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The Indian nobility of the Andes - largely descended from the Inca monarchs and other pre-conquest lords - occupied a crucial economic and political position in late colonial Andean society, a position widely accepted as legitimate until the Túpac Amaru rebellion. Shadows of Empire, first published in 2005, traces the history of this late colonial elite and examines the pre-conquest and colonial foundations of their privilege and authority. It brings to light the organization and the ideology of the Indian nobility in the bishopric of Cusco in the decades before the rebellion, and uses this nobility as a lens through which to study the internal organization and tension of late colonial Indian communities. The work analyzes the significance of the collapse of the Indian nobility, both repudiated by the Indian commons and the crown in the last years of Spanish rule, following the rebellion to the emergence of the creole-dominated republican order after 1825.

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In October, 1797, theindios principalesof the Andean pueblo of Muñani appealed to the royal court in Cusco to depose their governor, orcacica, Doña María Teresa Choquehuanca. Not challenging hereditary Choquehuanca rule, they instead focused on María Teresa's incompetence and her sex, complaining of “the miseries that we have suffered with [her] inappropriate entry into thecacicazgo,” adding that “on account of her distinct sex she should by justice be deposed, because she is not worthy of so estimable an office.” That office was central to the indigenous politics of colonial Peru, the legal and administrative ordering of which placed most of the Indian population in relatively autonomous, land-owning “pueblos de indios” over which the cacique, responsible for collecting the crown's tribute and maintaining order, presided as something between a chief and a lord. As the village leaders in a parallel, popular tradition that reserved its authority for men, Muñani's principales asserted that this bastion of elite indigenous authority ought not be held by a woman. But they made clear that it sometimes was: María Teresa had governed Muñani for five years. Nor was she alone. Cacicas governed pueblos andayllusthroughout the Andes, and it was quite common for the husbands of cacical heiresses to rule in their names.

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