Shows how the General Resettlement in the Andes added another layer to a complex web of settlement rather than displacing or destroying it
"This is a work of superior scholarship, and it will have a major impact in the field of Andean studies. Scholars and non-specialists alike have long seen the General Resettlement of Indians ordered in 1569 as a crushing blow landed on Andeans by their Spanish colonizers. Yet Jeremy Ravi Mumford shows a much more nuanced, ambivalent process. Vertical Empire joins a fast-growing secondary literature that emphasizes Andeans' agency." Kathryn Burns, author of Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru
In 1569 the Spanish viceroy Francisco de Toledo ordered the native people of the central Andes to move to newly founded Spanish-style towns called reducciones. This campaign, known as the General Resettlement of Indians, represented a turning-point in the history of European colonialism: a state forcing an entire conquered society to change its way of life overnight. But while this radical restructuring destroyed certain aspects of indigenous society, Jeremy Ravi Mumford's Vertical Empire reveals the ways that it preserved others. The campaign drew on colonial ethnographic inquiries into indigenous culture and strengthened the place of native lords in colonial society. In the end, the General Resettlement added another layer to a complex web of settlement-a web that Spaniards glimpsed and that Andeans defended fiercely-rather than displacing or destroying it.
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