Until now, Andean peasants have primarily been thought of by scholars as isolated subsistence farmers, "resistant" to money and to different markets in the region. "Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes" overturns this widely held assumption and puts in its place a new perspective as it explores the dynamic between Andean cultural, social, and economic practices and the market forces of a colonial and postcolonial mercantile economy.
Bringing together the work of outstanding scholars in Andean history, anthropology, and ethnohistory, these pioneering essays show how, from the very...

Brooke Larson's interpretive analysis of the history of Andean peasants reveals the challenges of nation making in the republics of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia during the volatile nineteenth century. Nowhere in Latin America were postcolonial transitions more turbulent than in the Andes, where communal indigenous roots grew deep and where the "Indian problem" seemed so discouraging to liberalizing states. The analysis raises broader issues about the interplay of liberalism, racism, and ethnicity in the formation of exclusionary "republics without citizens" over the nineteenth...

A historical and theoretical analysis of the formation of colonial society in the Cochabamba Valleys of Bolivia. A new final chapter reexamines the findings of the original study and situates this regional history in the political/historiographical persp