Cusco, the Inca capital, was captured by the Spanish in November 1533 after Francisco Pizarro’s forces had seized Atahualpa. The city’s subjugation was followed by the extraction of its wealth and, under later Spanish rule, the incorporation of the surrounding region into a vast labor system whose effects the book traces into the present.## Capture and colonial extraction After capturing Atahualpa in Cajamarca, the Spanish moved on to Cusco, where they imprisoned members of the Inca aristocracy until they produced gold and silver. When the captives failed to meet Spanish demands, they were killed. The conquerors stripped the gold from the city’s artistic and religious treasures, including the Temple of the Sun, and melted it into ingots. Cusco’s capture thus joined political conquest to the direct removal of the material wealth through which Inca power and culture had been expressed.

Spanish authorities then organized the people of the Inca Empire into encomiendas, assigning groups to the conquistadors who had accompanied Pizarro. This system helped organize and control labor in the early colonial period. The Crown later added further mechanisms of extraction, most consequentially the Potosí mita, which reached into the former imperial heartland around Cusco.## Cusco and the Potosí mita In the 1570s, Viceroy Francisco de Toledo reorganized indigenous communities and revived the Inca practice of mita, or labor performed in turns, for the Spanish colonial economy. The Inca system had supplied labor to plantations serving temples, aristocrats, and the army; in return, the Inca elite provided famine relief and security. Under Spanish rule, the adapted mita became a much larger and more onerous labor scheme, centered on the silver mines of Potosí.

De Toledo designated a catchment area of about 200,000 square miles across present-day Peru and much of Bolivia. One-seventh of the male inhabitants within it were required to work in the mines. The area overlapped with the Inca Empire’s core territory and included Cusco. The Potosí mita lasted throughout the colonial period and was abolished only in 1825, making the city’s location within its boundaries part of a durable geography of coerced labor.

The mita was not the only measure used to channel indigenous people into the colonial economy. De Toledo converted the encomienda into an annual head tax payable by each adult man in silver, a policy intended to draw people into wage labor and hold down wages for Spanish landowners. His administration also spread the repartimiento de mercancias, under which Spaniards compelled local people to buy goods at prices they set, and introduced the trajin, which used indigenous people to carry heavy commercial loads such as wine, coca leaves, and textiles. Together, these arrangements extended extraction beyond the mines and shaped the colonial economy around the demands of Spanish elites.## A historical boundary with lasting effects The book links the mita’s historical reach to differences between Calca and Acomayo, two nearby highland provinces whose inhabitants share Quechua language and Inca descent. Acomayo is much poorer: its inhabitants consume about one-third less than people in Calca. The contrast is visible in infrastructure as well as income. Calca can be reached on a surfaced road; the road to Acomayo is in severe disrepair, and travel beyond it requires a horse or mule.

Agriculture alone does not explain the difference. People in both provinces grow the same crops, but in Calca they sell produce in markets, while in Acomayo they primarily grow food for subsistence. The book identifies a historical institutional distinction: Acomayo lay within the Potosí mita’s catchment area, while Calca did not. Cusco, the former Inca center used as the regional reference point, anchors this comparison geographically and historically. The contrast shows how a colonial labor boundary could remain consequential long after the labor obligation itself had ended.