“When Fear Rather than Reason Dominates”

Abstract

This chapter examines how fear was experienced by rebels, priests, and colonial administrators in Peru during the Tupac Amaru Rebellion of 1780–1783. It first provides a historical background on the rebellion before discussing the cases of twelve of the eighteen clerics who were prosecuted by the bishop of Cuzco, Juan Manuel Moscoso y Peralta, to illustrate how priests experienced the uprising. It then considers what the rebellion contributed to our understanding of fear as a historical category and how the trials of the priests shed light on important questions about the Tupac Amaru Rebellion. It also explores how the Tupac Amaru uprising heightened social divisions in the Andes and notes that historians have deemed the postrebellion decades as the period of great fear. The chapter argues that Tupac Amaru as a symbol failed to foster the same broad, reactionary cohesion that the Haitian Revolution did a decade later.