They were never supposed to sail to Spain in the first place, said royal law. But some native Andeans did cross the Atlantic, and hovered around Hapsburgian centers among the indianos or returned colonists. They sought titles and honors for themselves and their lineages while also litigating on behalf of their native communities, or, toward the mid-colonial era, becoming procurators for assorted claims pressed in Peru’s congested legal circuits. This opulently researched and forcefully constructed history of the first two colonial centuries marks a new level of historiographic command in the growing field of west-to-east transatlantic studies.
De la Puente’s highly original claim is that the oceanic web grew upward and outward from intra-indigenous communal affairs. Ethnohistorians will especially relish chapter 2, which explains how defending sapçi (the supra-household commons of Quechua/Aymara communities) stimulated new uses of the Andean cord data registry, or khipu. Litigation itself became part of the...
