Introduction

IOjahl hubieran sido los hombres blancos como los Atahualpas y Moctezumas! -Ruben Dario, A Colon They (the Indians) were proud, loyal, and ingenuous. Their heads were encircled with plumes of great value. Would to God the white men had been like Atahualpa and Montezuma! Far from the populous and noisy cities of the white man's restless life, protected by the double rampart of the Cordilleras, "the bronze race" pursues its monotonous existence. The out sider who impartially contemplates it feels it to be very remote and very different from his own. Indeed, it is hard for him to discern its misty outlines at all against the uniformly gray back ground of the Andes from which it seems to emerge. He has the impression of finding himself on the threshold of an unknown world, in which man and Nature, in complete harmony with each other, are alike hostile to him. But he also senses spiritual vibrations that set him atremble with apprehension and curiosity.

However little he may have read of the ancient history of this land, however little he may have heard of its legends and its myths, he catches the reflection of the past in the present and begins to understand the soul of the Indian. He vaguely divines the hopes and regrets that lie hidden beneath conformity and routine. Then this whole tableau, which appeared frozen into immobility, becomes strangely animated, and Nature itself, full of lingering echoes, seems to come to life. The past springs up xv xvi Introduction imperiously on all sides; it is the ground in which the present has its roots. To the mind that is capable of detaching itself from the present, all now becomes clear. The shepherd, leading his flock of llamas through the solitude of the plateau, draws from his reed flute melancholy notes in a minor key that have come down to him across the ages. The farmer, squatting before the door of his mud hut, remains for hours hunched up, his legs and feet pressed close together and his knees drawn up level with his chin, without moving, without thinking, immersed in a vacuity congenial to his dreamy spirit. All these people live at a slackened pace, at one with their environment, defying time. They speak the language of their ancestors; they marry within their clan; they live a com munal life; they invoke their ancient idols under new names.

The form may have become Spanish and Catholic, but the sub stance is as immutable as the mountain and the forest. One would think this a world held in abeyance. A parenthesis was opened at the moment when the white conquerors came; it has not yet been closed. The course of history has remained suspended for four hundred years. If the Inca were to come back to life, he would find his people as he left them long ago, ready to welcome him. An instant would suffice to efface the memory of the white man's interregnum. What, then, is this empire that defies the passage of time, that survives in spite of all the upheavals that have convulsed the world, an empire whose mark four centuries of history have not been able to blot out? Let us transport ourselves in time and space and set our mind's eye upon Spain at the end of the fifteenth century. On this sun-scorched earth fecundated by the Goths, the Romans, and the Arabs, in this kingdom of Castile whose unity is perpetu ally being threatened by political dissensions and religious schisms, an intense individualism has sprung up, incarnated in the person of the conquistador, athirst for adventure and glory. The Medi terranean basis has become too small and too familiar a stage for the exploits for which the romances of chivalry have given Introduction xvii him a taste. And just at this moment he learns that the westward route to the Indies has been discovered, that somewhere toward the setting sun there are lands to be explored, gold to be dug from the earth, men to be converted to Christianity. Noblemen with thin purses and long swords, scholars surfeited with Latin, priests with nothing to occupy them since the departure of the Moors, all rush to the southern ports and crowd aboard the de parting caravels, to the accompaniment of prayers, brawls, and drinking songs!

Many years were to roll by before these men were to fulfill their destiny. Many of them were never to return from the cities of death and the lands of famine whither their evil fate had led them. But a handful among them, after seven years of arduous effort, were to reach Peru. It is easy to understand the intoxica tion of those who first set foot on the shores of this promised land as they disembarked, in 1531, at Tumbez, the great port of the Inca empire. Certainly Francisco Pizarro and his companions were expecting to find great riches, the echoes of which had reached them as far away as the Caribbean Sea. But what took them completely by surprise, what they were utterly unprepared for, was the extraor dinary system of social organization that they encountered. This they did not, and, indeed, could not, understand. The Spanish conquest of Peru marks a crucial date, a turning point in history. Unyielding and implacable, the two great con cepts of life into which the world was divided found themselves face to face. On the one side-a people ebullient with life, rest less, bold to the point of rashness; on the other-a great empire inflexibly organized along rigid lines. On the one side, a liberalism that would have degenerated into anarchy had it not been for the King and the ,Church; on the other, a socialism that would have leveled existence to a complete and suffocating uniformity had it not been for an elite. On the one side, men; on the other, a State.

And the drama of South America began-a drama that continues to our own day, the drama of two races superposed, but not mixing. That drama is also the one that all of us are witnessing today.

xviii Introduction It is the drama in which the East and the West now confront each other. The history that we are evoking here, which seems so far removed from us, is, in fact, our very own. It is the history in which we ourselves are the actors. The conflict with which it is concerned has become one of the most burning issues of the present day. The two civilizations, the two social systems whose impending clash fills us with anxiety today are the very same that confronted each other at the dawn of the sixteenth century; and under the impact of their violent collision, one of them, the em pire of the Incas, collapsed. We have characterized this empire as "socialist." What this term means will become clear in the course of the exposition of the organization of. the Inca empire that we propose to give later on. However, a brief justification of its use would seem to be in order at this point.

The word "socialism" easily lends itself to confusion. It is constantly made use of without being defined and has nowadays been so much abused that it has become for many a rather vague label applicable to theories that are very different from one an other. We do not propose to enter upon any extended discussion of this preliminary problem, which properly belongs to the do main of political economy.1 Suffice it to say that socialism, in the sense in which we shall speak of it here, involves the substitution of a rational plan of organization, based to a certain extent on collective ownership, for the spontaneous equilibrium achieved by the operation of individual self-interest and the free play of competition. This means, in our day, the more or less complete destruction of the mechanism of the pricing process. A n authori tarian system of planning that involves the suppression of private property-such, in brief, is the definition of socialism that we shall here ask the reader to accept as a postulate.

We shall see that, according to this definition, the Peru of the Incas was by no means a purely socialist state, but that in certain respects it calls to mind other countries of antiquity, notably Egypt. 2 Pure socialism, as a matter of fact, does not exist, any more than does perfect individualism. These absolute forms deIntroduction xix fine the extreme limits of the frame within which economic life actually takes place and are worth studying solely in virtue of their simplicity, as a first approximation to reality. But that reality itself is much more complex. Anticipating our conclusions, we may say that both agrarian collectivism and state socialism existed in Peru; the one dating back to a time long be fore the Incas, the other established when they conquered the land; one the result of a long evolution, the other the creation of the human mind. This superposition of agrarian communities and state socialism makes it possible to resolve the contradictions that we find in a great number of works on this subject,S and the real problem confronting us is to discover how it was actually put into practice.

We must not lose sight of the fundamental fact that the process by which the Incas extended their dominion over various South American tribes was a gradual one and was completed only a short time before the coming of the Spaniards; hence many terri tories had formed part of the empire for only a very few years. Now the Inca monarchs made it a rule to give the customs of conquered peoples the widest possible measure of respect. The system they established was thus applied differently at different times and in different places. To understand it, we must envisage the Indian tribes as forming a series of communities upon which the Incas imposed the framework of a socialist organization) but with none of the rigidity that most writers have assumed. On the contrary) it was extrem.ely supple and was more or less adapted to the organization that already existed. It is this uneven adapta tion that has led certain authors to deny the unity of the empire.

The framework left room for a certain amount of·free play; and in the end, for the tribes of central Peru that had been a long time conquered, it came to form a structure precisely fitted onto the ancient foundation. The study of this empire of the Incas is of special interest on three grounds. The first is its isolation. If any influence whatever from the Old World made itself felt in the Americas before their discovery by Columbus, it goes back to times so remote that it can be considered as virtually insignificant. The great civilizations xx Introduction of the Mediterranean all reacted upon one another, but the peo ple of the Andes did not receive the sacred torch from anyone: it was they themselves who had to set it alight. In the second place, the study of South America at the time of the Incas by no means takes us back to the misty ages of pre history and could not be compared to the study of ancient Egypt or Assyria. It was at the time of the discovery of the New World -that is, at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth-that the Inca empire reached its apogee. If this state seems to us so ancient that we have to make an effort to recall that elementary fact, it is because of its isolation. Distance in space becomes the equivalent of a remove in time.

Finally, recent though its date may be, the last great Andean civilization of the preColumbian epoch still remains mysterious. Though many have delved into the past to wrest its secrets from it, they have been more concerned with reconstructing the chain of events than with investigating the character of its institutions. The historian has performed his task; he has beaten a path for us. But we shall make use of the results of his researches only to a limited extent. We shall recall the sequence of events in a few words, so as to set our subject in its place, but we shall in no wise seek to take a stand on the controversies that have broken out on the subject of royal genealogies or the exact dates of conquests. Even on the threshold of this work many difficulties await us. It is not that documentation is lacking, though one might be tempted to think that it would be. On the contrary, there is a superabundance of it; but the study of it leaves the mind with a collection of confused ideas. Ancient chroniclers recount con tradictory facts without any sense of inconsistency, and modern writers reproduce them, without commentary, with a beautiful indifference. Someone will assert that trade did not exist, and then, a little further on, will describe the fairs and the markets.

Someone else will picture the Andean tribes before the Inca conquest as plunged in barbarism and then will speak of their methods of agriculture and of their tribal organization. These Introduction xxi are so many evidences of the uncertainties that continue to exist in the minds of the authors. Thus, the result of reading and research is very deceptive. The empire of the Incas is presented to us, in turn, as the normal development of the society that preceded it, or as the realization of a definite plan conceived by a sovereign; as the most atrocious regime of tyranny that the world has ever known, or as an ideal organization of society whose destruction must move us to tears; as the consummation of the slave state, and as an idyllic earthly abode. Every writer, ancient or modern, has presented us with a Peru fashioned according to his own tastes, aspirations, ideas, and feelings; and the impartial critic asks himself in astonishment what this strange empire was that some good minds could regard as a hell on earth and others as a p~radise.

What Menendez says at the beginning of his manual of the geography and statistics of Peru is unfortunately true: "None of the European states that belonged to the Spanish monarchy was the object of so many studies as Peru, but none has, at the same time, given rise to so many inaccuracies and errors." 4 But the economist is not the only one who can profit from the study of the Inca system. The historian, the sociologist, the archaeologist, and the ethnologist also have an interest in knowing it well, for the better orientation of their own researches. And we, on our part, shall have to make inquiries of them all, either to illuminate the past with the help of the vestiges brought to light by excavations or to reveal in the present the survivals that can explain the ancient customs of which they are the last re flection. Unfortunately, it has not been possible for us to confine this work exclusively to the economic domain, as we should have liked to do. The inadequacy of the works devoted to pre Columbian South America has compelled us to examine and con sider certain historical and sociological questions of which a knowledge is indispensable for the understanding of this book.

However, the treatment of these problems has been made as brief as possible.

xxii Introduction The purpose of this work, it need hardly be said, is purely scientific. Comparisons between economic systems established at different times must always be made with the greatest circum spection, and we propose to call particular attention to the ex aggerations of those authors who seek in the Peruvian experiment either an apology for or a condemnation of modern socialism. To measure the distance that separates the society of the Incas from our own, it suffices to point out that in the Inca empire the management of the economy was in the hands of an elite that was destroyed by the Indians themselves in the course of their civil wars and by the Spaniards at the time of the conquest. And even though we may be deluding ourselves concerning the extent of the interest that this study of the past could have for our contemporaries, we do not consider it profitless to investi gate this singular empire, taking apart its complicated machinery and stripping away all its military and political exploits, all the anecdotes and all the legends, unobsessed by names and dates.

I t is surely no detraction of the economists to assert that they are almost completely ignorant of ancient Peru. If only, thanks to our efforts, some of them decide to study it with greater pene tration than has been possible for us, we shall not regret having tried in these few pages. to bring the extraordinary enterprise of the Incas to life again. 5 1 The Hostile Environment* Beyond the steps of the steep Cordilleras, Beyond the mists where the black eagles soar, Higher than the summits hollowed out into funnels, Where the familiar lava boils in bloody flow.... -Lecomte de Lisle, Le sommeil du condor Those determinists who seek at any cost to explain every social order in .terms of its natural environment would be greatly em barrassed by the case of the Incas. They will not find here the essen tial elements that, according to them, make possible the birth of a great civilization.! The cradle of the Inca Empire is an area situ ated far from the sea, without any navigable river, afflicted with a harsh climate and a barren soil, broken up by mountains and tor rential streams, and surrounded by deserts and virgin forests. No country in the world seems better to have deserved the praise of which Europe was deemed worthy than does this plateau lost in the center of a vast continent: everything here was inferior except man himself.