From Two Republics to One Divided: Contradictions of Postcolonial Nationmaking in Andean Peru

by Mark Thurner

From Two Republics to One Divided examines Peru’s troubled transition from colonial viceroyalty to postcolonial republic from the local perspective of Andean peasant politics. Thurner’s reading of the Andean peasantry’s engagement and disengagement with the postcolonial state challenges long-standing interpretations of Peruvian and modern Latin American history and casts a critical eye toward Creole and Eurocentric ideas about citizenship and nationalism.
Working within an innovative and panoramic historical and linguistic framework, Thurner examines the paradoxes of a resurgent Andean peasant republicanism during the mid-1800s and provides a critical revision of the meaning of republican Peru’s bloodiest peasant insurgency, the Atusparia Uprising of 1885. Displacing ahistorical and nationalist readings of Inka or Andean continuity, and undermining the long-held notion that the colonial legacy is the dominant historical force shaping contemporary Andean reality, Thurner suggests that in Peru, the postcolonial legacy of Latin America’s nation-founding nineteenth century transfigured, and ultimately reinvented, the colonial legacy in its own image.

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Daniel Morgan]

I honestly feel rather bad for what I am about to write. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend the book because I found it boring.

I didn't know anything about the topic, but I figured I would give the book a go. I read it from cover to cover, but it did not pique my interest at any point in time. It seems like a fine work of scholarship, cites plenty of sources, and has good reviews from other scholars.

This might be a great book for somebody who works in this field. If like me you do not, then reading this book might not bring you joy.