Of Colonial Notaries, Inca Utopias, and Emerging Indigenous Elites: Some Noteworthy Titles in Andean Historiography

The three titles reviewed here focus on aspects of the Andean past, and each one presents remarkably varying approaches to writing about history. Herbert S. Klein’s A Concise History of Bolivia is the latest and greatest incarnation of a staid national narrative by an exceptionally knowledgeable expert. Alberto Flores Galindo died in 1986, but his influential In Search of an Inca: Identity and Utopia in the Andes is an important collection of essays only now available to English readers with this translation. Finally, Kathryn Burns offers Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru, an intriguing exploration of colonial notaries and the bureaucratic foundations of Spanish imperial authority in the Andes. Each of these three volumes—offering some newer ideas and interpretations along with older ones—are important additions (though not necessarily brand new ones) to Andean historiography.

First consider A Concise History of Bolivia by Herbert S. Klein, a solid national history now in its second edition. It remains a solid installment in Cambridge University Press’s excellent Concise Histories series; however, this is actually the fourth version of Klein’s profile of Bolivia, as this particular “concise history” was first published as Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Society in 1982 (and updated in 1992) by Oxford University Press. The first eight chapters originate from the Oxford editions, but the first Cambridge edition ended with chapter nine, covering 1982-2002. The latest—and possibly last edition by Klein—covers the remarkable changes that took place in Bolivia between 2002 and 2010.

Is it too soon for Klein to offer a balanced historian’s appraisal of this recent period? He acknowledges in his preface to the Cambridge second edition that “unanticipated developments” might derail some of his conclusions concerning Bolivia’s more recent history. Nevertheless, if any single scholar can be counted on to render a reliable assessment of the last decade’s developments in Bolivia, that person would be Herbert S. Klein. His career has been long and fruitful, and today he is the Governor Morris Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, a fitting honor for an astonishingly prolific (22 books and 163 articles!) and noteworthy historian of Latin America in general, and Bolivia in particular. As Klein points out in the preface, “I felt that I could offer some insights, even at this early stage in the process of change, based on my reading of the past and my long experience with this country that has fascinated me for most of my academic career” (p. x).

Even if Klein never completes a third edition, the second edition of A Concise History of Bolivia will serve as an admirable distillation of his extensive knowledge in an engaging narrative destined to endure for the foreseeable future. Obviously any single volume national history will fail to satisfy all readers, but this book is an introduction—and a concise one at that—to Bolivian history. Klein’s interpretations reflect his areas of specialization (social, demographic, and economic history), but other aspects of the past are examined where appropriate. This reviewer tried to find some important exclusions and/or erroneous inclusions, but gave up quickly in favor of enjoying a smoothly written overview of one of Latin America’s most ethnically complex societies.

The unifying theme in this survey is the resilience of ethnic complexity in Bolivia. The population of the southern Andes defied easy categorization even prior to the Spanish arrival, leading Klein to label Bolivia a “complex amalgam” (p. xi). Chapter 1 does an outstanding job of summarizing the pre-Columbia development of indigenous civilizations within a challenging environment. By the time of Pizarro’s...