The Inca Empire

Incan Civilization -- the collapse of an indigenous empire and the rise of a pre-Capitalist state

Although they can provide powerful social networks for the individuals whom are enmeshed within them, individuals who are part of communally-based societies often owe more loyalty to their immediate family groups and kin structures of religion, rather than to than their nation-state or leader. This social and ideological fragmentation, as was characteristic of the indigenous social and political systems of the early modern Incas, can make unity between peoples quite difficult, even when unity is required for self-preservation during such periods as military impingements from the outside through invasion, or in the case of the Incan empire, the 'exploration' or conquest by the Spaniards.

However, the conversion to new modalities of government and social relations can hardly be viewed as progress -- rather, the Spanish invasions of the Incan populations 1530s took pure advantage of the fissures caused by the civil wars of the region, and created an effective system of social repression, and finally a colonial empire that oppressed the indigenous people to the advantage of the colonizing Spanish. The subtitle of Thomas Patterson's book on this period is the Formation and Disintegration of a Pre-Capitalist State. Patterson suggests that the seeds of colonial oppression had within them the racist and oppressive structures that ultimately created a class system of rulers (Spanish-born) and ruled that was proto-capitalist in its schema of economic and personal oppression. The family relational style of Incan life was destroyed. The Spaniards assumed a level of authority that they could not have assumed back in their own land, which was characterized by more powerful institutional systems of rule, such as the monarchy and the powerful Catholic Church. Essentially, a new culture was created, but an inequitable one based not upon indigenous life or Spanish ideology, but dialectic of oppression.