When Helen Maria Williams embarked on the composition of her ‘epic romance’ Peru (1784), she drew on a formidable tradition of Enlightenment-era writing about Spanish America. Works such as the Abbé Raynal's Histoire philosophique et politique des Deux Indes and William Robertson's History of America had done much to shift eighteenth-century discourse about Spanish America from one that emphasized the moral depravity and greed of the Spanish conquerors to one that defined Spanish America as a site of commercial promise. While both historians sharply criticized the bullionist economy of the Spanish empire, they lauded Bourbon reforms aimed at the opening of trade and the reduction of taxes. Thanks to Spain's recent adoption of more liberal imperial practices, Spanish America was destined to become a principle hub in the spread of universal improvement, thereby proving the moral and political compatibility of free trade and colonialism. This conjunction of liberal economy and rational empire, Raynal and Robertson projected, would not only extend ‘universal benevolence’ to the Spanish colonies, it would also bring a corrupted Europe closer to the social unity and natural sensibility of earlier times, thereby compensating, on both sides of the Atlantic, for the ravages of conquest.

In addition to her acknowledged debt to Raynal and Robertson, Williams's Peru was deeply influenced by Jean-François Marmontel's Les Incas. One sees Marmontel's influence in the names of Williams's characters, in the poem's elevated sentimental tone, and in its attention to the intimate inter-relationships linking each aspect of the Inca empire, from its religion to its laws, and from the emotions of its subjects to Peru's flora and fauna.