondo who
had served the parish for over thirty years, had abruptly left on muleback to
move to the neighboring town of Toledo. Llanquipacha had a history of conflict
with the priest, but he also knew that the townspeople revered Father Espejo.
Llanquipacha openly suspected that the priest had conspired with elected
town officers to accuse him of stealing tax money, and so townspeople blamed
Llaquipacha for forcing Father Espejo to leave. Whatever the case, a large group
of townspeople had walked with the priest to the nearest town on his journey,
crying and begging him to stay with them in Condocondo. Only a few months
earlier the assistant priest, who had served as schoolmaster for the parish for six-
teen years, had likewise left Condocondo; his move, too, was widely understood
The People Are King: The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics. S. Elizabeth Penry, Oxford University Press
(2019). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780195161601.001.0001
2 The People Are King
by townspeople as being made at the demand of Llanquipacha. These events led

governor Gregorio Llanquipacha to be on his guard.
Vicente Nina, a twenty-six-year-old Condocondo resident, was one of those
whom Llanquipacha had asked to sleep in his house that night and who later
gave sworn testimony to Spanish officials of what ensued. Sometime during the
night, Nina said, he was awakened by the sound of a large rock hitting the door.
Jumping from [my] bed [I]‌put [my] body against the door to support it
from the inside. However, they continued to pound the doors furiously
and they forced them open. Immediately, [I] recognized Cruz Yana,
Damaso Yana and Ignacio Rudolfo Choque [current and former town
councilmen] . . . and many more people, men, women, young boys, so
that they were more than a 100 people gathered together in a mad rush,
entering the room with different weapons, stones, whips and clubs.4
At that point someone struck Nina in the chest with a club, knocking him
to the floor. Struggling to get up, he saw women carrying flaming straw torches
approach Llanquipacha, who, already bloodied, stood next to his bed clad only
in his night shirt, waving his sword. “Get out Indians!” Llanquipacha screamed
at his attackers, using the insulting term Spaniards applied to native Andeans.
With that the already enraged crowd surged toward him, and inflicted blows to
his head and body. Nina testified that one of the women, María Lenis, the wife
of Damaso Yana, took her weaving tool (a wichuña, a sharpened llama bone) and
repeatedly stabbed Gregorio Llanquipacha in the ear until the point broke off in
his brain. Meanwhile, others in the mob looted Llanquipacha’s office, taking his
papers. Then, with the vigilantes screaming “Let’s go kill the other thief!” they
ran to the home of Andrés Llanquipacha, Gregorio’s brother and his second in
command, who met them with gun in hand and managed to shoot one of the
mob before they murdered him.
In the days immediately following the murders, a large contingent from
Condocondo traveled the 70-odd miles of mountain roads and llama trails to
the seat of the regional Spanish colonial government in La Plata to present their
version of events. News of the murders arrived via mail before they did. When
Spanish officials realized that more than thirty people from Condocondo were
waiting inside the patio of the courthouse to plead their case, they quickly had
them arrested and jailed. The Condocondo prisoners offered an explanation of
the crimes that the Spaniards neither expected nor believed: the murders came
about in response to what they reckoned to be the forced ouster of their priest,
Father Espejo. Moreover, they contended, because the común of Condocondo
as a whole had killed the indigenous cacique and his second in command, it
was impossible to assess any individual blame. When pressured by incredulous
Int roduc tion 3
Spanish officials to offer a fuller explanation for the murders, one representative
to the Condocondo town council, an accused leader of the mob, declared:
It is a crime to take justice into [my] own hands, and to reprimand [my]
cacique or Governor, whom [I]‌well know ought to be obeyed if he is
good, but not if he is bad and his works unjust, as was the case with
the deceased. [Former town councilmen] Ignacio Rudolfo Choque and
Damián Lenis taught this doctrine. And also [I] know that if the común
ordered [me] to do one thing and [my] Governor another, [I] ought to
obey the común.5
What was the común? This book is an effort to answer that question. In
Spanish language dictionaries of the era, común can refer to common property,
common pastures, or more importantly the collective people of a place. Put
simply, común was the Andean voice of popular sovereignty and an exclusionary
term that referred solely to the common people, putting the hereditary nobility
outside the bounds of their community. But the people of the Andes had not al-
ways used the term común and had not always opposed rule by their hereditary
lords. The Andean community that prized commoner rule over their caciques
had come into being over the course of the long colonial period, from the late
sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries.
***
The People Are King is a history of how ordinary Andeans in the Audiencia of
Charcas, a vast region of the viceroyalty of Peru, came to define themselves by
reinterpreting colonial institutions and ideas, and their efforts to govern them-
selves and acquire full rights during the nearly three hundred years that they
were subjects of the Spanish Crown. It demonstrates how Andeans moved from
a politics of hereditary nobility, the caciques, to a hybrid form of participatory
democracy, with the town council at its heart, that had roots in both the Andean
and Spanish worlds. Andeans publicly articulated a political philosophy that
not only questioned their political, economic and social subordination to their
own hereditary lords, but presented a thesis on popular sovereignty that would
threaten the structures of Spanish colonial domination. This new politics was
undergirded by Andean ideas about a redistributive justice in which mountains,
fields, and animals participated, as well as Christian and Spanish notions of nat-
ural rights and God-given sovereignty.
Spaniards imposed new kinds of town life, commoner-led town councils,
and Christian patron saints and festivals in the sixteenth century, but these
impositions did not replace pre-Conquest Andean social forms. Indeed, at the
center of these new ideas about legitimacy and governance was the ayllu, the
Andean kin and landholding group that predated both the Spaniards and the
Incas and that during the colonial period (1532–1825) came to be linked to
Andean towns through the town council and saints’ celebrations. Andeans se-
lectively appropriated Spanish religious and political impositions and combined
them with pre-Conquest understandings of reciprocal and moral obligations,
and justice in a complex synthesis that Andeans called the común. Then, in the
eighteenth century, Andean communities across the viceroyalty of Peru took
collective action, deposing and, in some cases, executing abusive hereditary
lords, all the while claiming they were operating in the name of the común. No
one person could be named responsible for these political coups: the “común
de Indios” had acted. In the 1780s as revolutionary uprisings accelerated in
the Audiencia of Charcas (modern Bolivia), this political discourse spread
through the mails, with indigenous communities writing back and forth to their
“Amantíssimos hermanos comunes,” their “Beloved Común Brothers.”6
What led to this shift in how Andeans understood their political commu-
nity? Where did this strong sense of collective life come from? To answer these
questions, The People Are King offers an overview of the pre-Conquest Andes
and sixteenth-century Spanish ways, and then turns to an in-depth examination
of how grass roots-level political power was exercised by colonized Andeans
in two broad historical periods, times that roughly bookend the long colonial
era. The first runs from the late 1500s to roughly 1650, the era of the Spanish
invasion and creation of the early colony, when Spain was governed by the
Hapsburg dynasty. The second runs roughly from 1750 to the end of Spanish
hegemony in 1825, frequently referred to as the era of Bourbon Reforms be-
cause of economic and political changes introduced by the Bourbon dynasty,
which acceded to the Spanish throne in 1700. Close analysis of these two time
periods reveals the changes that occurred over the long colonial era in Andean
politics.
The setting for this study is the Audiencia of Charcas (see Figure I.1), an ad-
ministrative unit of the Spanish Indies, with its capital in La Plata (today Sucre,
Bolivia). Until 1776, the Audiencia of Charcas was part of the viceroyalty of
Peru, headquartered in Lima; after that it was incorporated into the new viceroy-
alty of Rio de la Plata, with Buenos Aires as its capital. Within the Audiencia, the
primary focus is the territory of what were two pre-Conquest federations, what
Spaniards called “nations,” the Killaka, of which Condocondo was part, and its
neighboring federation, the Karanqa. The contiguous core areas of these two
federations covered approximately thirty thousand square miles in the highland
Andes, an area roughly three times the size of the state of Massachusetts. The
average altitude for the core region is over twelve thousand feet, with mountain
peaks reaching twenty thousand feet above sea level. It is a cold, windswept, and
dry plain of austere beauty. In this highland area, people have herded llamas and
Int roduc tion 5
Figure I.1 Map of Study Area. Map by Erin Greb Cartography.
alpacas and cultivated the highland crops of potatoes and quinoa for thousands
of years. The full extension of the territories of Killaka and Karanqa, taking in
their “discontinuous but interconnected” outlier communities in distant, pro-
ductive valleys to the east, where maize and coca were grown, and oases near the
Pacific Ocean in the west, reached eighty thousand square miles, roughly the size
of the states of Kansas or Utah.7 Within that region, the study concentrates on
five highland towns, refounded with Christian patron saints in the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries: San Pedro de Condocondo, Santa Bárbara de

Culta, Todos Santos de Tomave, Santiago de Tolapampa, and San Pedro de
Totora. It also treats distant valley outliers belonging to the Killaka and Karanqa
to which highland people made annual trips with llama caravans for foodstuffs.
These valley settlements, nearer to the Audiencia capital of La Plata and within
the core territory of the Qaraqara people, particularly the town of San Juan de
Pocoata, were convenient resting places when traveling to the capital on com-
munity business.
From the sixteenth century re-foundation of these Andean communities
until the independence of this region from the Spanish Empire, representa-
tives from these towns regularly traveled to the Audiencia capital to meet with
lawyers and put forward the aims of their communities. When they did so,
they went with a particular understanding of the nature of the human col-
lectivity they represented, and of its rights, based on both in their historical
domination over lands they possessed and the sovereignty granted to them as
people. Such ideas were grounded in Spanish law as well as in Andean moral
frameworks.
The Spanish civilizational project, which had at its heart the creation of self-
governing resettlement towns for indigenous people, resulted from the Spanish
Crown’s recognition of Indians’ essential humanity and fundamental right of do-
minium, that is, “ownership” of themselves and their property, and by extension
the right to govern themselves.8 These plans for indigenous self-government were
forged during an era when the nature of sovereignty was understood as some-
thing granted by God to “the people.” These ideas had played out in Spain shortly
before the invasion of the Inca empire in Castile’s 1520–1521 Revolution of the
Communities. But going beyond the idea of the sovereignty of the people was
the proposition that the people had a right to take sovereignty back when their
leaders became tyrants. Spaniards used these ideas to justify their overthrow of
the Inca “tyrants.” Then, these political ideas were made explicit to indigenous
Andeans when Spaniards moved them into resettlement towns designed to “civ-
ilize” Andeans. This book reveals how Andeans came to understand such things
and to adopt the institutions imposed on them by colonizing Spaniards to speak
back to power and to serve their own ends.
Andean Community Life and the Introduction

of Reducciones
Conquered by the Inca around 1460, less than one hundred years before the
Spanish invasion, the region of this study was the most densely populated
and wealthiest of the Inca Empire. It was also home to the village that would
Int roduc tion 7
become San Pedro de Condocondo, where, just over three hundred years later,
the común would kill Gregorio Llanquipacha. Condocondo was part of a col-
lectivity known as Asanaqi, which in turn was part of the Killaka federation. The
Asanaqi population was concentrated in the high plateau of the Andes moun-
tains, living in small, scattered villages to the east of Lake Poopó. The Incas were
attracted to the region by the large llama herds of the Asanaqi and neighboring
“nations,” the fertile and irrigable fields of the Cochabamba valley, and the enor-
mous silver deposits of the region.
The Inca conquest brought benefits to the Asanaqi: peace prevailed across
the region, and their sophisticated agricultural methods and transport meant
that there was a surplus of food in the enormous state warehouses along the Inca
highway system that could be distributed to those in need. Incas imposed their
imperial religion of sun and moon worship on all, but their subject populations
were allowed to keep local gods. The Asanaqi had limited say in their political
life; they were ruled by a hereditary elite at local, regional and empire-wide levels
whose right to rule was grounded in their descent from deities. Like their neigh-
boring ethnic groups and larger federations, the Asanaqi held property collec-
tively; the only privately held property were the large estates of the Inca elite.
The Incas were enormously successful in funneling wealth upward from local
commoners to the ruling elite. Asanaqi commoners, for instance, were drafted
by the Inca to grow maize in the Inca fields of Cochabamba, work in the Inca
silver mines of Porco, and help build and maintain the highways on which llama
caravans moved their goods to regional storehouses, and from there to the Inca
capital in Cuzco. In 1532, when Spaniards entered the territory that would be-
come the viceroyalty of Peru, they recognized this efficient transfer of wealth
that sustained the Inca nobility and hoped to channel it into their own coffers to
ennoble themselves and enrich their king.
While the Spanish admired the wealth generated by the Inca Empire, they
believed that Andeans lacked the essentials of civilized life: Christianity, of
course, but almost as importantly, town life. The Inca Empire did hold some
impressive cities, but aside from the capital Cuzco (and a few others), they
were primarily administrative centers staffed with temporary laborers. With
the Spanish invasion, many of the temporary workers fled, returning to their
home villages. For Spaniards, neither these administrative centers, nor the small
villages in which most Andeans lived, were adequate to foster the kind of inten-
sive interpersonal and collective sociality that Spaniards identified as necessary
for civilized life. For Spaniards, the town was the república, the basis of civilized
life; the municipality guaranteed rights to its citizens and brought about proper
moral, religious, and political behavior. There was no national guarantee of rights
and citizenship; all political life was vested in the town-republic. The most basic
political identification for Spaniards was their natal town, their patria chica, or
little fatherland. In the Americas, then, Spaniards immediately founded towns

for themselves in order to legitimate their dominion.9
Under Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, who arrived in Peru in 1569, Spaniards
insisted on resettling Andeans from their small hamlets into new Spanish-
style towns in order to introduce them to life in a town-based republic and the
institutions of church and state that supported that life. Known as reducciones,
from the verb reducir, to reduce, these resettlement towns would concentrate the
population into towns with a uniform grid-pattern design that Spaniards believed
would help bring civilization to the people of the Americas. In this, Spaniards
were inspired by the plazas and squares of Roman architect Vitrivius, whose first-
century work was first published in Spanish in the late fifteenth century, and that
of the Renaissance Italian humanist and architect Alberti, in imaging the ideal
city design. The new resettlement towns, informed by Renaissance ideals that
considered the social effects of buildings and city design, were an early modern
attempt at social engineering. From the Spanish viewpoint, without the orderly
pattern of life, the buena policía, or “good customs,” of the Spanish-styled munic-
ipality, the people of the Andes were estranged from civilization and Christian
life. Orders governing the layout of towns issued by King Philip II called for
a large plaza and straight streets that would give physical expression to buena
policía. The straight streets and rectangular plazas of resettlement towns would
make indigenous Andeans into “true men.”10
With the creation of resettlement towns, Spaniards renewed and intensified
efforts to convert Andeans to Christianity, a requirement for buena policía. Each
resettlement town was named for a saint or other Christian advocation, and a
lay religious brotherhood to celebrate the saint was established for Andeans.
Condocondo, which had existed under the Inca empire, was “founded” as a
reducción town under Viceroy Toledo as San Pedro de Condocondo, with Saint
Peter as its patron. Asanaqi people, like other Andeans, quickly took up and
adapted these brotherhoods dedicated to the saints. The brotherhoods, called
cofradías, clothed the image of their patron saint in elaborate textiles and, on
his feast day, marched in processions through their town, carrying their saint’s
image on their shoulders on platforms laden with flowers and candles. Before
the end of the sixteenth century, church officials sought to limit the numbers of
indigenous founded cofradías, fearing that they could be a cover for a return to
pre-Conquest religious practices. Despite Spanish efforts to halt their numbers,
the new town based cofradías flourished, helping to give meaning to and create
ties of sentiment to the new reducción towns. Certain aspects of Christianity, in
particular the focus on the brotherhood between fellow members of cofradías
who collectively served the saints, along with generosity, humility, and charity,
but also Christianity’s sacrificial metaphors linking persons and domesti-
cated animals, were well-attuned for the emergence of a commoner-collective
Int roduc tion 9
political ethics in communities like San Pedro de Condocondo whose livelihood

depended on herd animals.
Building on Spanish concepts of God-given, community based popular sov-
ereignty, Viceroy Toledo also created a model for self-government within the re-
settlement towns, the elected town council or cabildo that was to share authority
with the hereditary cacique. This concept of divided rule was clearly modeled
on the Spanish pattern of dual government by aristocrats and plebeians. The
town councils were made up mainly of annually elected taxpaying plebeians;
the nobility was specifically restricted from monopolizing offices. Town council
officers would be charged with helping collect tax payments and recruiting
labor, in addition to governing. Toledo’s orders also compelled them to as-
sist the priest in conversion and teaching Christian doctrine. As town council
members led celebrations for the town’s saints, they publicly engaged in actions
that underscored their legitimation by tapping into pre-Conquest roots where
leaders’ political duties and their leadership of religious practices had been
inseparable.
Within a short time, Andeans adapted the imposed civil and religious
institutions and practices and made these resettlement towns their own. More
than that, commoner Andeans began to create new towns modeled on the
Spanish resettlement towns. In many cases, Andeans were returning to their pre-
Conquest hamlets, but re-founding them with town councils and the celebration
of the saints, now melded with Andean social forms. Asanaqi people originally
settled by Viceroy Toledo in Condocondo would create three new towns in the
early seventeenth century, carved out of Condo’s territory. Sometimes appealing
to the local archbishop, other times going to the viceroy, the highest civil offi-
cial in the Americas, commoner Andeans sought legal permission for their new
towns. With these new town foundations, indigenous social and political life was
transformed from systems of hereditary kingdoms and chiefdoms to town based
communities, with a concomitant reworking of concepts of legitimate political
leadership from rule by hereditary lords to self-government by elected town
councils made up of commoners.11 Andeans created a sophisticated hybrid of
pre-Conquest and Spanish political and religious ideas and practices that came
together to form the común.
From Caciques to the Común

While caciques continued to be regarded as the traditional authority in Andean
towns, by the eighteenth century, and earlier in some cases, they were being
supplanted by another set of authorities, the town council, known as the cabildo.12
Toledan ordinances describe in detail the process for electing cabildo officers,
but this did not automatically make cabildos a legitimate authority. Other long-
term processes simultaneously undermined caciques and strengthened cabildos.
Salaries for caciques came from the tax money collected from common Indians.
Just as Spanish nobles were exempted from a head tax, so too were Andean
nobles. As paid bureaucrats of the Spanish state, caciques’ interests began to
be more closely tied to Spanish interests. These ties were not only economic.
Caciques began to take on the cultural habits of Spaniards, dressing, eating and
living like them. Caciques owned haciendas, put their daughters in convents,
and required “their Indians” to greet them as nobles, ringing church bells and
setting off fireworks when they made official visits to one of “their towns.”13
Spanish reasons for creating reducciones had been, in part, to remove
Andeans from sites of native religion. In pre-Conquest and early post-conquest
times, caciques led public worship at local religious shrines. This was a vital com-
ponent of office holding as pre-Conquest relations were charged with religious
meaning.14 As Spanish efforts at forced conversion to Christianity effectively
curtailed many religious aspects of cacical activity, it also provided an avenue
for cabildo legitimacy. By the eighteenth century, cabildo and cofradía roles and
offices had become so closely linked that they were viewed as one complex hier-
archy within indigenous towns. Cabildo officers were expected to take an active
role in their town’s patron saint’s festival. Many cabildo offices had their specific
church duties outlined, from providing fronds for Palm Sunday to assisting the
priest in collecting charity donations.15 This certainly did not go unobserved by
caciques, some of whom attempted to promote their own legitimacy by listing
the saints’ celebrations that they had sponsored.16
The cabildo itself had taken on Andean shadings. Over two hundred years
of practice had made the cabildo membership larger and more flexible in
number and with a more distinctly Andean appearance. The people who were
considered cabildo members had broadened to include other town leaders: the
heads of ayllus; the captains who escorted the corvée workers to the silver mines
of Potosí; and a somewhat nebulous group of former office holders known as
principales.17
The political and religious institutions introduced by the Spanish in the six-
teenth century had by the eighteenth century become the basis for indigenous
identity conceived in terms of community-based collectivity and sovereignty. To
belong to the “común de Indios” in the late eighteenth century, one paid taxes,
served corvée labor, worked community lands, and honored the local saints. To
be a legitimate authority for the “común de Indios” one led these activities by
serving as officer of the cabildo and cofradía. If a cacique stole tribute money
or hounded the parish priest, he could be construed as a disloyal apostate and
therefore an enemy of the común.
Int roduc tion 11
The Age of Enlightenment and Revolution

In the two hundred years following the creation of resettlement towns, Andeans
melded pre-Conquest ideas and practices to imposed Spanish institutions to
create the complex synthesis that underlay their ideas about community-based
sovereignty that resided in the común. But just as the común took full shape,
around the beginning of the eighteenth century, the new Bourbon dynasty in
Spain, inspired by Enlightenment ideas, began to impose reforms that attacked
its representational form and the thesis of popular sovereignty the común had
adopted in its own vernacular. The Enlightenment is generally thought of as a
time when individualism gained ground against collectivities, private property
replaced commons, societies were secularized, and the state gained greater con-
trol over everyday life. These shifts are understood to go hand in hand with the
rise of the sovereign individual, who, gathering with others of his kind in cafes
and plazas, created not only institutions of civil society and a public sphere of de-
bate and discussion, but also new political theory to underwrite a revised under-
standing of popular sovereignty. That philosophy of classic liberalism legitimated
the displacement of monarchs by rule of “the people,” conceived as a collection
of bourgeois individuals. Of course, the Bourbon dynasts of Spain were aghast
at the anti-monarchial sentiments of the French and American revolutionaries.
They censored revolutionary writings (to little effect) and offered a hardline
counter thesis to popular sovereignty, arguing that God placed sovereignty di-
rectly into the body of the king himself. Aiming to consolidate and centralize
power, the Bourbons ejected the “popular sovereignty” philosophers, the Jesuits,
from Spanish realms, and aimed to streamline state control over the empire’s
population of individuals through a new administrative architecture, hoping to
undercut the myriad fractious municipal repúblicas that were becoming a danger
to crown power. The sum of these reforms can be called Absolutism.
Most discussions of eighteenth-century Enlightenment and modernity focus
on northern Europe and North America, taking the French and American
revolutions as the epicenters. But the earlier vernacular application of popular
sovereignty in the indigenous community of San Pedro de Condocondo in
1774 underscores some truths about the origins of modernity that challenge the
widely accepted view. Joining a growing chorus of revision of Anglophone and
Francophone theses on Enlightenment and modernity, this book affirms that
both came earlier and from further south, from Spain’s colonial peripheries.18
Yet, the Enlightenment and the course taken by political modernity in the
Spanish Atlantic diverged from that of northern Europe in a critical way best
explained by a difference in meaning between the English “the people” and its
ostensive Spanish equivalent, “el pueblo.” While “the people” is a plurality of
persons (and especially of “common persons”), “el pueblo” shifts in meaning be-
tween “people” and “town.” Popular sovereignty in the Spanish Atlantic world
always referred to rights vested in “el pueblo,” a “people” by virtue of residence in
a “pueblo” or town. When the people of San Pedro de Condocondo embraced
their right to popular sovereignty, it was not as sovereign individuals, but as a
sovereign town-based community, the común.19 This particular understanding
of collective or corporate political rights, one with a long genealogy in the
Iberian Peninsula, is not only a property of the indigenous común. It continues
to define the body politic of Creole-dominated Spanish-speaking countries in
the Americas.20
In the eighteenth century, the Bourbon Reforms that most directly bothered
Andeans could be summed up in the term “secularization.” Serving the saints, as
a cofradía officer, was understood as serving the community. But those serving
were exempt from taxation and corvée labor, thus depriving the state of much
income. Enlightenment-inspired reforms, with dual aims of secularizing and
bringing economic rationalism to bear, also aimed to reduce the numbers of
Andeans serving the saints. This would redirect income from church to state,
but it also undercut Andeans’ means to legitimate authority in the común.
Like the común’s killing of Llanquipacha, the late eighteenth- century
uprisings that followed were revolutionary uprisings of commoners against aris-
tocracy and in favor of something like municipal democracy. Seen in this manner,
the Andean revolutionary movements of the early 1780s become a grassroots
application of popular sovereignty not unlike that seen in other arenas of the
Atlantic Revolutions. Although they were creating a new public sphere of po-
litical action in their comunes, comuneros were not members of an emerging
bourgeoisie and did not employ the individualist idiom of the Enlightenment
in defining themselves or their anti-colonial movement. Instead, echoing the
Hispanic world’s tradition of democratic revolution, they declared themselves
to be sovereign communities. Far from being considered a vanguard by later
Creole revolutionaries who fought for independence from Spain, however, the
Andean comuneros led Creoles to fear and marginalize Indians from their own
republican-nationalist designs.
The Común
Many indigenous people across the Andes today refer to themselves as
comuneros, a term so taken for granted as indicating “peasant” or “indigenous”
status that it needs no explanation.21 But the contemporary meaning of común
or comunero came into use in the late seventeenth century and only became
widespread in the eighteenth century as commoners sought to define their
Int roduc tion 13
political interests in ways that often conflicted with their hereditary lords. During
interrogations following her arrest in the murders of Gregorio Llanquipacha and
his brother in San Pedro de Condocondo, María Michaela, imprisoned wife of
Ignacio Rudolfo Choque, an instigator of the murders, said she owed allegiance
to the “rey común.” When asked to define the term, María hedged and pleaded
ignorance as a mere woman. Pressed by her interrogators, she replied that “it is
the ayllus together,” making explicit an Andean definition of what on the surface
would appear to be a Spanish political term.22 The term, “King common people,”
or (in my translation) “the people are king,” then reappeared in another case in
the nearby town of Challapata, where a cacique expressed fear of the rey común
because “it” had claimed the power to elect or remove caciques. The term común
or rey común had become recognized political discourse and shorthand for a po-
litical philosophy empowering common people.23
Común was the term used by colonial indigenous people themselves in their
letters, petitions, and testimonies. Despite its Spanish origins, the term was an
indigenous social construction, a feat of the imagination that named the political
entity identified with sovereignty. How did indigenous make the term their own?
Sharing etymological roots with comunidad, or community, común had been the
basis for collective political action for Spaniards since at least the fifteenth cen-
tury. Something akin to the “sovereignty of the pueblo,” it had been a rallying cry
in the constitutionalist and pro-parliamentary Revolution of the Communities
of 1520–1521. In the hands of colonized Andeans the term revealed a revolu-
tionary potential that terrified Spaniards and Creoles.24 This study makes this
colonial indigenous terminology visible once again.
The Común Defined

The term común had many different but related meanings in the colonial Andes.
These various meanings coincided, at least nominally, with formal, Spanish
definitions. The Diccionario de la lengua castellana (1729) offered its first defini-
tion of común as an adjective, “that which not being privately held, pertains to all,
as common goods, common pasture.” In this sense, común is roughly equivalent
to sapsi, the Quechua term referring to common lands or other common pro-
perty. Sapsi or sapçi was defined in González Holguín’s 1608 Quechua-Spanish
dictionary in roughly the same way, as “common thing of all.” Testimony taken
in 1773 in the reducción of Santiago de Moscarí reflects this usage; townspeople
complained that the cacique had appropriated community land (“comunes”) for
his personal gain.25 While each tax payer had land assigned to him or her, other
community lands were to provide for community needs: to feed the poor, fi-
nance the local school, and pay taxes for the ill or those currently holding cabildo
status, or in service to the church.26 What becomes clear is that if caciques took
economic advantage of the common lands, they were directly attacking commu-
nity leaders, those who served the cabildo and the Church, by undermining the
community’s ability to pay the taxes of its office holders.
Común also defined the collective people of a place. In the 1791 edition of the
Diccionario de la lengua castellana, común can be “used as a noun, signifying the
entire people of whatever province, city, town or village.” This sort of “nesting”
definition where each progressively smaller group of people is known as a común
is reminiscent of modern definitions of ayllu.27 The 1608 definition of ayllu from
González Holguín, as “faction, genealogy, linage, kinship, or caste,” is less expan-
sive. But by the early eighteenth century, townspeople sometimes used común
and ayllu interchangeably. At other times, común referred to a group of related
ayllus (what Spaniards would call a parcilidad, and known by the Quechua terms,
anansaya and urinsaya), and, clearly, at other times, it referred to the entire town,
(the equivalent of the Quechua and Aymara marka).
The Común as Juridical Person

The term común seems to have been introduced initially as little more than legal
boilerplate, something that every scribe knew to include in formal petitions but
that carried little more weight than a series of “whereas,” “wherefores,” and “the
parties to the aforesaid.” Probably its multiple uses as common land, common
people, and common interest, and links to Andean terms such as sapsi and ayllu,
led común to take on specific meaning for Andeans as a person in law, or as the
collective public subject. This definition was slowly engendered by the repetitive
Spanish use of the term in legal documents that would hold great import for the
community. For example, in a 1711 boundary hearing in the Carangas province
town of San Pedro de Totora, possession of the town’s lands were given “in voice
and in name of the común of the said town.”28 At least by the 1740s, Andeans
had begun to use the term themselves in somewhat the same manner, as the col-
lective legal body of the community. Following accusations against him in 1744,
the cacique of Todos Santos de Tomave countercharged that the petition was
only “supposedly in the name of the común.”29 This of course suggests that the
boilerplate “in the name of the común” had to be backed up with some action in
order to be considered legitimate.
A 1758 report from the state’s attorney for Indians in the Spanish Creole
mining center of Oruro intimates how decisions of the común might be reached.
Beginning his report with a summary of charges made by the community of San
Pedro de Totora against their priest, including his proposal that they make ad-
ditional monetary offerings on certain feast days, the state’s attorney wrote “and
Int roduc tion 15
to this proposal [of the priest] they responded in the body of their común that
his Majesty [the King] had ordered that they observe no such thing.”30 Although
the state’s attorney offers no further details, this wording conjures an image of a
public meeting where the común could make known its collective will. Indeed,
public meetings seem to have been precisely how the común came to its opinion.
In 1775, following a written petition in which people from Pocoata denounced
their cacique, the notoriously abusive Don Florencio Lupa, and demanded a
new one, Lupa responded that their complaints did not reflect the town as a
whole, to which they replied:
The said cacique has resorted to saying that our complaint to the royal
government was made by us alone, without the agreement of the com-
munity. This is patently false in view of the meeting of more than three
hundred native Indians who in his presence, acted on this information
and unanimously called for our own cacique.31
With this example in mind, the increasingly repetitive use of the term común
in petitions from Andeans in the last half of the eighteenth century takes on
added significance. No longer mere perfunctory wording, común was coming to
represent the will of the people in a very literal sense, and pretenders to cacique
status were noting this change. If a cacique could claim that the común agreed
with him, he regarded this as strengthening his position. In 1762 a cacique
brought a complaint against a local-level Spanish bureaucrat claiming that his
community was being illegally assessed taxes for the deceased. The case was not
brought by him alone, because as he added, “the común of my Indians agrees.”32
Colonialism, Property, and “Race”

In English, as in Spanish, común can mean “commoner,” in contrast to aristocrats
or nobles, or it can refer to “the commons” as a form of collective property, to
which all “commoners” have guaranteed access. Sixteenth-century Spanish
towns possessed common lands, and even the poorest “commoners” held use
rights in those common lands, by which to support themselves in some way via
agriculture or herding or the gathering of firewood or chestnuts, for example. On
the other hand, while aristocrats in Spain had access to their town’s commonhold
land, they also had privately held land. Spaniards in the Indies identified them-
selves exclusively as holders of private property, aiming to amass and transfer
that private property through inheritance so as to create and sustain lineages
akin to those of Spain’s aristocracy.
The towns into which Andeans were resettled were established completely
as inalienable commonhold properties; the people of the town owned the land
collectively. Of course, usufruct rights in common lands also seems to have
characterized “property” in pre-Conquest times. So, when Spaniards granted
Andeans commonhold titles, they reinforced the merger of Andean ayllus and
the new town-based repúblicas. Caciques and town councilmen were entrusted
with equitably dividing up lands within the town’s jurisdiction among its
inhabitants on a regular basis as families grew or shrank. However, by the eight-
eenth century, caciques, whose claims to office depended on being members of
aristocratic lineages, were aiming to amass private property in a manner akin
to Spaniards, often by usurping parts of the common lands belonging to the
communities they ruled.
One result of granting common land title to “Indian” communities was to
reinforce and help shape among Andeans an understanding of commoner pol-
itics that celebrated an ethics of equality, redistribution, and investment in the
well-being of the collective and of the fields, pastures, crops, and herds on which
it depended, and that scorned any practices that held individual interests above
those of the collective. Yet another result of the Spanish granting recognition of
common land titles to the peoples resettled in new towns was to permanently
equate indigeneity both with commoner status and with commons, member-
ship in collectivities. By the late eighteenth century, when modern liberalism
began to be equated with the private-property holding individual, “indigenous
culture” founded on commons appeared to be the essence of non-modernity.
Commonhold property would be coupled with new “race” theory as evidence
of the inferiority of indigenous Americans. The eighteenth century was self-
consciously the age of reason, when science replaced faith as a way to knowledge,
with an urge toward classificatory or taxonomic thinking about plants, animals,
and people. Turning sixteenth-century “Protector of the Indians” Bartolomé de
Las Casas’ famous saying that “all mankind is one” on its head, Enlightenment
thinkers espoused a fixed racial hierarchy that enshrined “white” people at its
peak and put American natives near the bottom.33 With independence in the early
nineteenth century, Andeans would be systematically deprived of their rights
through liberal understandings of their assigned race determined in large part
through membership in comunes with commonhold, rather than private pro-
perty rights. But the común was a resilient entity that survived even those attacks.
Methodology and Scope

The People Are King is a work of ethnohistory, an Iberian Atlantic history, and
a series of microhistories. As an ethnohistory, the study of a people’s ways of
Int roduc tion 17
understanding their own past, it draws on the ethnographic method of “thick de-
scription” and poses anthropological questions to investigate the lived histories
of indigenous people, analyzing their religious, political, and social practices for
Andean meaning and understanding of their world.34 Increasingly, scholars of
colonial Latin America such as Jorge Cañezares-Esguerra, Karen Graubart, Jane
Mangan, Bianca Premo, and José Carlos de la Puente Luna, as well as many of
early modern Spain—most prominently Helen Nader and Richard Kagan—
have put their work in the context of the Iberian Atlantic realizing that it is not
possible to isolate the events, institutions, practices or people of the viceroyalties
of the New World from the Iberian Peninsula.35 This book joins that trend to
make clear that the colonial Andes cannot be understood without knowledge
of sixteenth-century Spain, especially the contemporary ideas and philosophies
about the importance of urban life and the nature of sovereignty, while putting
the lived experience of indigenous people at the forefront. In this way, The People
Are King meets one of the challenges of microhistory to connect the local case
to global history. The microhistorical accounts told here provide a series of fine-
grained, overlapping, interrelated, and sequential studies of towns in what were
originally the pre-Conquest federations of Killaka and Karanqa against a back-
drop of Spanish institutions and policies.36
Within these three fields The People Are King speaks to several important schol-
arly debates. Foremost, the impact of colonialism on native peoples. Scholars
of colonial Latin America have moved beyond the simple binary of resistance
and domination, where colonized people are seen as a uniformly and heroically
resistant class, and colonizers are in agreement on policies designed to main-
tain their economic, political, and social domination.37 One particularly pow-
erful critique of the “resistance school” is that it flattens the real lives and politics
of those in “resistance,” to create an “authentic” one-dimensional, unchanging
Indian—what Andean scholars refer to as “lo Andino.”38 Rather than searching
for cultural continuity from the colonial past into the present, The People Are King
demonstrates how Andeans grabbed hold of the new languages of legal codes
and rights of early modernity to defend their long-held values of mutual respon-
sibility and collective life in a manner akin to what Brian Owensby has found in
Mexico, and José Carlos de la Puente Luna has uncovered in Peru. In some sense
Andeans did resist Spanish impositions, but they did it by adopting and adapting
them, giving them new meaning and making them their own. While colonialism
is always destructive, and Amerindian reactions to the institutions, practices and
ideas introduced by Spaniards were constrained, recent scholarship has shown
that Andeans in the creole urban spaces of cities such as Lima, Cuzco or Potosí
were creative and effective in carving out spaces of action.39 The People Are King
brings rural Andeans into this debate by demonstrating how they fashioned new
identities in what might be called a process of ethnogenesis. By taking up and
adapting certain colonial policies, especially reducción, the resettlement into

Spanish style self-governing towns with commoner-led councils, commoner
Andeans came to challenge and ultimately replace the hereditary rule of indig-
enous nobles, forging a new identity for themselves as comuneros, members of
a república. These resignified ideas and institutions fit well with prior ideals of
mutual responsibility and collectivity.
The People Are King also intervenes in debates that are more particular to colo-
nial Latin American historiography: the impact of reducción policy, and the na-
ture of the late colonial rebellions. Colonial Spaniards almost universally judged
reducción policy to have been a failure. Studies drawing their evidence from of-
ficial reports by Spanish colonial bureaucrats have concurred, pointing out cor-
rectly that Andeans fled the new towns but drawing the erroneous conclusion
that the policy had no impact. Joining scholars such as Thomas Abercrombie,
and more recently William Hanks, Jeremy Mumford, Steve Wernke, and Marina
Zuloaga Rada (who have turned attention away from bureaucratic reports to
examine what local Andean practices tell about the impact of reducción), it
becomes clear that reducciones were neither a failure nor a success but rather a
catalyst for a complex Andean ethnogenesis producing new forms of collective
life drawing on a hybrid political/religious hierarchy.40
My research methods have enabled close attention to this process of
ethnogenesis in a handful of places over the entire Spanish colonial era. The
evidence presented here reveals the sea change in indigenous forms of self-
governance and collective self-identification from the pre-Conquest past of
leadership by aristocratic lineages of caciques to the commoner-led councils
governing indigenous municipalities. It clearly shows that the eighteenth-
century indigenous rebellions were as much about overthrowing indige-
nous aristocracies as seeking rights as self-governing indigenous republics. In
doing so, The People Are King also provides the genealogy of contemporary
indigenous collectivities of the Andes, as described in depth by numerous
ethnographies.41
To understand the 1774 events in San Pedro de Condocondo, the book
examines events in other towns in the region over the long term and links the
local and the global to make sense of both. The Llanquipacha murder is a fasci-
nating case in its own right, comprising nearly two thousand pages of testimony,
letters, petitions, and legal orders, but it gains importance as a vehicle to under-
stand the changes that took place over the years that separated the imposition
of resettlement towns in the 1570s and the revolutionary moment of the 1780s.
Little about the Condo murders makes sense without an in-depth understanding
of how the común came to exist. A group of “Indians” killing their “Indian” he-
reditary lord because he sent away their Spanish priest was incomprehensible to
Int roduc tion 19
late eighteenth-century Spanish bureaucrats. It defied their racialized categories,

and they were blind to the evolution of the común.
This book is framed by two key moments in the colonial transformation of
indigenous lives: the Renaissance of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries, when Spaniards forcibly resettled upwards of one and a half million
native Andeans, and the Enlightenment’s late eighteenth century, when nearly
Continent-wide revolutions shook the colonial state. This work portrays the
impact on Andeans and Andean responses to sixteenth-century resettlement
policies as the beginning of long-term, social, political, and religious changes that
redefined the indigenous political community. It roots indigenous rebellions
of the eighteenth century in Renaissance understandings of república and an
Enlightenment-from-below indigenous appropriation of the law that together
produced a revolutionary response to Enlightenment era reforms.42 In doing so,
The People Are King contributes to a rethinking of the origins of social and po-
litical change, reconsiders the long-term impact of colonialism and provides an
intimate portrait of how subaltern or colonized people defined and redefined
themselves and their political communities. It tracks a transition from one
kind of collectivity, the pre-Conquest dually organized kingdoms such as the
Asanaqi—composed of subunits called ayllus, and with a population scattered
in numerous small hamlets—to another kind focusing on reducción towns, in
which ayllus regrouped as parts of something Spaniards called república and in-
digenous people came to call the común. Many elements of pre-Conquest indig-
enous life were taken up in the república/común, but the resulting hybrid was a
profoundly different kind of indigenous political form, resembling in some ways
both sixteenth-century Castilian town life, and pre-Columbian ways, but reduc-
ible to neither. One commonality, however, is the centrality of collective life.
The research for this study comes from over twenty archives and research
libraries in Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, Spain, and the United States including
town, regional, national, and church archives. Colonial Spaniards were exem-
plar bureaucrats who frequently sent multiple copies of documents to higher
authorities; if a document no longer exists in Peruvian or Bolivian archives, it can
frequently be found in Argentine or Spanish ones. In other cases, archives hold
unique materials or original letters composed by indigenous commoners. These
include holographic letters written by indigenous people, letters never meant for
Spanish eyes, petitions to Crown or church authorities, trial testimonies, census
materials, church inspections, tax records, baptismal records, records from in-
digenous lay religious brotherhoods, chapel foundations, records of community
chests, testimonies taken and recorded by indigenous people, lists of indige-
nous household contents, contracts signed by indigenous people to hire school
teachers, and complaints against caciques and/or priests. This array of materials
provides a panoramic view of indigenous life and a multifaceted treatment

of their political culture, in many cases in the words of Andeans themselves.
Moreover, the abundance of documentation has made it possible to follow local
events over three centuries in a handful of related and neighboring communities,
revealing not just collectivities but the interactions of specific persons.
The people who are the subject of this book have too often been excluded
from their own history for being so radically different from colonial Spaniards
that their words could not be parsed. Rather than relying only on official reports
from Spanish bureaucrats, which generally attributed to Andeans motives
springing from their difference from Spaniards, this work gleans indigenous
meanings and reveals how contemporary participants understood the events
of their lives. It prioritizes letting them speak for themselves, sometimes by de-
tailing the contexts of their practices or acts and the kinds of futures they worked
toward and sometimes by reproducing words they spoke/wrote to judges or
comrades in arms.
These sources yield some surprises. First, many principal actors were literate
and wrote their own “testimonies”: that is, letters and petitions. Literacy in the
Spanish language was not uncommon among people outside of the elite class
of hereditary indigenous caciques. Late sixteenth-century Andeans purchased
books of Spanish law and manuals of instruction on how to file lawsuits. By the
seventeenth century, they were composing petitions directed to civil and polit-
ical authorities, which in some cases sought to curtail the power of the cacique
in favor of town council officials. Dozens of letters were written by rebels during
the Great Rebellion of the 1780s. The fact that all these petitions and letters were
written in Spanish might lead one to question how much of the “native” voice
can be heard in the “master’s” language.43 But literacy was not taught in indige-
nous languages in the Andes, and there was no standard orthography to draw on
with which to write those languages.
Through traces in the documentary record left by Andeans, it is possible to
glimpse the kinds of social and political entities significant to them, the varieties
of contexts for productive political and religious life, and the goals and values for
which they fought. Andeans speak through their testimony before judges at their
trials but also in litigation over local leadership positions, land, or injustices vis-
ited on them by administrative or religious authorities—and sometimes in let-
ters of correspondence. Rather than the aristocratic hereditary elite, the focus is
on tribute-paying commoners among native Andeans in small indigenous towns
who began to reshape colonial policy for their own purposes and who created their
own towns over the objections of local Spanish officials. Andeans were not merely
bystanders but architects of the world-transforming events of the age of Atlantic
Revolutions and the forerunners of today’s Indianist movements in Bolivia.
Int roduc tion 21
The book is divided into three parts that are both chronological and thematic.
Part I moves from the mid-fifteenth century to the late sixteenth century and
examines pre-Conquest Andean and Spanish societies then turns to the rad-
ical changes Spaniards imposed on Andeans. Chapter 1 presents an overview
of pre-Conquest Andean society from the standpoint of the Asanaqi people of
the southern highlands who were conquered by the Inca in about 1460. This
chapter sets the stage for understanding the transformations that both Spanish
and Andean political and social organization underwent as they clashed and
came together in the colonial era. Chapter 2 examines the political and religious
ideas that Spaniards carried with them to the New World, particularly their
notions of civilization and performance of Christianity within towns defined as
republics. Chapter three looks closely at one of the most destabilizing policies
introduced by Spaniards: the uprooting of 1.5 million people and their reset-
tlement in towns based on an idealized version of those of Castile. Spaniards
did not resettle indigenous people merely to exploit them economically but, as
they understood it, to ensure that their “natural rights” would be protected as
members of “repúblicas” subject to the king. For them, it was only within mu-
nicipal social structures that civilization, and hence Christianity, could exist.44
This chapter reveals what indigenous people initially made of this resettlement
policy and of the political and religious ideas and practices they were to learn in
the new towns.
Part II explores what Andeans born into this new colonial world made of the
institutions and policies imposed on their parents and grandparents. Chapter 4
shows that Andeans both followed and modified the resettlement policies. At
the center of this is the question of indigenous agency. How can Andeans “obey”
the letter of the law and yet “resist” its impositions? Andeans followed legal
strategies, appealing to either the civil or the ecclesiastical authorities for per-
mission to create their own towns.
Spanish resettlement policy was not an end in itself but a means to achieve
evangelization and imposition of Spanish ideas of civilization. Chapter five
focuses on the role of religious practices that would make the space of the newly
created towns meaningful places for Andeans. The religious dimensions of po-
litical culture demonstrate how the kinds of civil and religious offices character-
istic of colonially founded towns became the basis through which commoner
Andeans criticized both church and state. Yet as examples of animal sacrifice
demonstrate, orthodox Spanish Catholicism was not at the center of Andean
political culture. Tracing the modern system of alternating sponsorship of reli-
gious fiestas with civil duties to the eighteenth century, this chapter shows how
participation in religious and civil offices was transformed through the use of
local, indigenous idioms into a means to legitimate authority.
Chapter 6 turns to the civil aspects of political culture that made towns mean-
ingful places and contrasts the commoner authority developed in c hapter 5 with
that of the hereditary caciques. Commoners objected to the Hispanization of
their caciques, but also to their aristocratic pretensions and their claims to a pre-
eminent place in an incipient racial hierarchy. At the same time, caciques tried
to preserve their authority by tapping into culturally Andean behavior, doing
things such as pouring libations, as pre-Conquest caciques did, in order to legit-
imate their call for commoners to perform forced labor in Spanish silver mines.
Part III turns to the revolutionary outcome of over 250 years of colonialism.
Chapter seven closely narrates the murders of the Llanquipacha brothers. This
account reveals how people of Condo understood legitimate rule and tyranny
and why they were driven to remove Llanquipacha from the office of cacique by
any means. Chapter 8 examines the revolutionary moment of 1780–1782 and
reveals the crucial role that letters written by comuneros and their circulation
among rebel towns played in generating and coordinating region-wide uprisings.
Through a large corpus of holographic letters, it traces the evolution of the
uprising.
The book concludes by comparing the proto-nationalist quality of comuneros’
political language and their notions of municipal self-governance and citizenship
with those of their Creole contemporaries to demonstrate that a political philos-
ophy that could support a national public sphere was not purely an elite-driven
goal. As Creoles’ ideas of “republics” independent of Spain evolved between
1780 and 1825, they justified their exclusion of Andeans from full participation
in national political life by attributing to them a terrifying anti-modernity and po-
tential for violence. Perhaps Creoles unconsciously recognized that comuneros
were also poised for autonomy and nation building.45 The brutal suppression of
the revolution effectively curtailed that movement for Andeans.
In the new postcolonial nation, liberal ideas of individualism and private pro-
perty came to define modernity and the bounds of the proper political commu-
nity. Based on their communally held lands, seen as an inefficient ancient holdover
that would drag down the national economy, “Indians” were largely excluded
from political rights in the new nation of Bolivia. Across Latin America, newly
independent Creoles began policies aimed at destroying indigenous people’s
ethnic identity. As one post-independence patriot wrote: “To expand our agri-
culture it would be necessary to hispanicize our Indians. . . . it would be very de-
sirable that the Indians be extinguished by miscegenation with the whites . . . ”46 Try
as they might, however, white elites could not extinguish the indigenous común.
The towns depicted in this book defeated efforts to crush their liberties and steal
their lands from 1825 until the revolution of 1952, in which these comunes also
played important roles. Indigenous Bolivians regained their citizenship rights
Int roduc tion 23
only with the revolution of 1952 and gained full participation in the state, as
well as recognition of the right to self-governance and to possession of the com-
mons, through the election of an indigenous president, Evo Morales, in 2005.
Left behind for centuries was the alternative vision of community-based democ-
racy as a bulwark of human rights and rights of the land so deeply entangled
in the Andes with the común of persons—and something lately recognized in
the constitution of the plurinational Bolivian state. That vision had already been
eloquently expressed by eighteenth-century revolutionaries in the phrase “rey
común”: The people are king!
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Even while the examination of this group of assassins was going
on, and after the change in the Ministry had been effected, another
plot against the lives of the same men was discovered. This
conspiracy was, however, less important as respects the rank of the
persons involved and less extensive in the number of those
participating. Most of the ten Koreans thought to be concerned in it
belonged to the Yang-ban class, or the “gentry,” and all were
followers of Confucianism. The opinion prevailed that the motive of
these conspirators was scarcely to any degree patriotic; but that their
principal object was to collect money from the disappointed political
groups of the capital. At all events, seven of the criminals were
arrested, the plot broken up thoroughly, and another lesson given to
Korean officialdom that assassination is no longer to be so sure a
path to official promotion and Imperial influence as it has too often
been in the past history of the country.
An amusing but significant incident illustrative of Korean official
procedure came under my own observation. Prince Tokugawa, who
had been staying somewhat more than a week at Miss Sontag’s,
before leaving Korea, gave an “at home” to about one hundred and
fifty invited guests. Soon after the company had assembled, and
while the ladies were in the drawing-room and the gentlemen in the
large outer, enclosed verandah, suddenly the electric lights went out
and the company were left in total darkness. The gentleman with
whom I was conversing at the moment and I looked through the
glass doors of the verandah and observed that the electric lights
outside were still burning. At this discovery my companion, who had
had some experience in the ways of Seoul diplomacy, became
somewhat disturbed, and remarked: “Such things sometimes happen
by previous arrangement.” Almost immediately after the sudden
darkness came on, a servant emerged from the dining-hall with a
lighted taper, and crossing to the drawing-room proceeded to light
the numerous candelabra. At the heels of the servant followed
Prince Eui Wha, pale with fright, on his way from the verandah to the
drawing-room, where he slipped behind a barricade of ladies and
planted himself against the wall. It should be remembered in
explanation of so singular behavior that this Prince, although he is
the Emperor’s son by a concubine, is hated by no fewer than three
different parties; these are the Min family, who favor the succession
of the son of the Queen; the party of Lady Om, who would gladly see
her young son come to the throne; and the violently anti-Japanese
crowd who believe that Prince Eui Wha is too much under Japanese
influences. It had been rumored previously that a letter had
threatened him with assassination. However this may be, the present
was not the expected occasion; for examination showed that the
burning-out of a fuse was the real cause of the sudden darkness:
and a servant repaired the connection so that, just as a workman
hastily summoned from the electric plant, entered the front door, the
lights as suddenly came on again.
The plots for assassination undoubtedly contributed to the causes
which had already for some time been at work to make necessary a
change in the Ministry. In spite of the enmity which the existing
Cabinet had excited on account of its unwilling part in the
Convention of November, 1905, it had held together for a remarkably
long period of time. Not all its members, however, were equally
sincere or efficient in carrying out the reforms to which they had
pledged themselves; at least one of its members had been accused
of a notable attempt at the old-time manner of corrupt administration
of office. The Il Chin-hoi people, or members of a numerous so-
called “Independence Society,” had been “heckling the Cabinet
Ministers” by accusing them of venality and incapacity. In a memorial
forwarded to the Government by its committee, the beginning read:
“We herewith write you and enumerate your faults”; the memorial
ended with the amusingly frank declaration: “The only thing for you
Cabinet Ministers to do is to resign your posts and retire into private
life. Your armed body-guards are entirely useless. If you do your
duties assiduously and honestly, every one will love you; but if you
pursue idle and vicious courses, every man’s hand will be against
you.” Moreover, the acting Prime Minister Pak, although of good
intentions, had not developed the ability to lead and control his
colleagues, and he was probably acting wisely when he insisted on
having his resignation accepted. The resignation of their chief
involved the resignations of all and the formation of a new Ministry—
although not necessarily of a Ministry composed wholly of new
members.
On returning to “Maison Sontag” about ten o’clock (Wednesday,
May 22d) from dining out we found our hostess rather worn in body
and mentally disturbed; she had herself just reached home after
some seven hours of continuous service in the Palace.
Mademoiselle also appeared anxious about the comfort and health
of the Marquis Ito, who had himself been there during a similar long
period, and who had eaten and drunk nothing except a sandwich
and a glass of claret sent in by her to His Excellency. The resignation
of Premier Pak had been tendered on the Monday previous. The
next morning but one, the Seoul Press, published the following
announcement:
Marquis Ito’s audience with the Emperor of Korea on

Wednesday was a protracted one, it being nearly ten o’clock
in the evening before His Excellency left the palace. During
the five hours that he was with His Majesty, the old cabinet
was dismissed and a new one called into existence. The new
Ministry thus formed is composed as follows:
Prime Minister, Yi Wan-yong.

Minister of Justice, Yi Ha-yong.
Minister of Finance, Min Yong-ki.
Minister of the Interior, In Sun-jun.
Minister of War, Yi Pyong-mu.
Minister of Education, Yi Chai-kon.
As the same paper subsequently remarked, this change of

government, which had taken place with a quite unequalled
promptitude and quiet, followed upon a conversation in which the
“Resident-General spoke to the Emperor on the general situation in
a remarkably frank and outspoken manner.”
The substance of this conversation between Marquis Ito and the
Korean Emperor in this memorable interview was probably
somewhat as follows: His Majesty was reminded of the Marquis’
regret that a change of Ministry had become necessary; for under
existing circumstances it was desirable to avoid as much as possible
the friction likely to accompany such a change. But Minister Pak
insisted on resigning and the others, of course, must follow his
example. Now the history of the country showed, as the Emperor
well knew, that changes in the Cabinet were a signal for all manner
of confusion in the Government, caused by the intrigue of parties
contending for the control. Promptness of action would alone prevent
this. His Excellency wished to remain in the palace until the new
Ministry was constituted. Under existing circumstances it was most
desirable that the new Prime Minister should be a man who could be
trusted; and that, in order to secure internal harmony and freedom
from intrigue within the Cabinet itself, he should have a choice in the
selection of his colleagues. He should also have a policy, should
explain it to the others, and thus secure their intelligent and hearty
co-operation and support. In His Excellency’s opinion, Mr. Yi Wan-
yong, the then acting Minister of Education, was the man, of all
others, most suitable for the position of Premier. This advice—
accompanied, as it doubtless was, by words of plain but friendly
warning as to the consequences of continuing the old-time policy of
intrigue, deceit, and submission to the counsels of base-born and
unscrupulous fellows, who were always planning to deceive and rob
the Emperor in order to profit themselves—was finally followed.
The Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce and Industry, which for
practical importance stood next to that of the Prime Minister, and
which had been rather unworthily filled by its previous occupant, was
for the time being combined with the Prime Minister’s. Soon after, the
Minister of Justice and the Minister of Finance of the new Cabinet
insisted upon resigning, and Mr. Cho Chung-yung and Mr. Ko Yong-
hui were appointed to the vacant positions. At the same time the
vacant portfolio which had been temporarily left in the hands of the
Prime Minister was given to Mr. Song Pyong-chun. With these
changes and this additional appointment a new Cabinet was
arranged in the briefest possible time, without popular excitement,
and without opportunity for corrupt intrigue.
An analysis of the personnel of the new Ministry shows that it was
composed of comparatively young men and of men who had, on the
whole, previously sustained a fair reputation. It also was much more
obviously a reform Cabinet; its material was both more mouldable
and more homogeneous. The Home Minister had been the President
of “Song-kyun College” (a Confucian institution); the War Minister,
who was speedily made a Major-General, had received a thorough
military education in Japan and had been director of the Korean
Military Academy. The new Minister of Education had at one time
been Vice-Minister in the same department.
Almost immediately the new Cabinet, in accordance with the
significant decision to hold a Council every Tuesday at the official
residence of the Resident-General, met to shape a more definite
public policy. A full report of the speech made to them on this
occasion by Marquis Ito, and of the response made by Premier Yi,
was published for Korea, Japan, and all the world to read. In this
address the Marquis claimed that he had now, since his arrival one
year ago, acted in perfect good faith, with the immovable intention to
do all in his power to cement friendship between Japan and Korea,
and to develop the latter’s resources. The most urgent need for
Korea at present was a reformed administration. Reviewing the
history of the past thirty years in the Far East, with which his own
experiences had made him particularly familiar, he recalled before
them his persistent advocacy of peaceful measures as opposed to
those of a punitive war. But it was for Korea herself to say whether
such measures should prevail as would insure her independence in
home affairs and peaceful self-development, or not. If the present
Cabinet did not agree with him, let them frankly and bravely say, No!
If they concurred in his opinion, let them free themselves of selfish
motives and unite in bringing about the common good. To this
address of Marquis Ito, Mr. Yi, the Premier, replied in behalf of his
colleagues. After thanking the Resident-General for his advice, he
promised that the new Ministry would unite under his guidance, and
“despite all obstacles and in the face of any dangers that might lie in
the way, would endeavor to attain their object—the best good of their
country.”
Other measures followed rapidly, all of which tended to constitute
a Cabinet which should be a really effective administrative body,
relatively free from court intrigue and from the fear of internal
treachery. These measures, taken together, secured a new official
system, the beginnings of real government for the first time in the
history of Korea, as the following quotation will show:
According to the new system the present Council of State is

to be called hereafter the Cabinet, and the President of the
Council of State the Prime Minister. The respective Ministers
of State shall give their advice to the Emperor, and be
responsible for the management of important matters of
State. All laws, imperial edicts, the budget, the final account,
any and all expenditure that is not provided for in the budget,
the appointment, dismissal and promotion of Government
officials and officers, amnesty and pardon, and other affairs of
State, shall require the deliberation and consent of all the
Ministers of State as well as the counter-signature of them all.
In short, the new system aims at the enlargement of the
power of the Government in order to enable it to stand
independent of outward influence.
How complete a bloodless revolution was accomplished in this

quiet and almost unnoticed way will be made more apparent later on
when it can be viewed in its larger historical and political settings.
That His Majesty the Korean Emperor did not like the change, needs
scarcely to be said. The enlargement of the power of the
Government meant the diminishing of the Imperial power to dispose
of the offices, the possessions, not only of the Crown but also of
individuals and of the nation, and the lives of the subjects, without
regard to law, order, justice, or the semblance of equity. There is
equally little need to say that the Yang-bans and the corrupt courtiers
and local magistrates, as well as the court-eunuchs and
sorceresses, were in the opposition. But only by such changes is to
be constituted the true “Passing of Korea,” in a manner to commend
itself to every genuine patriot and to all foreigners who honestly care
for the good of the Koreans and for the welfare of the Far East.
The Emperor at first was reported to have attacks of being
“indisposed,” which prevented his seeing the Ministers when they
came for consultation, or for the imperial sanction to their acts under
the new régime. But, on the whole, his health gradually so improved
that he was able to accept the situation with more apparent
acquiescence, if not inner complacency. And the fright which soon
arose over the serious consequences that were to follow his alleged
Commission of Koreans and their “foreign friend” to enter formal
protest against Japan at The Hague Peace Conference, at least for
the time being made the humiliations suffered from his own subjects
at home the easier to be borne.
According to unfailing Korean custom, it was to be expected that
the ex-Ministers would become at once opponents of their
successors in office and powerful factors in the intrigues designed to
destroy the influence of the latter with the Emperor. The success of
the new Ministry, especially in the matter of those reforms which
made Marquis Ito’s administration so obnoxious to the ruling classes,
was therefore in peril from the Ministry that had resigned. But
influence of a private and suspicious character with His Majesty had
become, under the new régime, less important and less likely to be
profitable; and the ex-Ministers were not only to be rendered
innocuous, even if any of them might at any time be disposed to do
harm, but were also themselves to be committed by motives of
personal interest to a more responsible, relatively reformed mode of
administering national affairs. The new Korean Government decided
to “create” the office of “Councillor in the Privy Council”; the ex-
Ministers were themselves promptly appointed to this office. They
were given comfortable salaries, and three of them—including the
one who had been publicly reported as having put on a coat-of-mail
and secreted himself in his own house, through fear of
assassination, at the time of his resignation—were sent on a tour of
inspection to Japan. Here they were received in audience by His
Imperial Majesty the Emperor of Japan, and so well treated that they
might reasonably be expected to return to their own country with a
spirit of hearty co-operation in measures for reforming the condition
of their own country after the Japanese model.
Among the other events of the spring months of 1907 was one
which, while in itself considered, was relatively unimportant, was
destined to become of no small political influence upon the Japanese
policy in Korea and upon the relation of the Emperor and the court
circle to that policy. This was the sudden departure, after selling his
effects at auction, of Mr. Homer B. Hulbert. It does not belong to the
story we have to tell, to speak of the previous history of this
gentleman in Korea, or of his views on historical subjects when
involving the character of the Japanese, except so far as the
statement of the facts and truths of history makes such reference—
mostly indirect—indispensable. But on this particular occasion what
transpired of Mr. Hulbert’s transactions with the Emperor is so
intimately connected with the political events of the period that some
special mention of them cannot properly be omitted.
Immediately on my return from Chemulpo, Wednesday, May 8th, I
found the excitement of the day was over the following questions:
“What was Mr. Hulbert’s motive for leaving Seoul so suddenly?
Where is he going? and What is his business?” Now the Korean
Daily News, the violently anti-Japanese paper which was currently
believed to receive the support of Mr. Hulbert, in the forms of
friendship with its editor, writing some of its editorials, and interest in
its receiving subsidies, had just published as a despatch from Paris
(dated May 3d) the following illuminating statements: “Korea will also
participate in The Hague Peace Conference”; but then again: “It is
reported that Japan will represent Korea at the Conference.” The
conjecture, therefore, was very promptly made by those in the
diplomatic service in Seoul that the Emperor had again given
another large sum of money to the same hands, with the same hope,
as formerly, of procuring foreign assistance or even intervention. This
was, however, hard to credit even by those most suspicious; for,
from the Japanese point of view, such a transaction would have
been on the recipient’s part very like “obtaining money under false
pretences,” and on the giver’s part, a breach of the compact with
Japan which might seriously impair, or even endanger, the imperial
interests. That such a commission was a breach of treaty-obligations
will be made perfectly clear when we come to narrate the true history
of the compact made in November, 1905.
Inquiry resulted only in finding that Mr. Hulbert’s real plans in
going, and even his reasons for going at all, had not been confided
to any of his most intimate friends. His Korean associates, outside of
the very few higher officials that might be in the secret, held the
absurd opinion that he had been bought off from his devotion to
them by the Marquis Ito, to whose official residence he had resorted
for a conference and an agreement as to terms. To the other
foreigners he had assigned the condition of his family affairs as the
reason for his removal. To one of his more intimate friends among
the missionaries he had claimed that, having heard of a wealthy
American who might be induced to give a large sum of money to
found an educational institution in Korea, he was going to try to
secure the gift. The only points of agreement were that the journey
was to be made over the Siberian Railway, and that there was to be
a considerable stop in St. Petersburg. In a quite unexpected but
entirely authentic way it became known to me within a few hours that
Mr. Hulbert had indeed gone from Seoul with a large gift of money
from His Majesty and with an important commission to execute.
Although the precise amount of the imperial gift continued for some
time to be variously estimated and reported, and although its precise
uses may never be inquired into—not to say made public; that a
Commission appeared at The Hague, and its fate, are now matters
of the world’s political history. As such, it will be referred to
elsewhere.[3]
It would be a great mistake, however, to suppose that Seoul had
no other charms for us as visitors than the opportunity for delivering
lectures and for witnessing, from outside and inside points of view,
the human puppets which suppose themselves to be defeating the
plans of that Supreme Ethical Spirit who shapes the destiny of
nations, in partnership with those who partake of the spirit with which
He inspires the “men of good-will.” The Court intrigues, and even the
assassination of the Ministry, had little disturbing effect upon foreign
business or foreign social life in the capital of Korea. With the former
it made no difference of practical importance beyond the temporary
check, perhaps, to some promoting scheme which depended upon
the personality of the Court favorites for its Imperial support. There
was no particular reason why society should heed such familiar
occurrences. The weather was fine; the luxuriant bloom of the
Korean spring and the vivid and changeful coloring of the mountains
surrounding Seoul, invited to out-of-doors entertainments; and no
foreigner’s life was then in any danger. For, as to the last feature
favoring open-air sociability, the foreign visitor or resident need have
little fear within the city walls, so long as the mob is not aroused and
in control. Aside from one or two articles in the Seoul Press, and the
grave rebukes of the Resident-General, I neither heard, nor heard of,
any voice raised against the immorality and crime of political intrigue
and political assassination. There was at the time no Savonarola or
Martin Luther in Korea. But, then, in what part of America, or country
of Europe, is such a prophet now to be found? In Korea, as
elsewhere, politics and morals seemed only remotely related, even
in the minds of the teachers of religion.
The foreign society of Seoul, including, of course, the Japanese, is
small, but homogeneous and agreeable. It is, indeed, composed of
several nationalities and of varied occupations—from that of the
shrewd and hardened diplomat to the unsuspecting but devout
missionary. But whatever differences of views and habits, or more
important oppositions, lie hidden beneath, when the gathering is
social, there is a cordial interchange of courtesies and an
appearance of good-will. There can be no doubt that much of this
socially-uniting influence has its source in the will of the Japanese
Resident-General; and just as little doubt that the Japanese Imperial
treasury is somewhat heavily drawn upon for the expenses. But it is
worth for Korea all that it costs—and more. Especially true is this,
when we consider the effect which is had in this way upon the
Korean upper classes themselves. Indeed, it is foreign social
amenities and decencies, under the brave and efficient leadership of
the lady in whose house we stayed, that have made the Korean
court functions half-way tolerable, and that to this hour prevent the
housekeeping of the Palace from relapsing into an intolerable
condition of filth and disorder. But what the social functions that are
now encouraged by the Resident-General are in a measure doing is
chiefly valuable by way of bringing the Korean upper classes into
apparently—and as, I believe, the event will prove, genuinely—
friendly relations with the Japanese. This effect has already showed
itself to a considerable extent in the case of the Korean gentlemen.
Not only those who have been abroad, and those who are now going
abroad (for the most part, to Japan), but even the others are coming
to appreciate the value of more cleanly and elegant ways of enjoying
one’s self socially than were conceivable by their ancestors.
Gluttony, drunkenness, filthy habits and surroundings, seem less
natural and attractive by comparison with a few degrees of higher
social refinement. The hardest crust to break will doubtless be that
which encompasses and crushes the Korean lady. In Japan there
has never been anything quite comparable to the still present
degrading influences bearing upon the womanhood of the upper
classes in Korea. But while we were in Seoul, for the first time so far
as known in its history, a Korean lady walked upon the streets, and
after making several calls in this fashion, rode home in the electric
car! Her companion was a Japanese lady, and the two were selling
tickets to a public entertainment given in behalf of a benevolent
enterprise. Being present ourselves at this same entertainment, we
saw to our surprise quite one hundred Korean women, dressed in
their native costume, enter the theatre, and seat themselves among
the Japanese of their own sex. If this thing goes on, racial hatred is
doomed. For soon it is to be hoped, or feared, according to one’s
point of view, that Korean ladies will attend garden parties and,
perhaps, finally, frequent afternoon teas and evening receptions, at
which foreigners of both sexes are present. And this, I am sure, is a
sight never as yet beheld by mortal eyes; at least my eyes saw no
sign of its beginning as yet in the now half-opened “Hermit
Kingdom.”
A few days after our arrival our host gave us an afternoon
reception at the Residency House. It was a beautiful day; and the
grounds, which had been decorated as it is difficult for other than the
Japanese professionals to do, were beautiful as was the day. The
first two hours were spent upon the hill above the Residence, from
which there are fine and extensive views of Seoul and its environing
mountains. There, in the several well-situated booths and tea-
houses, light refreshments were served. There, too, we were
introduced to the whole of Seoul “society,” some of whom we were
glad to call our “friends,” when we parted from them nearly two
months later. The Japanese officials, the foreign Consuls, with their
wives and daughters, the Korean officials without their families, the
Roman Catholic Archbishop and the Protestant missionaries, and a
few of the leading business people, made up that sort of a gathering
which is most thoroughly human and most interesting. A collation,
with chatting and hand-shaking, in the Marquis’ apartments closed a
delightful afternoon.
Of the various garden parties, luncheons, dinners, and receptions,
which followed and not only enlivened the otherwise somewhat dull
life of lecturing, reading, consulting, and observing, it is not
necessary to speak in detail. The visit of Prince Tokugawa and his
party to Seoul, which was extended for some ten days, was very
properly made the occasion of a series of festivities, at most of which
they were the guests of honor; but at the last of which—a reception
given in Miss Sontag’s house—Prince Tokugawa was himself the
host. The unaffected friendly bearing of these Japanese gentlemen
toward the Koreans, with whom they were thus brought in contact,
helped to soften the anti-Japanese feeling; and since on one, at
least, of these occasions, the reception given by Mr. Megata, not
only the foreign diplomats but also a number of the foreign
missionaries were invited, it gave to the latter a somewhat
unaccustomed opportunity to observe at close hand the enlightening
fact that Japan, like all other so-called civilized nations, does not
have its true character best represented by its coolies, low-lived
adventurers, camp-followers, and land-grabbing pioneers.
I close this brief description of our varied experiences in Seoul with
a warning against a very common but, in my judgment, quite
fallacious view of the relation in which the capital city stands to the
entire country of Korea. It is customary to say that “Seoul is Korea”
just as “Paris is France.” But this is even less true in the macrocosm
of Seoul than in the macrocosm of Paris. It is indeed true, as Dr.
Jones has said, that “as the capital of the Empire its political pre-
eminence is undisputed. Intellectually and socially it has ruled Korea
with an iron hand for half a millennium.” But it is also true that the
real interests and undeveloped material and human resources of the
nation are in the country; and that the uneconomical, ignorant, and
depressed condition of the people outside of Seoul is the chief
concern of all who really care for the welfare of Korea. The local
magistrates must be reformed, or the well-nigh hopeless task of
reforming the corrupt Court at Seoul would be, if it could be
accomplished, of little value to the nation. And if it becomes
necessary, in order to effect this reform, and so to bring about the
redemption, industrially, educationally, morally and religiously, of the
people of the country, then the “iron hand” which rules them from
Seoul must be either gloved or broken in pieces. But, in truth, the
idol at Seoul which the Koreans worship is an image of clay.
CHAPTER V
A VISIT TO PYENG-YANG
From the historical, as well as the geographical and commercial

points of view, the city of Pyeng-yang (spelled also Pyong-yang and
in various other ways) is the most important place in all Northern
Korea. It has frequently been besieged and assaulted, both by
Japanese invaders from the south and by various forces—
Mongolian, Chinese, Manchu—coming down from the north to pour
their devastating hordes over the country. It was hither that the
Korean king fled before the armies of “men in fierce-looking helmets
and bright armor with little pennons at their backs bearing their
names and family badges,” which were sent against him by
Hideyoshi more than three hundred years ago. The city is beautifully
situated; it is by nature constituted for all time as a principal centre
for distributing over the Yellow Sea the industrial products of fertile
North Korea and for receiving in return whatever the adjoining parts
of China and Manchuria may furnish for coastwise trade.
Previous to the China-Japan war there were probably not more
than a half-score of Japanese within the walled city of Pyeng-yang.
But some two years after the end of this war the Japanese colony
had grown to several hundred souls. During and after the war with
Russia, however, the increase of this colony was so rapid that it
could find no room within the walls of the city. It therefore burst
through, as it were, the barrier of these walls and built a new city for
itself outside the South Gate, which, like all similar enterprises in
Korea, by its neat dwellings and shops, its clean and broad streets,
and its general air of prosperity, contrasts with, and forms an object
lesson to, the Korean city within the walls.
The original inhabitants of the Japanese city were by no means
altogether of the class most creditable to Japan, or comfortable as
neighbors for the Korean population. There were many adventurers,
hangers-on and panderers to the army, who did not stop at either
fraud or violence in their treatment of the native population of Pyeng-
yang. And while the Japanese army during the war behaved with
most admirable moderation and discipline here, as elsewhere in
Korea and Manchuria, at its close even the military authorities were
not as scrupulous as they should have been by way of appropriating
land and other necessaries for their permanent occupation. The
wrongs which were then committed are, however, as far as possible
in such cases, now being measurably remedied or compensated for;
and in spite of the fact that the withdrawal of the divisional
headquarters of the Japanese army has affected somewhat
seriously the retail trade, and there still continues to be more or less
of disturbing friction between dealers of the two nationalities, and a
crop of disputes over land-claims that need settlement, there is now
a prosperous Japanese city, with some 5,000 inhabitants. The
Korean city is also growing in numbers and prosperity. As the two
nationalities come to know and understand each other better, that
will inevitably, but happily, take place here which has already taken
place at Chemulpo. They will learn the better to respect each other,
and each other’s rights; and to live together in freedom from
outbreaking strife and sullen bitterness, if not in perfect harmony. It
was a good indication of this possibility to learn that the Japanese
Resident in Pyeng-yang already has coming to his court for
adjustment more cases of Koreans against Koreans than of Koreans
against his own countrymen.
The invitation to visit this interesting and important city was most
prompt and cordial. It came within a few days of our arrival in Seoul.
In spite, therefore, of the fact that I was suffering from a somewhat
severe attack of influenza, brought on in the quite ordinary way of
breathing in the dust of the streets of the capital city, we started for
Pyeng-yang, accompanied by Mr. Zumoto, by the early morning train
of April 5th. To make the journey more surely comfortable, and to
emphasize the relation of the travellers to the Resident-General, the
party was escorted about half-way by one railroad official, who,
having committed us to another that had come on from Pyeng-yang
for the purpose, himself returned to his duties at Seoul.
The night before had been rainy—a somewhat unusual thing in
such abundance at this time of year; but by noon the sky and air had
cleared, and the strong sunlight brought out the colors of the
landscape in a way characteristic of the usual climate of Korea in the
early Spring. The railway from Seoul to Wiju is being very largely
built over again; so that part of the time our train was running over
the permanent way and part of the time over the military road which
was quite too hastily constructed to be left after the war in a
satisfactory state. This process of reconstruction consists in
straightening curves, adjusting grades, erecting stone sustaining-
walls and heavy, steel bridges; as well as in making the old bed,
where it is followed, more solid and better ballasted. The part of
Korea through which we were now passing was obviously more
fertile and better cultivated than the part lying between Fusan and
Seoul. There were even some portions of the main highway which
resembled a passable jinrikisha road in Japan, instead of the
wretched and well-nigh impassable footpaths which are often the
only thoroughfares further south. In places, also, the peasants
seemed to have overcome their fears, both of the laws punishing
sacrilege and also of the avenging spirits of the dead; for the burial
mounds had been replaced by terraces which enabled the fields to
be cultivated nearly or quite to the tops of the hills.
On our arrival at the station in Pyeng-yang two of the missionaries
met us with a friendly greeting. Before taking our jinrikishas for the
house of Dr. Noble, who was to be our host, I walked for a short
distance over the gravelled plain surrounding the station to where
some 100 or 120 school-boys were drawn up in military line to give
the foreign teacher a welcome. This promptly took his mind and
heart back to Japan as well as carried it forward to the future
generation of Korean men. On one side, dressed in kakhi and
looking very important, stood the larger number, who were members
of the Christian school, connected with the Methodist mission. But
right opposite in Korean costume of plum-colored cloth were arrayed
some thirty or forty pupils of a neighboring Confucian school. It was
a matter of interest and significance to learn that just recently the
latter, on receiving overtures of friendly alliance, had agreed to a
meeting for the discussion of terms; and when the proposal had
been made that the “heathen school” should become Christian, it
had been promptly accepted! This was, of course, a way of
achieving unity entirely satisfactory to the missionaries. At the time of
our visit the wife of the head-master of the Confucian school and the
wife of one of the teachers had become earnest and active Bible-
women.
While we were being conveyed in jinrikishas to the foot of the hill
on which stands the house of our host, and as well the church and
other buildings belonging to the mission, the Doctor himself was
getting home in a different way. This was by means of a tram, the
rude car of which seated six persons, three on each side, facing
outward and back to back, but with Korean coolies for their motive
power—thus reviving, of course, in new form the time-worn joke
about the Far East’s “Pullman car.” As to the position and
significance of the group of buildings, in one of which we were to be
entertained for nearly a week, I avail myself of the description in the
Seoul Press, published subsequently by its editor who was the
Japanese friend and companion of this trip. “As his railway train
approaches the city, the first objects that catch his eyes are a cluster
of buildings, some in foreign style, others in half foreign and half
Korean style, which crown the hill-tops and constitute the most
conspicuous feature of the magnificent landscape that developes
itself before his eyes. His wonder increases still more, as the visitor
inquires into the result of the great missionary activity of which these
buildings are outward manifestations. How great the success has
been may be imagined, when it is computed by a very competent
authority that fully one-third of the entire Korean population of the
city (roughly estimated at between 40,000 and 50,000) are
professing Christians. There are Koreans and Japanese, apparently
in a position to know, who put the proportion of the Christian section
of the population at much higher figures; they confidently say that
quite one-half of the whole population belongs to the new faith....
The success which the work of Christian propagandism has attained
in Pyeng-yang is all the more marvellous when it is remembered that
the work was commenced scarcely more than fifteen years ago. The
success of the work has not been confined to the city alone; it is
noticeable, though not quite in like degree, in the adjacent districts
and all over North Korea which looks up to Pyeng-yang as the
fountain and centre of the new religious life.”
On the following day, which was Saturday, I had my first
experience with one of the larger Korean audiences. The numbers in
Seoul had been, at most, some 500 or 600. But here, although the
address was in the afternoon, no fewer than 1,700, all, with the
exception of a few foreign ladies, of the male sex, assembled in the
Methodist meeting-house which was just across a narrow lane from
the gate of Dr. Noble’s residence. The peculiarities of such an
audience are worthy of a brief description. All were seated on the
floor. Close around the platform, on which were a few of the
missionaries and of the Japanese officials, were grouped several
hundred school-boys, packed as thickly as herrings in a box. These
were dressed in garments of many and bright colors. Back of them
and reaching to the doors, massed solidly with no aisles or empty
spaces left between, were Korean men, in their picturesque
monotone of white clothing and black crinoline hats. The audiences
at Pyeng-yang, as at Seoul, were much more restless and seemingly
volatile than those of the same size which I had addressed in Japan;
although it should be remembered that the latter were chiefly
composed of teachers, officials, and men prominent in business and
in the professions, whereas this audience, although largely Christian,
was of the lowly and comparatively ignorant. A distinctly religious
character was given to all the meetings in Pyeng-yang by prayer and
by the singing of Christian hymns. The tunes were familiar; and
although the language was far removed in structure and vocabulary,
the attempt had evidently been made, with only a partial success, to
reproduce in a rhythmic way the English words which had been set
to them. The singing was led by a Korean chorister who used his
baton in a vigorous and fairly effective, if not wholly intelligent,
fashion. The cabinet organ was also played by a young Korean man.
The missionaries say that the people show great interest and even
enthusiasm in learning foreign music; and that they are apt pupils so
far as the singing of hymns is concerned. The favorite native music
is a dismal wailing upon pipes and rude flute-like instruments,
accompanied by the tom-tom of drums. The address on this
occasion was upon the relation of education to the social welfare; it
was interpreted by Dr. Noble with obvious clearness and vigor.
The audience next morning (Sunday, April 7th) was not so large,
but was scarcely less interesting. It comprised both sexes,
separated, however, by a tight screen which ran from the platform
through the middle of the church to the opposite wall. The numbers
present were some 1,400, about equally divided between the two
sexes. The girls on the one side, and the boys on the other, in their
gaily colored clothing, were massed about the platform; and back of
them the women and the men—both in white, but the former topped
out with white turbans and the latter with their black hats. The entire
audience marked out upon the floor an impressive color-scheme. It
was said that there were enough of the population of the city
attending Christian services at that same hour to make three
congregations of the same size. The afternoon gathering for Bible
study and the evening services were even more crowded; so that the
aggregate number of church-goers that Sunday in this Korean city of
somewhat more than 40,000 could not have been less than 13,000
or 14,000 souls. Considering also the fact that each service was
stretched out to the minimum length of two hours, there was
probably no place in the United States that could compete with
Pyeng-yang for its percentage of church-goers on that day. Yet ten
years ago there was in all the region scarcely the beginning of a
Christian congregation.
In the afternoon I spoke to about thirty of the missionaries, telling
them, in informal address, of certain economic, social, and religious
changes in the United States, which seemed to me destined
profoundly to affect the nature of Christian missions in so-called
“heathen lands.” Nor did it seem incongruous when prayer was
offered that the “home land” might receive in its present great need
some of the blessings which were being experienced in heathen
Korea. For I had long been of the opinion that if the word “heathen”
is to be used with that tinge of moral and intellectual opprobrium
which usually attaches to it, all so-called Christian countries are in
some important respects very considerably entitled to the term. And,
indeed, who that understands the true spirit of the religion of Christ
shall hesitate to confess that America and American churches as
sorely need deliverance from the demons of cowardice, avarice, and
pride, as do the Koreans from the superstitious fear of devils or of
the spirits of their own ancestors?
The audience of Monday morning numbered 800; it seemed,
however, from the point of view which regards social and political
standing, to be of decidedly superior quality. This was probably due,
in part at least, to the nature of the theme, which was—“Education
and the Stability and Progress of the Nation.” The attention, too,
appeared to be more thoughtful and unwavering at this meeting.
The public speaking at Pyeng-yang was concluded by an address,
especially designed for the Japanese official classes and prominent
business men, and given in the hall of the Japanese Club on the
afternoon of the day before leaving the city. There were present
about one hundred and fifty of this class of hearers. To them I spoke
very plainly, praising their preparation for, and conduct of, the war
with Russia; then warning them of the difficulties and dangers in
business and politics which the rivalries of peace would compel the
nation to face; and, finally, exhorting them to maintain the honor of
Japan in Korea, before the civilized world, by treating the Koreans in
an honorable way. Although, according to the testimony of the
Japanese friend who interpreted this address, there were uneasy
consciences in the audience, the warning and the rebuke, as well as
the praise, were received with equal appreciation and gratitude. I
take this opportunity to testify that, instead of deserving the
reputation often given to the Japanese, of being abnormally and
even ridiculously sensitive to criticism, I have found them, on the
contrary, remarkably willing to be told of their failures and faults, and
ready to receive, at least with the appearance of respect and
kindness, suggestions for their correction and amendment.
My engagements in Pyeng-yang came so near to the limit of
exhausting my time and strength that I was unable to see as much
as would have been otherwise desirable of the externals, and of the
antiquities, of the neighborhood. From the piazza in front of our
host’s house nearly the whole of the Korean city lies literally spread
out, as all the cities of the country are, beneath the eye of the
observer from a surrounding hill. The streets within the walls are,
with one or two exceptions, narrow, winding, and made disgusting by

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Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Introduction: The Genesis of an Andean Christianity and Politics 1

PART I INCA AND E ARLY SPANISH PERU

1. Inca and Asanaqi in Qullasuyu 29

PART II THE ANDE ANIZ ATION OF SPANISH

4. Andeans Found Their Own Towns: The Andeanization of

PART III THE REVOLUTIONARY COMÚN

7. Comunero Politics and the King’s Justice: The Común Takes

Conclusion. The Resilience of the Común and Its Legacy 200

projects reevaluating reducciones. My deep appreciation goes to the team of in-

GmbH & Co.KG, Göttingen, Germany. Chapter 4 is a revised version originally

“Andean” or “indigenous.” When writing from a Spanish colonial viewpoint,

by townspeople as being made at the demand of Llanquipacha. These events led

Figure I.1 Map of Study Area. Map by Erin Greb Cartography.

and early seventeenth centuries: San Pedro de Condocondo, Santa Bárbara de

Andean Community Life and the Introduction

little fatherland. In the Americas, then, Spaniards immediately founded towns

political ethics in communities like San Pedro de Condocondo whose livelihood

From Caciques to the Común

The Age of Enlightenment and Revolution

The Común Defined

The Común as Juridical Person

Colonialism, Property, and “Race”

Methodology and Scope

adapting certain colonial policies, especially reducción, the resettlement into

late eighteenth-​century Spanish bureaucrats. It defied their racialized categories,

provides a panoramic view of indigenous life and a multifaceted treatment

Marquis Ito’s audience with the Emperor of Korea on

Prime Minister, Yi Wan-yong.

As the same paper subsequently remarked, this change of

According to the new system the present Council of State is

How complete a bloodless revolution was accomplished in this

From the historical, as well as the geographical and commercial

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Introduction: The Genesis of an Andean Christianity and Politics  1

PART I INCA AND E ARLY SPANISH PERU  

1. Inca and Asanaqi in Qullasuyu  29

PART III THE REVOLUTIONARY COMÚN  

Conclusion. The Resilience of the Común and Its Legacy  200

late eighteenth-century Spanish bureaucrats. It defied their racialized categories,