From the time of the initial encounter between Europeans and the peoples who lived under the domination of the Inca in Andean America, outsiders were fascinated by the political and economic organization of such a large number of people who were spread over a vast and varied territory. Shortly after the first published notices of the Inca “empire,” European thinkers began the process of integrating their discoveries into their own understanding of the past. What was the nature of this system, with massive amounts of gold and silver that seemed to function without a money economy?
In this mature exercise in intellectual history, Villarías Robles carefully and systematically traces the evolution of Europe’s attempt to understand the political economy of Inca Peru. The theoretical models that are constructed by European observers are based on the empirical evidence, and the nature of that evidence is an important aspect of the author’s...
