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""Modern Inquisitions" is an extraordinary work of research and interpretation. Based on painstaking archival research in the Lima Inquisition records, it makes crucial contributions to the debates about race, state-formation, and colonialism."--Barbara Weinstein, author of "For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in Sao Paulo, 1920-1964"

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Modern Inquisitions

Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized WorldBy Irene Marsha Silverblatt

Duke University Press

ISBN: 0-8223-3417-8

Contents

About the Series........................................ixAcknowledgments.........................................xiPrologue................................................3Three Accused Heretics..................................29Inquisition as Bureaucracy..............................55Mysteries of State......................................77Globalization and Guinea Pigs...........................99States and Stains.......................................117New Christians and New World Fears......................141The Inca's Witches......................................161Becoming Indian.........................................187Afterword...............................................217Appendix: Notes on Bias and Sources.....................227Notes...................................................235Bibliography............................................283Index...................................................293

Prologue

We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface.-HANNAH ARENDT, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Puzzling over the rise of fascism, Hannah Arendt searched for a precedent in Western history-a form of government supporting worldwide dominance by a would-be master race-that might have eased the way for civilized peoples to embrace barbarity. She found it in the global imperialism of the nineteenth century, when northern European nations like England were putting the machinery in place to rule their colonies around the globe. That machinery included an organization for absolute political control and an ideology of social superiority. Imperial powers governed their colonies as despotic bureaucrats, argued Arendt, and racial ideologies turned mere bureaucrats into members of a superior caste. Her fear was this: intertwined, "race thinking" and bureaucratic rule could unleash "extraordinary power and destruction," a destruction all the more terrible since it was bathed in an aura of rationality and civilization.

Colonialism's governing principles, however, were not launched by nineteenth-century imperialism. That honor goes to Europe's first wave of colonial expansion, spearheaded not by northern Europe but by Portugal and Spain. From the sixteenth century through the mid-seventeenth, Spain was in the vanguard of the modern world, installing cutting-edge bureaucracies along with templates for race thinking in its colonies dotting the globe. This book is rooted in Arendt's insights but applies them to the Spanish empire and its workings in the Viceroyalty of Peru. If we take the first wave of empire as the origin of the "subterranean stream of Western history," we have a better grasp, I think, of its complexity and depth: the dance of bureaucracy and race, born in colonialism, was party to the creation of the modern world.

We trace our modern beginnings to the efforts of European monarchs to extend their power and consolidate their victories-the initial moments of state-making. What we often forget is that history wedded these domestic efforts to incursions abroad. Spain is a prototype of this double-edged politics. Castilian monarchs were vying to increase their authority over the Peninsula when they triumphed in the Americas, struggling to control Iberian principalities when they worked out details of colonial government, battling the English when they established Indian courts, and skirmishing with the Dutch when they defended colonial borders. The Spanish experience-fashioned out of colonial efforts and European conflicts-colored all the West's state-building projects. European statemaking, then, was bound in various ways to imperial expansion; this link is hidden if we date colonialism to the nineteenth century and not to the sixteenth.

To make a Spanish colony out of what had been the Inca empire was an extended process. Although begun in the 1530s when Spanish conquistadors, led by Francisco Pizarro, overwhelmed Cuzco's native forces, it wasn't until the century's end that royal authorities-having confronted civil wars, rebellions, and settlers' raw ambition-could successfully root the institutions of government. The Crown quickly learned that successful colony-building pivoted on control over immigrant colonists in equal measure to control over native peoples, and it instituted bureaucracies to curb and administer both. Learning from pitfalls on the Peninsula, the Crown consolidated colonial state power in ways that would have been unthinkable in Europe. The Crown gave royal officials (as opposed to Spanish settlers) jurisdiction over Indian commoners and had royal officials broker relations between Peru's colonizers and colonized natives. The Crown appointed magistrates to supervise Spanish-Indian relations, designated local headmen to represent native communities before the royal authorities, and established courts, armies, and district governors to oversee the rest. It fell to the Crown's ally, the Church, however, to instruct Indians, as well as colonials, in the ways and necessities of civilization.

Like all bureaucracies, that of colonial Peru functioned through a cultural matrix, and race thinking was its scaffold. Royal authorities, grounded in the experiences of a developing absolutist state, imposed broad, racialized classifications on their imperial subjects. They created two unequal "republics" as the foundation for colonial rule. Native Americans and their descendants-regardless of origin or ethnicity-were classed as Indians; Iberians and their descendants-regardless of origin or ethnicity-were privileged Spanish colonists. With the exception of the native nobility, all Indians owned tribute and labor to the Crown; Spaniards in the colonies, unlike lower-class Spaniards in Europe, had no such obligations. When Indian populations, decimated by disease and upheaval, could no longer meet labor demands, the Crown turned to slavery, spurring the creation of a third abstract category, negro, which included all Africans brought to Peru and their descendants-regardless of origin, ethnicity, or social rank. Ancestry determined the official categories of colonial government. But, as authorities were soon to realize, colonial realities could not be contained within colonial categories, and "hybrid" racial classes (like mestizo, mulato, and sambo) entered the Spanish political ken. This was Spanish legal theory's flat presentation of colonial order-a caste trio of espaol, indio, and negro along with mixtures. Like most categorical descriptions, this one too concealed the historical processes-and the contradictions-at its heart.

For something akin to a cultural revolution was taking place: a revolution of social selves, social relations, and social understandings, a revolution mapped by the great transformations in political order and economic power during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The new human beings of the modern world-espaol, indio, negro, mestizo, mulato, sambo-were born out of the same upheaval that made "nations," "bureaucrats," "slavers," "global merchants," and "colonies." It was the modern world's signature to etch economic dominance and political supremacy into a radical cultural design. It was also its signature to hide the social relations that were brewing supremacy and conflict behind a...