The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (W W Norton & Company; 1998)

FROM DISCOVERIES TO EMPIRE^109

tenacity reflected in part the lesser effect of European diseases on the
Peruvian population. The reason is not clear, but where Mexican pop­
ulation fell by over 90 percent in the century after arrival of the Span­
ish, from about 25 million to between 1 and 2 million, Peruvian
numbers shrank by about one fifth.^12
In spite of occasional successes, these efforts to throw out the in­
vader were unavailing. The Spanish had technology, discipline, and or­
ganization on their side, an experience of war that made the natives
look like amateurs. They had the help of collaborators, among them
numerous converts to a Christianity elastic in its tolerance for nonsan-
guinary pagan practices but uncompromising in its commitment to
Spanish rule.^13 They were backed by the resources of a distant but
powerful empire and by a seemingly endless flow of soldiers of fortune.
And they wisely turned older structures of authority to their service.
The heirs of the Inca became a hereditary, idle noble caste, increasingly
intermarried with Spanish dignitaries. Their descendants, some of them
active in business and government, constitute today the high society of
Lima and Quito. The former tribal headmen (caciques) continued to
administer locally. They were given special status and exemptions from
labor burdens and taxes; from 1619, their children were educated in
special Jesuit schools. Some of these children would become nostalgic
annalists of an old regime seen through tears of regret and sympathy;
some became eloquent spokesmen for a grossly exploited population.
(Such memorials for a lost world found more resonance among Euro­
peans than with the largely illiterate native population.) Any lingering
protest usually took the form of petitions, duly submitted within the
rules and hierarchy of Spanish ascendancy. The Inca empire was his­
tory.^14

"He Who Sees All":

The Incas before Pizarro

The Incas left no written records—they did not know writing. We

must rely, then, on archeological remains, substantially reduced by a

Spanish fury for gold and silver that spared little, and on the

romanticized accounts collected from the conquered, or written by

their descendants, or by some of the early Spanish visitors to the

area.^15 On the whole, these sources agree on the essentials.