This book studies the institutions and administration of Indian tribute in the Andes, from the era of conquest encomiendas through seventeenth-century attempts to make tribute a more effective source of Crown revenue. Four chapters analyze the historical context, administration, and institutional categories of a changing tribute system. A fifth presents statistical data, including tables of Indian tribute revenue recorded at various cajas reales.
The author is at his best relating the details of Hispanic policy and politics to the evolution of specific tribute institutions. The book’s chief strength is its intricate, detailed view of the inner history of colonial tribute administration. The author reviews the methods by which the Crown absorbed increasing shares of Indian tribute. He traces the rise of new fiscal problems, proposals, and categories (rezagos, tercios, tribute de yanaconas) and so forth, and describes the shifting and sometimes conflicting administrative roles of encomenderos, royal treasury officials, corregidors, and Indian chiefs. The statistics reveal large annual fluctuations in royal tribute revenue, whose sums remained surprisingly substantial during some years of the late seventeenth century.
The limitations of the book derive from its failure to assess systematically the broader significance of Indian tribute, either fiscally or socially. The author presents his study as a contribution to the history of colonial finance, viewed as an “infrastructure that is fundamental to the understanding of socioeconomic reality” (p. 15). Indeed, one of the book’s merits is the specificity with which it discusses royal attempts to alleviate revenue shortages by expanding Indian tribute income. Yet the reader will find no analysis of Indian tribute as a proportion of total royal revenue from Peru, and is left to guess to what extent that proportion may have changed over time. Similarly, a narrowness of perspective limits the value of the author’s social observations. The author cautiously discusses the economic capacity of native society to sustain tribute levies (pp. 65-67, 71-75), for example, but neglects to address the qualitative dimension so forcefully presented by John V. Murra. Murra argues that tribute in goods rather than labor violated a fundamental native tradition that protected peasant subsistence production from taxation during poor agricultural seasons.
This book provides a solid institutional history of Indian tribute, and is a source of welcome data for specialists engaged in research. Its statistics are of limited value, however, unless placed in a broader context, and the author refrains from addressing the larger fiscal and social issues raised by his study. It is perhaps no accident that the text ends abruptly, without a chapter of conclusions.
