The Viceroyalty of Peru, the Spanish colonial administrative unit that contained the former Inca territory (along with most of South America until the eighteenth-century subdivisions), was governed from Lima — Pizarro's new coastal capital — by Spanish-appointed viceroys from 1542 until the independence wars of the 1820s. The administrative system was a substantial reworking of indigenous institutions: the Spanish kept the mita labour service (in altered form, with the labour redirected to Spanish-owned mines and farms), the qollqa storehouse system (in altered form, with the surplus extracted as colonial revenue), the kuraka local nobility (in altered form, as Spanish-recognised indigenous lords responsible for tribute collection), and even substantial elements of the Quechua administrative language (the colonial Quechua used in Spanish missionary work was directly descended from the imperial Inca standard). The system was effective enough that the late-sixteenth-century viceroy Francisco de Toledo could simultaneously destroy the residual Inca state (1572) and codify a body of colonial regulations (the so-called Toledan ordinances of 1570-1575) that would govern Spanish South America for two centuries.
The demographic catastrophe
The most consequential single feature of the colonial period was the demographic collapse of the indigenous population. The pre-conquest population of the former Inca territory is estimated at perhaps 10 to 12 million; by 1620, the population in the same region was probably about 1.5 to 2 million — a decline of about eighty to eighty-five percent over ninety years. The causes were principally epidemiological — successive waves of smallpox, measles, typhus, influenza, and (later) yellow fever, all of them Old World diseases against which the indigenous American population had no acquired immunity — supplemented by the demographic effects of forced labour in the mines, sustained malnutrition under colonial extraction, and (in some regions) direct violence. The recovery of the indigenous population began only in the mid-seventeenth century and was a slow process; the pre-conquest population levels in the highland regions were not regained until the late nineteenth century. The population catastrophe is one of the largest in recorded human history; in absolute terms, the death toll was probably larger than that of any other single demographic event before the twentieth century.
Potosí
The economic centre of gravity of colonial Peru was the silver-mining city of Potosí in the southern altiplano (modern Bolivia). The Cerro Rico — the silver mountain above the town — was discovered to be one of the richest silver deposits in the world in 1545; by 1600 Potosí had become, briefly, the largest city in the Americas, with a population of perhaps 150,000-160,000 (larger than London at the time). The mines were worked by the colonial mita system: each indigenous Andean village in the southern viceroyalty was required to send a fraction of its adult male population to work at Potosí for a year-long term. The conditions were lethal. Estimates of mita-worker mortality at Potosí range from twenty to forty percent over the year-long term, depending on the period and the specific mining operation. Across the colonial period, perhaps several hundred thousand indigenous men died working in the Potosí mines.
The silver from Potosí — about 60,000 tonnes over the colonial period, by the principal historical estimate — financed the Spanish Habsburg empire, the global trade with China (which absorbed substantial fractions of the silver as monetary metal, via the Manila Galleon route from Acapulco), and the broader European inflation of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Potosí mining economy was, in its sustained operation, the most economically consequential single mining operation in pre-industrial human history.
The persistence of indigenous society
Despite the demographic catastrophe and the colonial economic extraction, indigenous Andean society in the colonial period did not simply disappear. The Quechua language continued to be spoken — by perhaps a million people in 1700, and again by several million by the late colonial period as the demographic recovery proceeded. The ayllu kinship system continued to organise rural life. The pre-Inca and Inca religious traditions continued in syncretic combination with Catholic Christianity (the Andean Catholic tradition that emerged in the colonial period — with its veneration of mountain apus, its pilgrimage cycles, its mixing of pre-Columbian and Catholic figures — is one of the major distinct Catholic regional cultures and is well-studied). The Quechua-language religious and historical literature of the late colonial period (the Huarochirí manuscript of c. 1608, recording pre-Inca and Inca mythology in Quechua; the work of Guaman Poma; the Quechua plays performed by indigenous and mestizo authors) was substantial.
The Inca royal lineage itself persisted as a colonial institution. The Spanish authorities had, in the immediate post-conquest period, granted noble status (the so-called nobleza indígena) to surviving members of the imperial family. Descendants of Manco Inca, of Huáscar, of Atahualpa, and of various secondary lineages continued to be recognised as caciques with hereditary privileges through the colonial period. The descendants of Túpac Amaru's brother Carlos Inca Yupanqui survived in the Yucay valley. José Gabriel Condorcanqui — the eighteenth-century cacique who would lead the great rebellion of 1780 under the regnal name Túpac Amaru II — was a verifiable descendant of the last Inca through his great-great-great-grandfather Juan Tito Condemayta.
Túpac Amaru II
The largest indigenous rising of the entire Spanish colonial period in the Americas was the Túpac Amaru rebellion of 1780-1783 in the southern Peruvian highlands and the Bolivian altiplano. The leader, José Gabriel Condorcanqui Túpac Amaru II, was a Cuzco-area cacique with a substantial Spanish education, an active participation in the colonial economy as a mule-transport entrepreneur, and a documented Inca royal lineage. The proximate cause of the rebellion was the harsh treatment of indigenous taxpayers by the corregidor of Tinta, Antonio de Arriaga, whom Túpac Amaru II had arrested and executed on the 10th of November 1780. The rebellion that followed mobilised a regional indigenous army of perhaps 80,000 men and laid siege to Cuzco for several months. It was suppressed by Spanish royal forces with the assistance of loyalist indigenous and mestizo militias by mid-1781; Túpac Amaru II himself was captured in April 1781, brought to Cuzco, and tortured to death in the same plaza where his ancestor had been executed in 1572 — the Spanish drew and quartered him by tying his limbs to four horses, an execution that took several attempts before the horses succeeded in tearing him apart. His wife, several of his children, and the rest of his immediate family were similarly executed. The colonial authorities ordered the eradication of all Inca-related cultural practices — the Quechua language in formal contexts was prohibited, the Inca-style portraits and noble titles were suppressed, and the surviving Inca royal lineages were stripped of their colonial privileges.
The rebellion was the largest indigenous-led uprising against any European colonial power in the Americas between Pope's Rebellion (1680) and the Mexican Revolution (1910), and it was the proximate trigger for substantial Spanish colonial reforms in the 1780s. Its memory survived in the Andean indigenous tradition and would shape the indigenous political imagination through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The leftist guerrilla movement that emerged in 1980s Peru took its name (the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru) from this rebellion. The contemporary Andean cultural and political revival, particularly in Peru and Bolivia, references Túpac Amaru II as the principal indigenous-resistance figure of the colonial period.
The independence wars
The colonial period ended in the South American independence wars of 1810-1824, in which Peru was the last principal Spanish loyalist stronghold to fall (Lima was taken by San Martín's expedition in July 1821; the final royalist forces were defeated by Sucre's army at Ayacucho on the 9th of December 1824). The independence movement was, in social composition, largely a project of the creole (American-born Spanish-descent) elite rather than of the indigenous population, and the new republic of Peru that emerged in 1824 was substantially a continuation of the colonial social hierarchy with the Spanish administrative apparatus replaced by a local one. The new constitution recognised Quechua-speaking Peruvians as citizens but in practice the indigenous population was substantially excluded from political life through the mid-twentieth century. The colonial system of forced labour ended only with the abolition of the indigenous head tax in the 1850s; the great rural haciendas continued to exploit indigenous labour under various semi-feudal arrangements into the 1960s.
The republican period and the modern Andean world are the subject of the final chapter.
End of Chapter IX