Epilogue Available to Purchase

The epilogue offers a conclusion to the book’s main arguments and looks at the implications of the making of the kingdom by addressing the long-term efforts to create centralized political entities in this area, like the Viceroyalty of Santa Fe in the eighteenth century or the Republic of Colombia in the nineteenth. It argues that the distinctive political geography of the kingdom—divided between the cold lands, seen as civilized, and the hot lands, seen as backward—continued to shape the political imagination in the longue durée. In the nineteenth century, however, the making of the kingdom was distorted by republican narratives. Indigenous peoples were invented as naïve victims who passively accepted Spanish dominance. Thus the epilogue frames two of the book’s major interventions: how Indigenous peoples participated in, disputed, and negotiated the making of the kingdom, and the kingdom’s enduring political geography that continues to elude big centralizing schemes.