Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780-1840

In Smouldering Ashes Charles F. Walker interprets the end of the Spanish domination in Peru and that country’s shaky transition to an autonomous republican state. Placing the indigenous population at the centre of his analysis, Walker shows how the Indian peasants played a crucial and previously unacknowledged role in the battle against colonialism and in the political clashes of the early republican period. With its focus on Cuzco, the former capital of the Inca Empire, Smouldering Ashes highlights the promises and frustrations of a critical period whose long shadow remains cast on modern Peru. As Walker shows, the internal conflict shaped the many struggles to come, including the Tupac Amaru uprising and other Indian-based rebellions, the long War of Independence, the caudillo civil wars, and the Peru-Bolivian Confederation. Smouldering Ashes not only reinterprets these conflicts but also examines the debates that took place - in the courts, in the press, in taverns and even during public festivities - over Indians’ place in the republic. In clear and elegant prose, Walker explores why the fate of the indigenous population, despite its participation in decades of anticolonial battles, was little improved by republican rule, as Indians were denied citizenship in the new nation - an unhappy legacy with which Peru still grapples. Smouldering Ashes should be useful reading for experts in Andean history, as well as scholars and students in the fields of nationalism, peasant and Native American studies, colonialism and post-colonialism, and state formation.