In this part of the world, the population is highly stratified. The Indian peasantry forms the lowest stratum of a society that is dominated by a relatively small number of landowners, merchants, and state officials. Stratification is nothing new to the Andes, however, for it typified Andean society even before the Inca conquests of the fifteenth century.

In pre-Incan times ethnic lords, known as kurakas, ruled over local districts in accordance with long-established social and political traditions. The Incas incorporated these traditional arrangements into their imperial system by absorbing the kuraka class into their own administrative apparatus. The Incas also extracted a portion of the crops produced by the peasantry and commandeered peasant services to support and extend their ambitious imperial enterprise.

When the Spaniards arrived in 1532, they swept the Inca ruling class aside, replacing it with a Hispanic society that continued to rule the native population from above.  Like the Incas before them, the Spaniards retained the kuraka class (the caciques, as the Spaniards called them) as part of the new colonial administration.  In fact, local Indian noblemen, in service to the distant Spanish crown, were often the harshest exploiters of the Indian masses they administered.

Under colonial rule, Indians were required to pay tribute to the state and to supply a steady stream of labor for Spanish mines and textile factories.  Spaniards, on the other hand, paid no taxes at all and were guaranteed special privileges by law.  Andean society was thus structured into two quite different hierarchically ordered social spheres, in both of which the Indian peasantry remained a permanent servile class.

This arrangement was not unique to Peru.  In fact Peruvian society was a sixteenth-century colonial version of the estate system, which prevailed in Europe before the French Revolution.  It consisted of a legal system in which only certain social categories (the estates) had access to power, retaining for themselves all prestige and prerogatives.  Unlike estate systems in Europe, however, the Andean colonial system was especially harsh, as indicated by the appallingly high mortality rate among the Indians throughout the first two centuries of Spanish rule.

The high death rate was partly due to cycles of epidemic diseases, which periodically ravaged the Indian population in colonial times.  Added burdens were the dislocations and the cruelly exploitative conditions created by colonial institutions, especially the mita.