Inca Apocalypse offers a finely written, twenty-first century retelling of the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire that is self-consciously reflexive about its orientation and goals. Recognizing that historical narratives reflect the values and attitudes of their day, Covey explicitly centers his story around the moral equivalencies of European and Native American empires, the historicity of race and race-making, the incertitude of imperial endeavors, and current end-of-times anxieties. Given these commitments, he widens the geographical, temporal, and political scope of his account to contextualize the well-known tale of New World conquest, exploitation, and colonization better. The resulting volume can be viewed as the legitimate successor to John Hemming’s Conquest of the Incas (Boston, 1970) and its nineteenth-century predecessor, William Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru (New York, 1847).
Covey chose the religious concept of apocalypse as both the title and the leitmotif of his book to “reveal how different...