This book fills an important gap for students and nonspecialists on the colonial history of indigenous Andean peoples. Andrien draws freely on a tremendous outpouring of recent scholarship by historians, anthropologists, literary scholars, and art historians in Europe and the Americas. In particular, he introduces students to the vivid historical figures who make this subject so exciting for those who study it, from the early colonial chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, to Tupac Amaru II and his generation of eighteenth-century rebels.
Andrien organizes his book thematically: following a general introduction to Andean culture at the time of the conquest, each chapter takes one area of colonial life and follows it from the beginning to the end of the period. He makes the most of this structure to present a series of tightly organized narratives. However, in doing so, he sacrifices the coherence that an overarching chronological structure would have...
