Andean Cosmopolitans explores the ways that indigenous Peruvians of diverse social backgrounds engaged with local, viceregal, and royal Hapsburg courts in Europe in pursuit of privileges, court case resolutions, and favorable legislation and ultimately not only transformed their social status in Peru but shaped the empire itself. While this book concerns indigenous subjects throughout Peru, it focuses mainly on certain justice seekers from Lima and on how they gradually accumulated privileges and eventually discursively claimed to represent all Peru's Indians by the late 1600s and 1700s. This book's structure is simultaneously thematic and chronological. Chapter 1 outlines the book's key contributions and contents. Chapter 2 demonstrates that while judicial archives suggest top-down Spanish and Indian elite domination of Peruvian politics, indigenous communities also shaped the state through various grassroots legal efforts from the 1530s to the 1600s, which they often determined in town assemblies, funded through their sapci communal assets,...
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