Vertical empire

In 1569 the Spanish viceroy Francisco de Toledo ordered more than one million native people of the central Andes to move to newly founded Spanish-style towns called reducciones. This campaign, known as the General Resettlement of Indians, represented a turning point in the history of European colonialism: a state forcing an entire conquered society to change its way of life overnight. But while this radical restructuring destroyed certain aspects of indigenous society, Jeremy Ravi Mumford's Vertical Empire reveals the ways that it preserved others. The campaign drew on colonial ethnographic inquiries into indigenous culture and strengthened the place of native lords in colonial society. In the end, rather than destroying the web of Andean communities, the General Resettlement added another layer to indigenous culture, a culture that the Spaniards glimpsed and that Andeans defended fiercely.Jeremy Ravi Mumford is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Brown University."This is a work of superior scholarship, and it will have a major impact in the field of Andean studies. Scholars and non-specialists alike have long seen the General Resettlement of Indians ordered in 1569 as a crushing blow landed on Andeans by their Spanish colonizers. Yet Jeremy Ravi Mumford shows a much more nuanced, ambivalent process. Vertical Empire joins a fast-growing secondary literature that emphasizes Andeans' agency."—Kathryn Burns, author of Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru"Jeremy Ravi Mumford's gracefully written study is a major contribution not only to the history of the Andes and colonial Latin America, but also to the history of colonialism. The most detailed examination of the project to date, Vertical Empire adds new depth and dimension to what many regard as one of the greatest feats of social engineering in modern history: the resettlement of the Andean population ordered by Francisco de Toledo, fifth viceroy of Peru."—Karen Spalding, author of Huarochirí: An Andean Society under Inca and Spanish Rule