The Túpac Amaru Rebellion. By Charles F. Walker (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2014) 347 pp. $29.95

From late 1780 to 1782, indigenous uprisings convulsed Andean society from Cusco to Potosí, presenting the most significant challenge to Spanish rule in America between the conquest and independence. During the past half-century, the “Great Rebellion” of the Túpac Amarus in southern Peru and the Kataris in Bolivia has morphed from footnote to central narrative in Andean history, generating a substantial scholarship; it is now treated as a major anticolonial revolt in the Atlantic world’s age of revolution. Sergio Serulnikov’s recent Revolution in the Andes: The Age of Túpac Amaru (Durham, 2013) offers a strong synthetic summary of this violent assault on the colonial order, but no English language narrative of Josef Gabriel Túpac Amaru’s attempts to establish a colonial, neo-Inca order in Cusco has appeared since Lillian Fisher’s dated The Last Inca Revolt (Norman, 1966). Drawing primarily from correspondence and official colonial records during and just after the rebellion,...