José Carlos de la Puente Luna achieves a triumph of research, analysis, and prose…Experts will marvel at its simultaneously local and global scope and its profound new perspectives on the viceregal period.
~Hispanic American Historical Review
The remarkable strengths of de la Puente Luna's book: constant attention to the indigenous as that which is constructed in discourse and through discourse, and thus is indicative of subjection, limited by the law, yet transformative of it, in the charged contexts of local and imperial representation.
~Renaissance Quarterly
De La Puente has shown himself a virtuoso researcher in many archives, and at the same time a powerful renovator of New World history in the wide frame. He changes our view of the seventeenth century by clarifying how the institutions called Andean community took shape—and also by proving that community is not the whole Andean story. Everyone concerned with creating a truly ‘forward-facing’ history of the New World peoples will want to read Andean Cosmopolitans.
~Ethnohistory
[An] important monograph...Anyone wanting to understand the centrality of the legal system for shifting social and power constellations in the colonial Andes needs to read this impressive work of scholarship.
~Journal of Latin American Studies
Andean Cosmopolitans is a nuanced and comprehensive study...What makes the book so exciting is its unusual historiographical combination. De la Puente Luna brings together two historiographies, each with their own traditions, methods, and paradigms: ethnohistory and Atlantic history...This beautifully documented study is also a deep exploration of the meaning of indigeneity in the Spanish Empire. The indigenous world reconstructed here is unpredictable, in flux, and fascinating.
~H-Net Reviews, Latin America
This much anticipated book is a thorough analysis of the Amerindian travelers and their respective networks...La Puente recovers these indigenous travelers’ social experiences and then inserts them into the making of the Spanish Atlantic.
~Colonial Latin American Review
De La Puente offers a fascinating study of the emergence of a new indigenous self-made elite of deracinated provincials. Through savvy uses of literacy and control of indigenous urban courts and legal resources, these urban, upwardly mobile, artisanal and mercantile former ‘commoners’ came to completely displace the Inca elites. This study breaks new ground
~Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin
In this creative and provocative study, we learn that mid-colonial Andean elites approached the Spanish crown not only to demand personal rewards (as we have long known) but also to promote a vision of a Nación Indica, a collective identity that emerged from the juridical construct of the República de Indios. This is certainly a fresh and novel reading of the colonial period, one that will stand out among other intellectual, legal, and social histories.
~Karen B. Graubart, University of Notre Dame, author of With Our Labor and Sweat: Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550–1700
The most comprehensive examination to date of the indigenous intermediary sector of colonial Peruvian society, which used Spanish and knowledge of the Spanish legal system to advocate for personal and collective interests. One would be hard-pressed to read another book as richly documented by published scholarship and archival findings.
~John Charles, Tulane University, author of Allies at Odds: The Andean Church and Its Indigenous Agents, 1583–1671
The research presented here…is immensely solid and coherent, reflecting the most recent works within the area of global history aimed at uncovering the mutual innterrelations and influences among different areas of the globe…a vibrant and dynamic narration...Andean Cosmopolitans presents all the necessary ingredients for becoming an indispensable reference work for a vision of colonial America based on the criteria of global history.
~Sixteenth Century Journal