As the foremost translator of the Inca culture and history for a European audience, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega was continually translated and published by English, French and Dutch scholars and printers in the early modern times. His Royal Commentaries on Peru not only became a bestseller in France and the Netherlands in the 17th and 18th centuries, but also in Restoration England, where another cultural translator, Sir Paul Rycaut, rendered the Peruvian’s work into English. Examined for their performativity, the translations of Garcilaso’s works emerge as sites for early modern mercantile expansion and for the staging of cultural difference. In the wake of the boom of English publications on the New World, which began in the 1650’s with Cromwell’s attack on Jamaica, the fortunes of the Royal Commentaries on Peru speak both to the ideological needs of an emerging modern world and to the transatlantic endeavours that marked English imperial expansion.