Alberto Flores Galindo was an acclaimed historian and social critic who died in 1989 at age 40. In Search of an Inca won the prestigious Cuban Casa de las Américas Prize in 1986 and the Clarence Haring Prize from the American Historical Association in 1991. It is now in its fifth edition in Peru and has been published in Cuba, Mexico, and Italy. Flores Galindo was the author or editor of numerous other books, director of various scholarly journals, and recipient of many fellowships and honors. He received his doctoral degree from L'Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and taught at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima. Carlos Aguirre is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oregon. He obtained his Ph.D. degree at the University of Minnesota in 1996. In 1999 he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author or co-editor of nine books, most recently Dénle duro que no siente: Poder y transgresión en el Perú republicano (2008). Charles Walker is a Professor of History and Director of the Hemispheric Institute on the Americas at the University of California, Davis. His books include Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru and Its Long Aftermath (2008) and Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780–1840 (1999). Willie Hiatt is a Visiting Professor of History at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. He completed his Ph.D. in history in 2009 at the University of California, Davis. His dissertation is entitled 'The Rarefied Air of the Modern: Aviation and Peruvian Participation in World History, 1910–1950'.

'Flores Galindo, in his now-classic In Search of an Inca, traces the utopian myth that has persisted in many forms in the Andean region down to the present, inspiring uprisings, prophecies, sects, and local rituals … [The book] follows the underground path of myth and memory and the ethnic tensions that have preoccupied Peru's greatest thinkers. It is an absorbing story that needed to be told.' Jean Franco, Columbia University

• Editors' introduction; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Europe and the land of the Incas: the Andean utopia; 2. Communities and doctrines: the struggle for souls (central Andes, 1608–66); 3. The spark and the fire: Juan Santos Atahualpa; 4. The Tupac Amaru Revolution and the Andean people; 5. Govern the world, disrupt the world; 6. Soldiers and montoneros; 7. A republic without citizens; 8. The utopian horizon; 9. The boiling point; 10. The silent war; 11. Epilogue: dreams and nightmares.