Don Francisco de Toledo is one of the most famous viceroys in the history of the Spanish Empire in the Americas, and his 1569 decision to resettle the indigenous peoples of the Andes remains his most striking endeavor. Vertical Empire takes on the general resettlement of the Indians, which has been often mentioned but rarely studied, to show “how and why it happened as it did” (p. 2).

Mumford uses orders and instructions for the resettlement, chroniclers’ and inspectors’ reports, financial accounts, and lawsuits to reconstruct the debates and ideas that preceded Toledo's measures, as well as those triggered by the implementation of his grand plan. Mumford's protagonists are the colonial officials involved in the campaign and their views and observations, and his focus is on the main administrative centers of Audiencias of Lima and Charcas. The book is divided into three parts. Part I sets the stage, with chapters on the elements of the Spanish ethnographic vision of the Andes, as the author calls cities, mountains, grids, and indigenous lords. This part compares Spanish and Inca concepts of municipality, and analyzes early colonizers’ ideas about verticality, the first resettlement campaigns, and deals made between the Spanish king and the indigenous lords. The overarching argument is that both sides carried out ethnographies of each other, for similar reasons. Mumford thus adds substance to his otherwise generic idea of ethnography, mentioned in the Introduction in the “literal sense” of “writing about peoples” (3).

The meat of the book comes in Part II, which builds on more extensive archival research. The four chapters cover the 1568 Junta Magna, who was appointed to assess colonial government; Toledo's resettlement plan; his fascination with the Inca model to rule the Andes; and the actual implementation of the resettlement. What emerges is a resettlement driven by Toledo and the inspectors on the ground rather than the Spanish monarchy. Local authorities adapted royal instructions through decisions designed to diffuse both Spanish and indigenous resistance, so a campaign too often thought of as directed by the center was in fact characterized by variation. Mumford sees Toledo torn between conceiving of the Incas as tyrants to justify their expulsion by the Spanish, and recognizing that aspects of their rule were essential to authority in the Andes. He tells us how the viceroy and his officials were inspired by indigenous mechanisms of social control, equalization and atomization of subjects, public works, and social engineering through population movements. In chapter 8, the author aptly illustrates this in a fascinating study of resettlement cases, often drawing on existing literature.

Finally, Part III uses two chapters to examine the afterlife of the resettlement communities. The story moves from reflections on corruption and flight, mainly viewed through the seventeenth-century eyes of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, to a broad overview of the consequences of independence and the upheavals in demography and politics of the last century and the current one.

Ultimately, Mumford contributes what he calls “a new synthesis” to the recent scholarship on Toledo's ambivalence toward the Incas, and argues that the general resettlement was a mix of reorganization and preservation of indigenous elements that were key to the functioning of Andean society. To this he adds his concept of ethnography, and also an analogy between Toledo's program and twentieth-century examples of resettlement (borrowed from James Scott's Seeing Like a State), referencing the “modern state” and “modern colonialism.” Vertical Empire offers stimulating insights and comparisons, and don Francisco de Toledo has yet to exhaust our curiosity.