This book looks at the socioeconomic impact of the boom-and-bust cycle of viticulture and the wine trade in southern Peru from colonial times to the twentieth century. Prudence M. Rice uses a combination of methodologies straddling such academic disciplines as history, anthropology, and archaeology and looks at material culture, markets, and the morphology of the region’s landscapes in explaining the vicissitudes of a peculiar industry in what is still today a peripheral region of Peru. She makes a convincing case for continuities in Andean networks, practices, and place-names despite the highly disruptive impact of colonial viticulture on the land and its inhabitants and culture.
Viticulture and the wine trade were some of the most consequential of the many cultural practices that came with the Spanish Conquest of the Americas. Its importance was not merely sociocultural but also economic: the Spanish Atlantic wine trade was one of the biggest between the...
