Charles Walker has set out to write the history of the transition from ancien régime to republic in the Cuzco region. The chief practical obstacle to this aspiration is the disparity in the amount of extant documentation available: holdings for late colonial Cuzco are enormous, while those for the early republic are relatively meager. The author has negotiated this difficulty with considerable skill, no mean feat.
This is an exceptionally well-written account, and a pleasure to read. Walker has an eye for the telling quote, an uncommon ability to distill complex debates cogently, and a fluid literary prose. He is well versed in the relevant theoretical and comparative literature, but the book is mercifully free of jargon. Walker is the first historian to systematically use the region’s early republican newspapers as a source, and does so with profit; he deploys other early printed materials tellingly. This book is, however, excessively...
