Hierarchy and Resistance in American State-Systems 1400–1800 CE

Abstract

After spelling out some implications of recent ethno-history, this chapter examines the two great areas of extensive urbanization and political organization encountered by the Spanish in the Americas in the early 16^th century, asking when and to what extent balancing had failed in each prior to the Spanish invasion, and seeking to account for this. It goes on to ask why Aztec and Inca overlordship was followed by Spanish empire rather than a recovery of sovereignty by indigenous polities, incorporating settler-states into local balancing systems or replacing them altogether, as would happen in sub-Saharan Africa within a century of the so-called Scramble of the 1880s.

* I would like to acknowledge helpful comments on drafts of this paper from the co-authors of this volume and from David Brading and Liselotte Odgârd. Liselotte complains that more needs to be said about the texture of international society in the Americas before the European invasions, and she is right. But that must be for another occasion.