INQ-271 | The Inca

Full Title: The Inca

Topic Description:

Why study the history of the Inca? Nearly five hundred years after a bedraggled band of Spanish conquistadores stumbled into the Andean world in the 1530s and conquered the Inca, their history may seem a remote and specialized topic. The conquest was essentially two young and expanding empires colliding and creating a colonial world broadly pattered along Spanish ideas and based on indigenous labor. This course explores how this world was created and how the people who lived in it -- both Spanish and indigenous -- imagined and interpreted their lives. This course will also defend the study of the history of peoples long past and times so different as to be hard for us to imagine. The Inca developed a society very different from anything that evolved elsewhere. Trying to capture, understand, explain, and perhaps learn from this other way of being human they created is ultimately one of history’s most important and exciting tasks.

Counts as Global? No

Topic Approved: December 2010