There are moments when circumstances seem to pound away at existence itself: a lack of bread, or a feeling that everything is going badly. Native Andeans must have experienced many such moments during the various transformations in their way of life from the time of the conquest and colonial implantation onward. Nevertheless two centuries passed before conditions were ripe for indigenous people to rise up against the symbols of what oppressed them and against people for whom they had incubated a historic hatred. When they did they were influenced by explosive feelings, informed by new images of the world, and led by caudillos (charismatic strongmen) in whom they saw their own aspirations embodied.

Coexistence with the Euro-American “other” was a constant daily fact of life in the viceroyalty of Peru. It was never a simple one for anybody. The stratified and indeed estate-based social scheme recognized by officialdom and sometimes theorized as a set of paired “republics” – the “republic of Indians” and the “republic of Spaniards” – each with its own hierarchy, was crosscut by de facto differentiations of class, race, and access to power. The viceregal order that came under attack from Andean rebels and their allies was in some respects a typical European ancien régime, yet in others an unpredictably novel one shaped by peculiarly American forces including, as this chapter emphasizes, Inka and post-Inka institutions of leadership and ideologies of legitimacy. These pages synthesize the evidence concerning Andean rebellions and indigenous resistance from the end of the seventeenth century up to the penultimate colonial period, 1780–1800. It emphasizes forces within Indian society, forces traditionally neglected in favor of arguments about external factors, or macroscopic and “top-down” processes, which claim to explain revolt but usually explain only its context. The objective is to approach a political economy and an ethnology of mobilization, as well as to sound out Andean thinking and daily habits of resistance leading up to the late colonial explosions.

The “Republic of Indians” did not mount a single unitary assault on power but a number of qualitatively different struggles.