Ideological Dissonance, Civil War, and Revolutionary Failure during the Great Rebellion of Peru and Bolivia, 1780-1783

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2010
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Haverford College. Department of History
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Award
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
From 1780 to 1783, Peru and Bolivia were embroiled in a bloody revolution against colonial Spain. Spanning from well north of Cuzco to provinces south of Lake Titicaca, the Great Rebellion was the most serious threat to Spanish power in the region between conquest and independence. Its two primary leaders were Tupac Amaru, an indigenous noble and wealthy trader who fought in Peru, and Tapac Katari, an illiterate peasant who led an army against La Paz. The rebellion, however, was highly decentralized and ideologically inconsistent. Of the various ideologies present during the revolt, two emerged as the most widespread and influential. The first was that of the Europeanized indigenous nobility and upper class, as well as the creole and wealthy mestizos. These groups generally fought to end exploitative colonial practices and revoke newly implemented laws and taxes that they saw as directly threatening their economic and political power. The second ideological strand was that of the indigenous peasantry. This group was far more radical and fought for the total eradication of all vestiges of Europeans and European culture and a near total return to pre-Columbian culture and power structure. These two groups, though each interested in expelling the colonial Spaniards from the continent, were otherwise fighting for distinctly incongruous and opposed ends. This irreconcilability eventually became manifest in direct, violent confrontation as the revolution against Spain turned into a civil war between the Europeanized upper class and the radical indigenous peasantry. This transformation and subsequent political failure to maintain insurrectionary unity made military success impossible for either ideological strand, resulting in the failure of the Great Rebellion.
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