Inca Apocalypse is an expansive, gracefully written narrative history of the Spanish invasion of Peru—a conquest that combined brutal violence with negotiation, grafting Indigenous Andean institutions onto a Mediterranean, Catholic monarchy. Beginning with parallel histories of Castile and the Inca kingdom (called Tawantinsuyu) in the century before 1530, it follows the Spanish incursion into the Andes, the Incas’ rapid and catastrophic collapse, and the slow, tortuous process of constructing a colonial state. There has been no rigorous, scholarly synthesis of this history since John Hemming's classic Conquest of the Incas, published fifty years ago. In the intervening decades, the idea of the Spanish conquest as an organizing framework went out of fashion, then returned in the form of the New Conquest History. This body of work, mainly focused on Mesoamerica, has debunked old myths and revealed the great diversity of Indigenous as well as European perspectives on the conquest. One of its insights is that Indigenous people did not always see the Spanish invasion, and the replacement of Aztec, Maya, or Inca rulers with Spanish ones, as a hinge moment of history.

Covey takes a different tack. He shows that many people, both Spanish and Andean, did in fact perceive the Spanish conquest as a world-historical hinge, if not immediately, then within a few decades; they saw many other events in this way as well. Both cultures shared a supernatural framework of history, in which key events marked a transition between temporal dispensations; this is what Covey references with the idea of apocalypse. In the Andes, a key metaphysical concept was pachacuti, meaning the overturning or renewal of time and space. It offered an explanation for the Spaniards’ invasion and, later, a way of imagining their expulsion. On the Spanish side, there was continuity from medieval millenarianism (Christian, Jewish, and Muslim), through Columbus's millennial designs, to the dreams of missionary friars and ordinary settlers who situated their lives within a metaphysical, dispensational narrative.

This parallel treatment of Spanish and Andean metaphysics reflects the book's premise that Spanish and Andean societies were more alike than we tend to assume. Both were peasant societies with large, bureaucratic states; they had broadly similar lifeways, world views, and technologies. Particularly striking is Covey's presentation of pre-Hispanic Inca history, for which most of the sources are colonial chronicles written by Spaniards, based on now-lost Andean oral accounts. Scholars have hesitated to read these chronicles literally; some posit that Spaniards and Andeans had such radically different ontologies that Spanish authors could not have understood what they were being told. Covey himself, in a 2006 article, cautioned against naïvely literal readings of these texts. Here, however, he offers a confident narrative of Inca history that may startle readers familiar with the scholarly debates over this subject. While he does not address the methodological issues here, his treatment implies that Spanish authors, encountering a state and society not so different from their own, understood and accurately conveyed what Inca history keepers told them.

Covey's account of early colonial history is familiar in its broad contours but is well synthesized, narratively compelling, and dense with colorful details. He highlights the role of the Inca royal clan, its factional disputes and colonial accommodations, and especially the royal women who served as key mediators and power brokers, both before and after the Spanish invasion. Although Covey is one of the preeminent archaeologists of the Cuzco region, and has also done important work publishing and editing archival documents, he does not incorporate much archaeological or archival evidence in this book, at least explicitly. Inca Apocalypse is based essentially on a close reading of the published primary sources, some 160 of which are listed in the bibliography. The synthesis and narrative it offers will reward nonspecialists who have an interest in this dramatic story, and perhaps especially Europeanists. In the last fifty years, scholars of early modern Europe have become ethnohistorians, revealing a symbolic and performative politics as exotic for contemporary readers as any Geertzian theater state. While dialing back the radical alterity that some anthropologists attributed to the Incas, Covey places Castile and Tawantinsuyu side by side as ethnographic case studies, both rich and strange, joined in the cruel violence of the Spanish conquest.