week 15 post

In Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish conquest it seems to me that Steve Stern is trying to covey his belief that the motivating factors for historical change are wealth and greed. On page 82 Stern goes into Toledo’s creation of a new draft system, which he says is motivated by a labor shortage. This system Toledo created is stated to be burdensome and a violation of Andean tradition. This system seems to be motivated by the desire for profit as there are several references on this page to cheap labor, and the chart on the next page even breaks down what would be made due to various forms of labor in Toledo’s draft system. Page 92 goes on to explain some of the ways the new draft system was maintained due to the changes in the way things were run. Throughout this you can see how profit, money and greed motivated these changes. Page 96 goes so far as to state that a Don “threw his energies into one driving purpose: to convert political eminence into quick profit” and further describes the way he went about making money in this way. There are several other people and groups that do things for their profit, such as the Spanish colonial leaders who engineered things to leave the natives always in debt so that they always had a source of cheap labor ( 82) .Overall in this book you can see where various people and groups did things not for religious racial or political purposes, but to feed their greed and make them as much profit as was possible at that time.