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This book offers the first interpretive synthesis of the history of Andean peasants and the challenges of nation making in the four republics of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia during the turbulent nineteenth century. Nowhere in Latin America were postcolonial transitions more vexed or violent than in the Andes, where communal indigenous roots grew deep and where the "Indian problem" seemed so daunting to liberalizing states. Brooke Larson paints vivid portraits of Creole ruling elites, mestizo middle sectors, and native peasantries engaged in ongoing political and moral battles over the rightful place of the Indian majorities in these emerging, but still inchoate, nation-states. In this story, indigenous people emerge as crucial protagonists through their prosaic struggles for land, community, and "ethnic" identity, as well as in the upheavals of war, rebellion, and repression in rural society. At the level of synthesis, this book raises broader issues about the interplay of liberalism, racism, and ethnicity in the formation of exclusionary "republics without citizens" over the nineteenth century.

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As both a focus and locus of vibrant scholarly work, the field of Bolivian studies burst onto the international scene, carving a distinctive niche for itself within the larger fields of Andean and Latin American studies over the past twenty-five years. Bolivia went from being the hemisphere’s “least studied” country, according to a 1984 LASA Forum survey, to becoming a beacon of intercultural dialogue, vanguard scholarship, and postcolonial debate. This essay traces Bolivian studies’ coming of age. Plotting the field’s developments and dialogues across history, anthropology, and ethnohistory, it argues that a dual process of academic decentering and epistemic reinvention unfolded in Bolivia at the height of its indigenous and popular mobilizations during the 1990s and early 2000s. The article closes by identifying five thematic clusters of recent research and briefly reflects on the place of Bolivian scholarship in the wider purview of Andean studies.