The Inca Empire (Tawantinsuyu) was one of the largest empires in the pre-Columbian Americas and one of the most administratively sophisticated. At its peak it controlled territory from modern Ecuador to central Chile, connected by a road network of approximately 40,000 km — more extensive than the Roman road system at its height.

What makes Inca statecraft distinctive is its operation without markets or money. The Inca state extracted labor through the mita system — obligatory labor rotations — rather than monetary taxation. State warehouses (qollqas) stored vast quantities of food, textiles, and other goods redistributed to laborers working on state projects and to support the army and religious institutions.

The quipu — knotted string records — encoded information about labor accounts, census data, and possibly other information that we cannot yet decode. Local curacas (chiefs) administered their own communities while reporting to the Inca state through a hierarchical chain of command reaching back to Cusco.

The speed of the empire's collapse after the Spanish arrival in 1532 — facilitated by smallpox, by the Inca civil war between Atahualpa and Huascar, and by the strategic brilliance of Pizarro — reflects both the vulnerabilities of a highly centralized system and the catastrophic impact of epidemic disease on populations with no prior exposure.