This book attempts to gauge the political weight of rural Andean society in the shaping of the nation-state, and to account for the transition from imperial to republican rule from the perspective of an area usually considered isolated. Despite focusing on a monarchist rebellion that took place in the highlands of the province of Ayacucho, only months after the final capitulation of the Spanish Army to patriot forces, Cecilia Méndez has chosen to highlight its repercussions on the wider process of state building in the republican period. This decision stems from her desire to understand contemporary Peru and in particular the Senderista violence that shook the country. Her point of departure is the report written by a commission headed by Mario Vargas Llosa after eight journalists were assassinated in 1983 in the remote community of Uchuraccay. The document concluded that the peasants killed the journalists, and even as it exonerated them from responsibility due to their perceived naiveté, it stressed the innate violent predisposition of the peasants due to the ‘secular isolation’, in which the commissioners believed, they had lived since ‘pre-Hispanic times’ (p. 3). Méndez sets off in search of the Iquichanos referred to in this text, but instead of finding an ethnic group that could be traced back to colonial records she encountered an identity constructed after the monarchist rebellion of the 1820s.

Mendez's greatest originality lies in her efforts to debunk the myth of the backward peasant – brute or victim – that she contends has been put forward by urban-based writers, journalists, and academics as a discursive strategy to deny, not only Huanta's peasants' mental capacities and active engagement with the present, but their historicity and their contribution to the making of Peru's early republican state (p. 232). She is extremely successful in this endeavour as she manages to show the way in which the peasant groups of these highlands engaged in the political process using war as ‘politics by other means’. To do so she sets the scene describing the geographical setting in northern Ayacucho, the economic basis of the population, as well as its colonial historical development. The second chapter presents the uprising's main events and is followed by four chapters that focus on the short-term regional and national explanations for the rebellion, the discourse local caudillos used in their ideological propaganda, the social background of the main protagonists and the process of ethno-genesis through which Iquichanos came into being, as well as the social bases of the rebellion and how its leaders created a parallel government. The last chapter expands the narrative to the 1830s when some of the defeated, but never captured, caudillos sided with the liberals and how, in gratitude to their services, they were appointed to the local state bureaucracy. The author suggests that politics were ‘plebeianized’ in a caudillo state that rewarded military skill with political office and opened new spaces for people who could not claim noble Spanish or indigenous lineage. Early republican politics were marked by a permanent strife over state control and Méndez points out rightly that rural societies, and not just elites, participated in this process. She notes how this notion, widely accepted in countries such as Mexico and Argentina, has not found a space in Peruvian historiography. She concludes that in Huanta, national caudillos successfully mobilised rural civilians by resorting to the language of citizenship, and wonders whether these might have been among the few instances in which they were momentarily included in the negotiation over state making. Her arguments cast doubt, rightly, on the widespread assumption that rural populations of Andean Peru were so traumatised after the brutal repression that followed the defeat of Tupac Amaru that they remained aloof of the ensuing conflicts. She also questions whether criollos were so troubled by the violence triggered by the ‘Indian masses’ that they were reluctant to mobilise them.

This study is yet another rich addition to the growing body of work that examines Peru's transit from colony to republic, and, as in previous monographs, the author succeeds in presenting a detailed regional case study and has shown how things changed with the advent of the republic. New political arrangements that would have never taken place in colonial times were now possible. However, as in most of the recent books, her focus on a small region makes generalisations for the whole of Peru difficult. Méndez does not argue for the exceptionality of northern Ayacucho, but sees it as a place where problems afflicting the national society take sharper contours or more extreme expression. The question remains, however, how much can be extrapolated from this example. That she chooses to extend her conclusions until the 1850s, when the material presented only goes until the 1830s, is also problematic because this work does not show how these particular groups acted during the convulsed years that followed the Peru-Bolivia Confederation (1836–1839) and how they participated in the caudillo politics of the 1840s and 1850s.

The lack of work on peasant political mobilisation in Republican Peru, leads Méndez to assert that it is plausible that the scenario she describes for Huanta applies elsewhere and that national caudillos may have sought to court local powers with sway over the peasantry in order to enlarge their armies. However, we will not know for certain until more studies of the quality of this one appear. Her conclusion, that in the early caudillo period the fiercest political antagonism occurred not between the national ruling elites and the peasants, but rather between the various political factions competing for control of the state (p. 241), is proven by the evidence she presents, showing how peasants were not just cannon fodder whose support could be taken for granted, but that they had to be won over. This is an immense contribution not only to the study of nineteenth century Peruvian history, but to the scholarship of the region and must be read by every specialist wishing to gain further understanding of the rural Andes.