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New World, First Nations
Native Peoples of Mesoamerica and the Andes under Colonial Rule

Edited by David Cahill and Blanca Tovías
David Cahill is Professorial Fellow, School of History, University of New South Wales. He has recently published From Rebellion to Independence in the Andes: Soundings from Southern Peru, 1750–1830, and (with co-author Peter Bradley) of Habsburg Peru: Images, Imagination and Memory. Blanca Tovías is a Researcher at UNSW and the editor (with David Cahill) of Élites Indígenas en los Andes: Nobles, Caciques y Cabildantes bajo el Yugo Colonial.

“The result is an edited book tied thematically by a goal to take ‘stock of this wealth of innovative research and of comparing and contrasting the respective experiences of native Mesoamerican and Andean peoples under Spanish colonial rule (1492–1825)’ (p. i). This book is recommended for classroom use and for those interested in comparative studies of indigenous peoples in the Americas.” Colonial Latin American Historical Review

“This important and imaginative collection of essays brings together some of the most innovative scholars currently working on indigenous societies during the Spanish American colonial period. This is a field that has been evolving rapidly in recent decades, and this volume makes no small contribution to that transformation. Moving from the Conquest to Independence, between Mesoamerica and the Andes, these historians offer a rich stew of succinct syntheses, provocative insights, and original, new findings – one that should appeal to the appetites of specialists and students alike.” Matthew Restall, Professor of Latin American History, Anthropology, and Women's Studies, Director of Latin American Studies, Pennsylvania State University

“This substantial collection stretches across a historiographic divide that still often separates studies of related themes in Mesoamerican and Andean colonial settings. And it pushes persuasively past tired assumptions about the kinds of interaction that ought to follow violent conquest and dislocation. Cahill and Tovías’s contributors raise big questions about social transformation that should challenge others and re-open entire realms of research. Their essays juxtapose everything from demography, labour regimes and gender constructions, through cosmological principles and appropriated written expression, to the revision of reigning theories of identity formation and proto-national mythmaking.” Kenneth Mills, Professor of History and Director, Latin American Studies at the University of Toronto


The Spanish conquest and colonization of the Americas dramatically transformed the lives of native peoples in Mesoamerica and the Andes. This revolutionary and multilayered process varied greatly in its intensity and timing from region to region, but in all cases radically changed indigenous societies, their values and beliefs. The encounter between native peoples and the Spanish conquistadors and later settlers was marked by violence and drastic, epidemic-driven population decline. This dislocatory phase gradually gave way to myriad forms of accommodation, resistance, and social, cultural and religious hybridity – the colonial heritage of Spanish America.

The innovative essays in this volume compare the colonial experience of native peoples of the conquered Aztec, Maya and Inca civilizations, from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. They highlight their creative responses to the challenges posed by colonial rule, its institutions, religion, and legal and economic systems. Interdisciplinary in approach, the essays distil a generation of scholarship and suggest an agenda for future research. This book will be of great interest to historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and postcolonialists.

	List of Contents to follow

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