The product of four years of teamwork in Cuzco and Lima, this massive book is a microhistory spanning several centuries of agrarian life and economy in Ollantaytambo. Located in the “Sacred Valley of the Incas,” roughly midway between Cuzco and Machu Picchu, Ollantaytambo included by the sixteenth century a large mix of Inca nobles, relatives, allies, and yanaconas, in addition to the valley’s ancestral inhabitants. Its ecology and commercial possibilities encouraged colonization by enterprising creoles and mestizos, and the formation of haciendas oriented to the colonial maize market. The peculiarity of its pre-Hispanic social structure (compared to that of highland regions less intensively colonized by the Incas) and the attraction it held for Hispanic colonizers facilitated a directness of social relations, including marriage and kinship relations, that rapidly blurred racial and cultural boundaries and gave the area a mestizo cast. The mercantile value of Ollantaytambo’s lands pointed in a similar direction, for it brought the area under the sway of expansive haciendas by the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, the Bethlehemites of Cuzco took over the best haciendas of Ollantaytambo.
Glave and Remy provide the reader an intense immersion into the history of agrarian colonization and enterprise in Ollantaytambo. Half the book studies the evolution of population, culture contact, landed property, and commerce and production in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The second half focuses directly on the Bethlehemites and the economics of their eighteenth-century haciendas, and closes with a suggestive preview of the quite different nineteenth-century hacienda pattern. Rich in descriptive detail, consistently sound in its reasoning, conversant with the issues raised in the general literature on haciendas, this book is carefully crafted and perceptive. Its detail, meticulousness, and sweep will remind readers of Manuel Burga’s (1976) study of Jequetepeque, or Herman Konrad’s (1980) study of Santa Lucía. A book of many layers, it offers something for nearly any Latin American historian. Social historians will find the biographical vignettes fascinating. The career of the local notary Antonio de Porras, for example, provides an instructive and intimate look at the art of mestizo-Indian relations and the related art of individual property accumulation. Hacienda buffs will find yet another example of the institution’s responsiveness to mercantile incentive, and many useful methodological pointers on the calculation of costs, profitability, and so on. Price historians will find important confirmation of Enrique Tandeters and Nathan Wachtel’s recent (1983) discovery of falling maize prices on the eve of the Túpac Amaru insurrection. Late colonial and nineteenth-century specialists will note the authors finding of saturated maize markets in the late eighteenth century, and a trend toward less monetized and more decentralized relations of production that made the nineteenth-century hacienda more decadent, fragmented, and dependent on rent than its more commercially dynamic colonial antecessor. On a technical level, historians will appreciate the exhaustive research, careful analysis, and mastery of diverse topics that mark this book’s luxuriant narrative.
Yet the book’s luxuriance is a weakness as well as a strength. The habit of analyzing issues from almost every conceivable angle and providing the reader with overwhelming detail can too easily evade as well as inform. Too often, the book seems to reflect a reluctance to discriminate between what is important and unimportant, to establish a connecting thread linking one point to another, or to drive home an argument about the significance or originality of the book’s findings. This volume offers richly textured description and analysis of a variety of topics in the agrarian and hacienda history of Ollantaytambo. This is no mean achievement, given the authors’ great sensitivity and skill. The findings, however, will sound by and large familiar to students of hacienda history, and this reader is still not sure what the authors consider their most significant finding or argument.
