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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
The true character of the Inca Empire is poorly set forth in works dealing with its economic and social structure. Too many historians or sociologists have attempted, in their enthusiasm, to make of it a state corresponding to a modern formula : a socialist, a totalitarian or a welfare state. From the sixteenth century on, how many arbitrary pictures have been drawn, propped up by quotations! In fact, among the chronicles and reports and documents which Spain, that rummager of old papers, has handed down to us, and in the accounts of the Indians themselves, one finds enough mixed-up assertions and facts to bolster or justify the most diverse interpretations. Reality has frequently been confused with a schematic, abstract order which was the fruit of frequently gratuitous speculations.
1 For fear of overburdening the pages of this article with notes, I have preferred to omit the bibliography entirely. However, I wish to make clear my particular debt to my colleague and friend, Professor John Murra, whose work on the economic and social structure of the Inca Empire will inevitably renew our interpretation of the facts.
2 Let us recall that the term, Inca, properly refers to the sovereign of the quichua Empire of Peru, and his cast—and only by extension to the people subject to him.
3 These very hypothetical estimates have been made by Mrs. Sally Falk Moore in her book Power and Property in Inca Peru, Columbia University Press, 1958, p. 64.
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