This study of Bolivia uses Cochabamba as a laboratory to examine the long-term transformation of native Andean society into a vibrant Quechua-Spanish-mestizo region of haciendas and smallholdings, towns and villages, peasant markets and migratory networks caught in the web of Spanish imperial politics and economics. Combining economic, social, and ethnohistory, Brooke Larson shows how the contradictions of class and colonialism eventually gave rise to new peasant, artisan, and laboring groups that challenged the evolving structures of colonial domination. Originally published in 1988, this expanded edition includes a new final chapter that explores the book's implications for understanding the formation of a distinctive peasant political culture in the Cochabamba valleys over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
"[T]he work of a master historian, finding, analyzing, and interpreting archival sources with both discipline and insight."--William Roseberry, from the Foreword

Brooke Larson is Professor of History and Director of Latin American Center, State University of New York, Stony Brook. She is the coeditor of Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes, also published by Duke University Press.