Description
This study explores the organization, scale, complexity, and integration of Aztec commerce across Mesoamerica at Spanish contact. The aims of the book are threefold. The first is to construct an in-depth understanding of the economic organization of precolumbian Aztec society and how it developed in the way that it did. The second is to explore the livelihoods of the individuals who bought, sold, and moved goods across a cultural landscape that lacked both navigable rivers and animal transport. Finally, this study models Aztec economy in a way that facilitates its comparison to other ancient and premodern societies around the world. What makes the Aztec economy unique is that it developed one of the most sophisticated market economies in the ancient world in a society with one of the worse transportation systems. This is the first book to provide an updated and comprehensive view of the Aztec economy in thirty years.
Chapter
Domestic and institutional economy
Mesoamerican social classes
The informal institutional economy
The formal institutional economy
Operation of a large prebendal estate
The production of durable goods for institutional use
The imperial tribute system
3 The Mesoamerican marketplace
The market, market exchange, market economy, and the marketplace
Eyewitness accounts of prehispanic marketplaces
The marketplace as a formal institution
Institutional finance and the market tax
Five economic functions of the marketplace
4 Merchants, profit, and the precolumbian world
Defining the precolumbian merchant
Profiling precolumbian commercial activity
5 Often invisible: domestic entrepreneurs in Mesoamerican commerce
The domestic economy in economic development
Household economic strategies
Domestic commerce in Mesoamerica: the producer-seller
Producer-sellers of food and fiber products
Producer-sellers of foraged products and natural resources
Independent craftsmen of manufactured products
Indigenous service providers
The production of agricultural surplus for the marketplace
Domestic diversification: the production of craft goods and other services
6 The professional retail merchants
The importance of indigenous retailing
Identifying indigenous retailers: the tlanamacac and tlanecuilo
Retail dealers in the prehispanic marketplace
Textile and apparel retailers
Commercial specialists: bankers and peddlers
Craftsmen and producers with retail functions
The question of supply and retail provisioning
7 Merchant communities and pochteca vanguard merchants
The organization of professional merchants
The merchant community of Otumba
The merchant community of Santa Maria Acxotla
Merchants in other Huexotzinco communities
Rank, status, and merchant privilege
Long-distance trade and the Aztec state
The ritual life of merchants
Preparation rituals for merchant ventures
Ritual feasting and social rank
8 The tools of the trade and the mechanics of commerce
The cost of movement: a tumpline economy
Deal making: the mechanisms of supply and exchange
Currency as medium of exchange
Rules of the road: strategies for inter-regional exchange
Facilitating exchange: agents, brokers, and factors
Making loans and charging interest
Commerce and the ancient economy
The material conditions of commercial activity
The miracle of the marketplace
Commercial complexity in the Aztec economic world
The long-distance vanguard merchant
Mediating the merchant’s dilemma
The Aztec commercial world in cross-cultural perspective
Glossary of Nahuatl and early colonial Spanish terms
The Aztec Economic World
：Merchants and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica
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