Vertical Empire: The General Resettlement of Indians in the Colonial Andes by Jeremy Ravi Mumford (review)

Mumford’s book on the Spanish reducción policy and its implementation in the colonial Andes is a welcome addition to the institutional history of the sixteenth century. He divides his study into three parts. A background section covers the geographic setting, the native ceremonial centers, reducciones as colonial policy in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the Americas, and its sputtering origins in the 1550s and 1560s in the viceroyalty. He also discusses the Spanish realization that Andeans’ prosperity was the foundation for Spanish culture and well-being and their continued hegemony.

In part 2, he reviews the theory and practice of this control strategy under Viceroy Francisco de Toledo in the 1570s. He traces the discussion of the policy from the twenty-two-member Junta Magna of Spain to its implementation in Peru under Toledo, who believed that the general resettlement would transform Andeans “from savages to men and from barbarians to civilized people” (p. 79). In a chapter on Viceroy Toledo, Mumford outlines his instructions, including the locations of the new centralized settlements—towns should be as far as possible from Andeans’ burials and sacred places where they went to venerate their ancestors. The instructions were so detailed that they mandated that houses have separate bedrooms for male and female children, that beds be raised from the ground, and that all houses open onto the street, not onto one another, to help prevent such frowned-on practices as idolatry, drunkenness, and illicit sexual relations. His analysis also details the opposition to the implementation of the policy by native authorities and some Spaniards. The latter feared the loss of control of labor for agricultural pursuits and income. In chapter 7, Mumford shows how Toledo’s fascination with the Inca kings, ranging from vituperation against them to his efforts to emulate them and some of their institutions, turned them into tyrants, in part, to justify the Spanish conquest and bolster the rights of the Spanish crown. Yet, his study of mitmas (colonists usually living at various distances from the rest of their kin) influenced his design of the General Resettlement. Toledo determined that he wanted to transform comprehensively the Andean way of organizing space, while preserving it in detail. The last chapter in this section uses a series of case studies to show how Toledo assigned more than a million people to live in six hundred reducciones (p. 119) and the negotiation between inspectors and natives to effect a resettlement that would still give the native lineages access to resources at different altitudes in various ecological niches to enable them to meet their subsistence needs.

A third section develops how the reducciones took root, often incompletely. Overall, he shows that the reducciones in general were a short-term failure and a long-term success. His last chapter and epilogue associates his findings with state formation into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Finally, of special interest for scholars are his appendices discussing the tasa (tribute list) of the General Inspection, including where to find those that are extant; the population of the reducciones; and the secret dispatches from the king to Viceroy Toledo.

The strengths of Mumford’s work are his discussion of pre-Hispanic scattered-site occupations and the archipelago system of land exploitation that guaranteed basic subsistence. Such a settlement and production pattern made the Hispanicization and evangelization of the native population, the collection of their tribute goods, and the mobilization of their tribute labor difficult for the Iberian colonists and their descendants. All these efforts would be facilitated by the reducciones. A second point to laud is his command of the latest ethnohistorical literature to a degree rarely achieved by other researchers. He also corrects the record on Toledo’s understanding and use of mitimas (p. 112). Further, he briefly writes about the reducciones outside of the Andean heartland, that is, in Quito and New Granada...