Elizabeth Penry examines ordinary Andeans from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in the Audiencia de Chacras then part of the viceroyalty of Peru (now present-day Bolivia). She argues that following the Spanish invasion of South America and the disruption of Inca rule, Andeans “moved from a politics of hereditary nobility, the caciques, to a hybrid form of participatory democracy, with the town council at its heart” (3). While historians have traditionally focused on North America and France as epicenters of revolution, modernity, and Enlightenment during this period, Penry asks readers to consider movements that occurred much earlier and at the peripheries of Spain's South American empire (11). To support this claim, she describes Indigenous grassroots political activity as “an Enlightenment-from-below” (19). Within this framework, common Andeans (comuneros) worked to understand colonial laws and confront their political standing. In particular, the book traces two important trends over this period: 1) the local reception of colonial laws, and 2) the rejection of corruption and the question of legitimate rule. Along those lines, it intellectually complements Alfonso W. Quiroz's Historia de la corrupción en el Perú (2019).

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 examines the Inca and early Spanish Peru. She notes that prior to the conquest, the Asanqui people lived across scattered hamlets, cultivating livestock and agriculture in diverse ecological regions connected by ayllu kinship groups and trade ties (32–33). Yet Viceroy Toledo implemented a widespread reducción (resettlement) program, which forced Indigenous peoples to abandon their network of pastures and fields and relocate to newly formed colonial towns. Toledo allowed Indigenous peoples to continue holding common lands, while allowing Spaniards to acquire private property, effectively establishing Spaniards as “de facto aristocrats” and Indians as commoners (66). Caciques occupied an intermediary space that granted them a privileged liminal status that the comuneros would eventually undermine.

Part 2 discusses the Andeanization of Spanish and Christian institutions, such as the blending of the pre-conquest ayllu and Spanish structures like the town council and cofradía (religious brotherhood) strengthening the común, a political belief that advocated for Andean's interests and self-governance. This political agency, she contends, occurred in towns and annexes across the Audiencia de Chacras, challenging the traditional narrative of a one-dimensional resistance to Spanish occupation. And while many of Toledo's resettled cities were abandoned, Andeans took to founding their own towns and annexes, which then allowed them to petition to create towns and cofradías. While their surviving records are sparse compared to Spanish town councils, Penry observes the “notary, alcaldes, aguaciles, and jilaqatas of indigenous cabildos primarily appear as actors when pursuing causes between towns, between the común, the body of commoners of a town, and a Spaniard, or against their cacique” (96). This section offers several anecdotes of organized Indigenous resistance to colonial structures, like when the governing body of San Francisco de Pocona demanded the removal of their cacique governor for allegedly “beating and imprisoning people unjustly,” and “driving residents from town” (96).

In part 3, Penry questions a longstanding historiographical tradition that locates post-conquest Indigenous peasant political autonomy in the nineteenth century, a myth that overshadows centuries of Indigenous political thought and collective action with narratives that cast Andeans as impoverished, fractured, and backward (204). Moreover, this mischaracterization of Peruvian history oversimplified the 1780–82 Peruvian Indigenous rebellions as a surge of Inca revivalism. Penry cautions that scholars have taken reports from eighteenth-century Spanish officials at face value, attributing the rebellions to a handful of supposedly great men rather than appreciating the grassroots organization and natural evolution between disparate communities and leaders over time (203). Some factions did support Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui (renamed Tupac Amaru) as a legitimate Inca king and others, even more so after the rumored death of King Charles III. Yet the influential leader and organizer Tomás Catari never championed Inca revivalism or the return to an Inca state (202). “Calling the events in San Pedro de Condo ‘the Tomás Catari rebellion,’ when Catari had no role in them, or lumping all these regional phenomena under the name Tupac Amaru points in a misleading direction” (203). What Spanish officials and historians have missed is the widespread belief in Indigenous self-government and the común's repeated use of this concept in their discourse and correspondence. While the fundamental goals were shared, such as political determination and lowered taxes, the comuneros’ motivations were heterogeneous.