Introduction

In the sixteenth century, Spaniards forcibly resettled Andeans into planned towns called reducciones. Andeans adapted the political and religious institutions of the new towns, the cabildo (town council) and the cofradías (confraternities), and made them their own, organizing them by the Andean social form, the ayllu. Over time, political legitimacy and authority within towns was transferred from traditional native hereditary lords, the caciques, to the common people of the town, who called themselves the común. Although a Spanish word, común took on Andean meaning as it was the word used to translate terms for collective land and the collective people of a town. It became a recognized shorthand for a political philosophy empowering common people. In the late eighteenth-century era of Atlantic Revolutions, the común rose up against its caciques, in an Enlightenment-from-below moment of popular sovereignty.

The People Are King

The People Are King traces the transformation of Andean communities under Inca and Spanish rule. The sixteenth-century Spanish resettlement policy known as reducción was pivotal to this transformation. Modeled on the Spanish ideal of república (self-government within planned towns) and shared sovereignty with their monarch, Spaniards in the Viceroyalty of Peru forced Andeans into resettlement towns. Andeans turned the tables on forced resettlement by making the towns their own and the center of their social, political, and religious lives. Andeans made a coherent life for themselves in a complex process of ethnogenesis that blended preconquest ways of life (the ayllu) with the imposed institutions of town life and Christian religious practices. Within these towns, Andeans claimed the right to self-government, and increasingly regarded their native lords, the caciques, as tyrants. A series of microhistorical accounts in these repúblicas reveals that Andeans believed that commoner people, collectively called the común, could rule themselves. With both Andean and Spanish antecedents, this political philosophy of radical democracy was key to the Great Rebellion of the late eighteenth century. Rather than focusing on well-known leaders such as Tupac Amaru, this book demonstrates through commoner rebels’ holographic letters that it was commoner Andean people who made the late eighteenth-century a revolutionary moment by asserting their rights to self-government. In the final chapter the book follows the commoner-lead towns of the Andes from the era of independence into the present day of the Plurinational State of Bolivia.

Spanish República and Inca Tyranny

For Spaniards civilization was only possible in a república, a self-governing town that was both urbs, the built environment, and, more importantly, civitas, the people and their social bonds. Theologians taught that God had granted sovereignty collectively to the people, who in turn loaned it to the king. But if he proved to be a tyrant, the people could revoke their sovereignty and overthrow the king. This political ideology underwrote both the 1521 Comunero Revolution in Spain and provided justification for overthrow of the Incas: if a people were so oppressed by a tyrant that they could not act, another power could intervene and overthrow the tyrant. Understood this way, Spaniards rescued Andeans from Inca tyrants. In order to civilize Andeans and convert them to Christianity, Viceroy Toledo began a process of undercutting encomenderos’ control of Andean labor and resettled Andeans into planned towns, modeled on the Spanish república.

Creating Community: Industrial Paternalism and Town Planning in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, 1923–1955

In the early twentieth century numerous primary extractive industries constructed company towns on the resource frontiers of North America. Company directors hoped that massive capital infusion in remote areas in the form of planned towns would secure a much-needed skilled workforce and generally increase returns. The pulp and paper town of Corner Brook in western Newfoundland is a significant, but largely neglected case in point. This paper details the paternalist and utilitarian motivations of companies for single-industry community construction at this time. More importantly, however, it offers a new and critical approach to the issue of single-industry community development. Early multinational companies sought to secure a place "on the ground" through comprehensive planning and community administration. At the same time, residents of Corner Brook, though constrained by dependence on the sole industry, negotiated their own physically and socially distinct community in a variety of ways. The global-local nexus of company planning, resident response, and change introduces a complexity into the study of company towns that are generally portrayed in terms of rigid top-down company exploitation of a "captive" workforce.

Late Saxon Planned Towns

SummaryDocumentary, topographical, and archaeological evidence suggests that the rectilinear street plan of modern Winchester was laid out as a planned system not later than the mid tenth century and probably before c. 904. Among the places listed in the Burghal Hidage there are seven which show clear evidence of rectilinear planning which is not of Roman origin. Four are on the sites of Roman towns—Winchester, Chichester, Exeter, and Bath—and three on non-Roman sites—Wareham, Wallingford, and Cricklade. These plans are seen as the result of a deliberate policy of urban formation in response to the military situation during Alfred's reign (871–99). These places are not so much fortresses as fortified towns in which the rectilinear street plan is a deliberate expression of the organization and apportionment of the land for permanent settlement. Rectilinear street systems appear to be characteristic of the larger places founded or re-organized by Edward the Elder or Athelstan, but rectilinear planning does not thereafter appear until the plantation of new towns in the Norman and later period.