The Spanish conquest of Peru was not only a military seizure but the imposition of a colonial system for extracting people’s labor and the region’s wealth. Its decisive early episodes—the capture and execution of Atahualpa, the seizure of Cusco, and the organization of labor for the silver mines—show how conquest joined political domination to economic extraction. In the book’s broader account, the institutions created by such conquests help explain how elites could concentrate power and resources at the expense of the wider population.

Expedition and Capture at Cajamarca

The Spanish approach to Peru followed a strategy already used elsewhere in the Americas. The methods perfected in Mexico were adopted across the Spanish Empire, and the campaign led by Francisco Pizarro became one of their most effective applications. Pizarro arrived in 1531 with the intention of imitating the tactics used by other Spanish adventurers. He began on the coast near Tumbes and marched south.

On November 15, 1532, Pizarro reached Cajamarca, where the Inca emperor Atahualpa was encamped with his army. The political situation was unsettled: Atahualpa had recently defeated his brother Huáscar in a struggle to succeed their deceased father, Huayna Capac. Atahualpa was also angered by reports of Spanish abuses, including the violation of a temple dedicated to Inti, the Sun God.

The following day, Atahualpa came with his retinue to the Spanish camp. The Spaniards set a trap, killed his guards and attendants—possibly as many as two thousand people—and captured him. The encounter transformed a Spanish expedition into a campaign directed at the ruler and wealth of the Inca Empire.

Ransom, Execution, and the Seizure of Cusco

To secure his freedom, Atahualpa promised to fill one room with gold and two rooms of the same size with silver. He fulfilled the demand, but the Spaniards broke their promise and strangled him in July 1533. The ransom therefore did not restore his freedom: it converted the emperor’s captivity into an opportunity to collect precious metal before eliminating him.

In November 1533, the Spaniards captured Cusco, the Inca capital. Members of the Inca aristocracy were imprisoned and pressed to produce gold and silver. When they failed to meet Spanish demands, they were burned alive. The city’s artistic and religious wealth was also targeted: the gold was stripped from treasures such as the Temple of the Sun and melted into ingots. The conquest thus attacked political authority and cultural wealth together, turning objects of great artistic significance into portable bullion.

From Conquest to Encomienda

After focusing on the Inca ruler and aristocracy, the Spaniards turned their attention to the people of the empire. As in Mexico, they divided Indigenous communities into encomiendas, assigning one to each of the conquistadors who had accompanied Pizarro. The encomienda became the principal institution for organizing and controlling labor in the early colonial period.

The conquest’s economic structure reflected a wider relationship between political and economic power. In the book’s analysis, extractive political institutions allow a narrow elite to shape economic arrangements with few constraints; those arrangements then transfer resources to the elite and help sustain its political dominance. In Spanish America, colonists used political power to impose institutions that enriched them at the expense of the rest of the population. The account of Peru illustrates this connection through the progression from military capture to control of communities and their labor.

Potosí and the Mita

The encomienda soon faced a major rival in the organization of colonial labor. In 1545, an Indigenous man named Diego Gualpa was searching for a shrine high in the Andes in what is now Bolivia when a sudden gust of wind threw him to the ground and exposed silver ore. The discovery formed part of a vast mountain that the Spaniards named El Cerro Rico, or “The Rich Hill.” A city grew around the silver deposit; at its height in 1650, Potosí had 160,000 inhabitants, a population larger than Lisbon’s or Venice’s at the time.

Extracting the silver required a large workforce. Francisco de Toledo, the new viceroy and chief Spanish colonial official, arrived in Peru in 1569 with the task of addressing the labor shortage. He spent five years traveling through the territory and commissioned a broad survey of its adult population. He then moved almost the entire Indigenous population into newly established towns called reducciones, concentrating people in settlements that would make their labor easier for the Spanish Crown to exploit.

De Toledo also revived and adapted the Inca mita, a system whose name in Quechua means “a turn.” Under Inca rule, the mita had supplied forced labor for plantations that produced food for temples, the aristocracy, and the army; the Inca elite, in return, provided famine relief and security. In the colonial version, especially at Potosí, this inherited institution became what the book describes as the largest and most onerous labor-exploitation scheme of the Spanish colonial period.

The Potosí mita drew workers from an area of roughly 200,000 square miles, extending from central Peru across much of present-day Bolivia. One-seventh of the male inhabitants in this catchment area were required to work in the mines. The region overlapped the former heartland of the Inca Empire, including Cusco, and the system endured through the colonial period until its abolition in 1825.

Institutional Consequences and Historical Significance

The conquest’s significance in the book extends beyond the campaign itself. It is an example of how political control can be converted into economic extraction: military force secured rulers and cities, colonial institutions organized communities and labor, and the resulting wealth strengthened the position of those who controlled the system. More generally, extractive political and economic institutions reinforce one another. Political power enables elites to impose economic rules that benefit them; the wealth those rules generate can then help consolidate their dominance and protect the institutions that produced it.

The account does not present this historical pattern as inevitable. Its broader framework emphasizes the interaction of inherited institutions and critical junctures, events that disrupt an existing balance of political and economic power. The Spanish conquest was one such disruption for the societies it transformed, but its consequences depended on the institutions established in its wake. In Peru, the transition from capture and tribute demands to encomienda and the Potosí mita reveals the durable machinery of colonial rule: domination was not confined to the moment of military victory but organized into systems that compelled labor and carried wealth away.