What was the Inca Empire?

The Inca Empire — Tawantinsuyu, meaning 'The Four Regions Together' — was the largest and most administratively sophisticated state in the pre-Columbian Americas. In less than a century, the Inca expanded from a small kingdom centered on Cusco in the Peruvian highlands to control an empire stretching 4,000 kilometers along the Andes, from modern Colombia to central Chile, governing approximately 12 million people.

What makes the Inca particularly remarkable is what they accomplished without technologies that seem essential to large-scale civilization. They had no writing system, using instead the quipu — an elaborate system of knotted, colored strings — for record-keeping and communication. They had no wheeled transport, no iron or steel tools, no currency, and no markets in the conventional sense. Yet they built one of history's most effective administrative states.

The Inca economy was based on the mit'a labor tax system. Instead of paying tribute in goods or money, every household owed labor to the state — farming, construction, military service, or craft production. In return, the state provided food, clothing, and shelter from its vast warehouses. This system built Machu Picchu, the 40,000-kilometer road network (including rope suspension bridges across mountain gorges), and agricultural terraces that turned steep Andean slopes into productive farmland.

The empire's rapid collapse after Francisco Pizarro's arrival in 1532 was caused by a devastating combination of factors: a civil war between rival claimants to the throne, the introduction of epidemic diseases (particularly smallpox, which had preceded the Spanish), and the technological advantages of Spanish steel, horses, and firearms.