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Caribbean and Latin America
MARfA ROSTWOROWSKI DE DIEZ CANSECO. Histoty of the
Inca Recilm. Translated by HARRY B. ICELAND. New
York: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Pp. x, 259.
Cloth $49.95, paper $14.95.
In some sense, Marfa Rostworowski de Diez Canseco's
book represents a summation of her life's work, which
has been dedicated to interpreting indigenous Andean
society through the analysis of a diverse array of
Spanish colonial period documents, including chronicle and ecclesiastical literatures, administrative reports, census records, and litigation dossiers. Rostworowski's four decades of assiduous archival research
have revealed new primary source materials as well as
generated fundamental analytical insights into the
nature of complex social formations in the precolonial
Andean world. In particular, her work has convincingly
demonstrated the social and cultural importance of
economie specialization keyed to distinct ecological
adaptations and sustained interethnic relations among
Pacific coastal populations during the pre-Hispanic
past. Rostworowski's long and unfailingly provocative
stream of publications on the particularities and dialectics of coastal versus highland models of native
Andean political economy continue to animate and
nourish ethnohistorical scholarship in the region.
This book is a synthesis of ideas and source matenals that by and large have been published in other fora,
so scholars already familiar with Rostworowski's work
will find little new here. The book is, however, a
valuable resource for non-Andeanists and readers
looking for a concise precis of theories of Inca state
formation and the social dynamics of territorial expansion from an ethnohistorical perspective. The first half
of the text is given over to a rapid historical survey of
the formation and expansion of the Inca empire (although in her preface, the author eschews the term
"empire" as a Western category inappropriate to the
native Andean world).
Intercalated with this historical narrative, Rostworowski identifies specific social institutions that
shaped and facilitated the Inca's extraordinary construction of the largest pre-Hispanic political formation in the western hemisphere. Specifically, she singles out the deeply rooted institution of reciprocity as
a critical politico-economic tool in the early formation
of the Inca state, but astutely remarks that this institution subsequently became a burden and an impediment to the territorial ambitions of Inca kings. According to Rostworowski, in the initial stages of state
expansion, Inca rulers established and continually renewed strategie political ties with allies and conquered
populations through a prodigious flow of gifts—including various forms of luxury goods, prestige items, and
women—to subject lords. These political alliances
were often reaffirmed publicly in the context of rich,
exquisitely ritualized banquets hosted by the Inca.
Rostworowski succinctly notes that as "the state
grew, so did the number of lords who had to be
satisfied" (p. 46). The Inca responded to the ever
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
increasing demand for gift commodities by conquering
new territory, by increasing productivity in subject
provinces through alienating more land and extracting
additional tribute in the form of labor, and by creating
new categories of "citizens" outside of the system of
reciprocity who were tied directly to the Inca state and
not to their autochthonous communities of origin.
The inherent instability of this system is evident:
new territorial conquests generated new revenues, but
also new demands from more elite clients who anticipated a flow of gifts. The Inca rulers' drive to escalate
production in subject communities through increased
taxation of land and labor generated deep hostility
among the ethnic lords who were their erstwhile allies.
Not surprisingly, many of these subject lords and their
populations eventually rebelled against the Inca and
readily made the (ultimately woeful) decision to ally
themselves with Francisco Pizarro in his conquest of
the Inca.
In the second half of the book, Rostworowski turns
to a synchronie analysis of the "organizational aspects"
of Inca society in which she treats various issues of
social structure, class formation, and economie systems. This analysis breaks no new intellectual ground
but does serve as a concise, if somewhat fragmented
and incomplete, summary of Inca principles of sovereignty, class structure, and modes of production. Rostworowski's analysis is seriously weakened by its lack
of recognition that systems of belief, imperial cults,
and various religious ideologies and counter-ideologies also played critical roles in the formation and
expansion of the Inca, as well as in the inevitable local
resistance to their hegemony.
In sum, this book is an excellent Baedeker to
Rostworowski's fundamental contributions with respect to the documentation and interpretation of
pre-Hispanic Andean political economy. It is not,
however, a comprehensive interpretation of the internal social dynamics of the Inca state.
ALAN L. KOLATA
University of Chicago
Red Rubber, Bleeding
Trees: Violence, Slavely, and Empire in Northwest Amazonia, 1850-1933. Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press. 1998. Pp. xvii, 270. Cloth $60.00, paper
$21.95.
MICHAEL EDWARD STANFIELD.
The "Putumayo scandal" of 1907-1914 focused attention on the ill-treatment of laborers who extracted
rubber from trees in the Northwest Amazonia region
of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. The late nineteenthcentury demand for rubber for use in the industries of
Europe and North America "opened" the upper Amazon to commodity production and, because of its
profitability, to geopolitical contention. Rubber from
this region and from the African Congo dominated the
world trade, producing over ninety-nine percent of the
exported rubber in 1906, although not without negative human and environmental consequences. Roger
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