Wednesday, 28 January 2025
10.30 am ET / 3.30 pm GMT / 9 pm IST
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This is a free, virtual lecture
What if the Inca Empire, often imagined as distant and ancient, helped shape modern European arguments about capitalism and socialism?
This presentation traces how European discourses about Inca-era economies in the Andes developed over time. Early Spanish accounts focused on sovereign interests within an emerging mercantilist order, emphasizing the powers and privileges claimed for Inca monarchs. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these claims were recontextualized within new political and intellectual debates. By the mid-twentieth century, the Inca economy had become closely associated with arguments about socialism, a connection that has persisted in anthropological studies of the Incas ever since.
R. Alan Covey is a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, and a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History.
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