This innovative research by Marina Zuloaga achieves two important goals. Firstly, it presents an impressive and detailed history of Huaylas during the decades following the Spanish Conquest of Peru. It thus falls into the distinguished tradition of histories of the Peruvian regions during the Conquest era: Karen Spalding's Huarochirí for that province, Steve Stern's Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest for Huamanga, Susan Ramírez's The World Turned Upside Down for northern Peru, and so on. Successive chapters discuss the implications for Huaylas of the key stages within this history: the Conquest itself in the 1530s, the ‘Spanish Civil Wars’ that followed through to the early 1550s, and the package of major reforms that reached their culmination in the 1570s during the administration of viceroy Francisco de Toledo; these reforms included the introduction of corregidor provincial magistracies, and above all the sweeping programme of resettlement of the native population into new, Spanish-style towns or reducciones. The subtitle of the book points to an emphasis on local authorities and the imperial state in Huaylas, and indeed, the primary focus is upon the three major actors among these local authorities: native chiefs or caciques; the corregidores themselves, as the main representatives of the state at the provincial level; and the clergy, whether the priests who lived among native communities in Huaylas, or the Church hierarchy, presided over at this time by such formidable figures as Archbishop (afterwards Saint) Toribio de Mogrovejo.

For this history of early colonial Huaylas alone, La conquista negociada would merit a place in Americanist libraries – but it is for its second and most original purpose that the book will surely have lasting influence. Its originality lies in its focus on the guaranga, a socio-political institution I cannot be alone in having come across in archival documents without any full understanding or grasp of its significance. Zuloaga emphasises that guarangas were the key unit of self-organisation of the native population across the north and centre of the Peruvian Andes. They were intermediate between the higher provincial level and the lower level of the ayllus, or pachacas; thus, ‘guaranga’ stands for one thousand (tributaries), ‘pachaca’ for one hundred. But they were intermediate between these levels only in the formal sense: the key argument of the book is that in reality, these were the most important units of the native population, both deep into prehistory, under Inca rule, and then throughout the first decades of Spanish colonisation. Thus, guarangas were ‘the most significant organisations when it comes to understanding the political dynamic in the north-central Andes’ (p. 50); ‘they constituted the fundamental centre of power, the hard nucleus within the local and regional complex of power’ (p. 66).

This argument is most persuasive in the book's demonstration of the striking irreducibility of guarangas throughout the first turbulent decades of Spanish rule in Peru. Thus, in the immediate aftermath of the Conquest, the Inca system of provinces was disarticulated by the Spaniards (it would be resurrected from the 1560s in the system of corregimientos). But the smaller units on which the new encomienda grants of native labour to powerful Spaniards were based were the guarangas. Thus, the 12 guarangas of Huaylas were parcelled out originally into two encomiendas: Francisco Pizarro himself took the six guarangas of the north for his own encomienda, while the six in the south then became subdivided among a growing number of encomiendas. But these always respected the guaranga structure itself and its head, the cacique de guaranga. The Spanish subdivision of the Inca provinces was thus a ‘natural’ one in terms of local organisation, even representing to some extent a return to the status quo ante the Incas. Guarangas became the basic constituent unit of encomiendas, with tribute allotted by guaranga rather than across the encomienda as a whole. Indeed, as the encomienda itself declined along with the native population, Zuloaga demonstrates how the control of community resources by caciques de guarangas, and their other attributes, meant that they enjoyed relative autonomy and considerable wealth throughout the period, at least until the 1560s and the introduction of the corregimientos.

The status of guarangas as the ‘hard nucleus’ of power relations at the local level was even apparent during the profound changes brought about by Toledo's programme of reducciones. The resettlement programme, needless to say, had an enormous and permanent impact on native settlement patterns and lifeways in Huaylas. The simultaneous institutionalisation of corregimientos also brought a major disempowerment of the caciques. Even so, reducción (in which caciques themselves necessarily played a central role) also respected the basic structure of the guarangas of the region. Thus, reducción took place almost entirely with reference to the guaranga structure: reducciones took the guarangas for granted and only rarely disregarded them outright. The population of some guarangas, such as Guambo, was reduced into just one town (in this case Yungay). In other cases, the people of two guarangas were reduced into just a single town (thus, Carhuaz was founded from the population of the two guarangas of Ecash and Rupa). In other cases, the concentration of population was less severe: the people of the guaranga of Ichochonta were reduced into seven new settlements, with Recuay designated the head town or cabecera. Where it did not involve the reduction of the population of two guarangas into one town, cross-cutting was limited to the case of Pampas, which became a ‘mixed’ settlement with population from its own guaranga of Ichopomas and from that of Allaucapomas. Even within such settlements (Huaraz is a documented example here), however, the guaranga population remained strictly separate, as must necessarily be the case: both tribute assessments and the working of lands continued to be allotted by guaranga, and each guaranga retained its own cacique.

This is an original and important monograph.