The Inca state's administrative system was the practical mechanism by which a Quechua-speaking ruling class of perhaps twenty thousand families in the Cuzco region managed the labour and resources of perhaps ten million subjects spread over a territory of about two million square kilometres. The system was, by the standards of every comparable pre-modern state, extraordinarily effective. It was also, by the standards of the systems familiar to its European contemporaries, conceptually unfamiliar in several important respects. The Inca system did not use writing, did not use monetary currency, did not use markets in any substantial sense, and did not use private property in productive land. It did use, in functionally equivalent forms, all of the things those institutions provide.
The Qhapaq Ñan
The single most visible institutional creation of the Inca state was the imperial road network — the Qhapaq Ñan, "the Royal Road," in Quechua. It comprised about eighteen thousand kilometres of paved or improved road, with the principal trunk lines running north-south along the highlands (from Quito to central Chile) and along the Pacific coast, connected by transverse roads at strategic intervals. The principal highland road averaged about four metres wide; the coastal road, in flat terrain, was wider; mountain sections used switchbacks, stone-cut steps, and rope-suspension bridges across the deep river gorges. The bridges in particular were notable: the most spectacular surviving example is the Q'eswachaka grass-rope suspension bridge over the Apurímac, still maintained today by the surrounding Quechua communities as an annual rebuilding (the bridge has been continuously maintained since the Inca period and is, in a directly traceable sense, the same bridge that the Inca built).
The road network was supplemented by a chain of way-stations, the tampu, set at distances corresponding to one day's march (about 25-30 km in the highlands, less on difficult terrain). Each tampu had storage capacity, lodging for officials, and (at strategic intervals) garrisons. The road network was reserved, in principle, for state use — official travellers, military movements, diplomatic missions, and chasqui couriers — but in practice was used by traders, pilgrims, and the rotating labour service. The Spaniards used the same roads in 1532-1533 to move their own forces between Cajamarca, Cuzco, and Lima at speeds that would have been impossible across un-roaded terrain.
The chasqui courier system
The fast-message component of the Inca state's communications was the chasqui — the relay courier service that operated on the road network. Stations were set at intervals of perhaps three kilometres in the highlands; each station was manned by two trained runners, who took messages from the incoming courier, ran to the next station, and handed the message off. The system was capable of moving information at about two hundred kilometres per day — a speed not equalled by any European postal service before the nineteenth century. Messages were carried verbally (as memorised oral text) and, for numerical content, in khipus.
The khipus
The Inca record-keeping system used the khipu, a knotted cord device that recorded numerical and (in some applications) phonetic information. A khipu consisted of a primary cord from which secondary cords descended, each carrying a series of knots representing numerical values in a decimal positional system (the position of the knot along the cord indicated the order of magnitude — units, tens, hundreds, thousands — and the type of knot indicated the digit). The colour of the cord, the direction of its spin, and its attachment to the primary cord all carried additional categorical information. About a thousand khipus survive (most of them in museum collections, principally at the Museo de Arqueología in Lima and the Ethnological Museum in Berlin); they have been studied since the late nineteenth century but the work of full interpretation is still in progress. Recent decipherment work — particularly by Sabine Hyland on the Khipus of Collata in Peru's Huarochirí province, where the khipus were preserved as community records continuously into the colonial period — has demonstrated that some khipus encoded phonetic information that allowed identification of the lineages and names of the individuals to whom the records referred. The Inca state was therefore not, in the strict sense, illiterate; it had a non-alphabetic written record system that we are only now learning to read.
The mita
The Inca state did not use monetary taxation. Its principal source of revenue was the labour service — the mita — owed by every subject household to the state. Each productive adult owed a fixed period (the figure varied by region, but was typically about a third of working time in any given year) of labour to state projects: agricultural work on state lands, construction on roads and public buildings, military service, or specialised craft production. The labour was organised through the local lineage structures (the ayllu, the basic kinship unit of Andean society) under their hereditary leaders (the kurakas), who were integrated into the imperial administration as the lowest level of the official hierarchy. The mita was, in functional terms, a tax — a transfer of resources from the producing population to the state — but it was a tax in labour rather than money, with substantial implications for how the imperial economy was organised.
The qollqa storehouses
The output of the mita-organised state production — primarily maize, potatoes, quinoa, dried meat, cloth, and military equipment — was stored in the network of state storehouses, the qollqas. Substantial surviving qollqa complexes are preserved at sites including Cotapachi (Bolivia, near modern Cochabamba, with about 2,400 individual storage units in five rows), Sondondo (Peru), and at every major Inca administrative centre. The Spanish accounts of the early conquest period describe storehouses still containing several years' supply of grain, cloth, and military equipment in 1533 — the state's accumulated provision against famine, military emergency, and the support of state personnel. The storehouse system functioned as the state's monetary substitute: it allowed the state to maintain its officials, its army, and (in the case of crop failure) its subjects, by drawing on the accumulated reserves of past production.
The mitma resettlement system
A distinctive feature of Inca governance was the use of population resettlement — the mitma system — as an administrative tool. Communities considered politically unreliable, or whose location was advantageous for resource exploitation, were relocated by the state to new homes far from their place of origin. The resettled populations were called mitmaqkuna; their numbers are estimated to have totalled several hundred thousand people across the empire. The system served multiple purposes: it broke up potentially rebellious population concentrations; it spread Quechua-speaking populations into newly conquered regions to assist with linguistic and administrative integration; it placed agricultural specialists in regions where their skills were needed; and it provided controlled populations near strategic frontiers. The mitma system was substantially more elaborate than the deportation practices of comparable Old World empires (Assyrian, Babylonian, early Roman) and is one of the distinctive Inca administrative innovations.
The panaqas and the perpetual conquest dynamic
The final administrative feature worth noting is the system of panaqas — the royal estates that each deceased Inca sovereign retained as the inalienable property of his lineage. The mummy of each sovereign was preserved in his Cuzco residence and treated as a living being: his lineage members continued to support him through agricultural production from his estates, brought him food and drink at appropriate ceremonial occasions, consulted him on family decisions, and brought him out on royal occasions to participate in the ceremony. The arrangement was politically substantial. Each new Sapa Inca inherited the throne but not his predecessor's estates. He therefore had to acquire new lands during his reign to support his own future panaqa. The system thereby produced an enduring institutional pressure for continuous territorial expansion. Some modern interpreters (notably the anthropologist John Murra and the historian Terence D'Altroy) have argued that the panaqa system is the principal explanation for the unusual sustained tempo of Inca imperial expansion over the late fifteenth century. The institutional dynamic was, on this analysis, a self-reproducing engine of conquest that operated independently of the personality of any particular Sapa Inca.
The administrative system summarised above governed a state of unusual sophistication for the absence of writing, currency, and the wheel. It was also a system whose surviving documentation is unusually sparse, and whose reconstruction depends on a combination of archaeological evidence, post-conquest Spanish chronicle accounts, and modern ethnographic analogy. The chapter that follows takes up the religious and social organisation that underlay the administrative system.
End of Chapter IV