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