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In Smoldering Ashes Charles F. Walker interprets the end of Spanish domination in Peru & that country's shaky transition to an autonomous republican state. Placing the indigenous population at the center of his analysis, Walker shows how the Indian peasants played a crucial & previously ...

In Smoldering Ashes Charles F. Walker interprets the end of Spanish domination in Peru & that country's shaky transition to an autonomous republican state. Placing the indigenous population at the center of his analysis, Walker shows how the Indian peasants played a crucial & previously unacknowledged role in the battle against colonialism & in the political clashes of the early republican period. With its focus on Cuzco, the former capital of the Inca Empire, Smoldering Ashes highlights the promises & frustrations of a critical period whose long shadow remains cast on modern Peru. Peru's Indian majority & non-Indian elite were both opposed to Spanish rule, & both groups participated in uprisings during the late colonial period. But, at the same time, seething tensions between the two groups were evident, & non-Indians feared a mass uprising. As Walker shows, this internal conflict shaped the many struggles to come, including the Tupac Amaru uprising & other Indian-based rebellions, the long War of Independence, the caudillo civil wars, & the Peru-Bolivian Confederation. Smoldering Ashes not only reinterprets these conflicts but also examines the debates that took place-in the courts, in the press, in taverns, & even during public festivities-over the place of Indians in the republic. In clear & 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. Informed by the notion of political culture & grounded in Walker's archival research & knowledge of Peruvian & Latin American history, Smoldering Ashes will be essential reading for experts in Andean history, as well as scholars & students in the fields of nationalism, peasant & Native American studies, colonialism & postcolonialism, & state formation.