For those in search of current perspectives on the Aztec with a focus on matters economic, I heartily recommend a deep dive into these three volumes. Each book offers an insightful vantage on what we presently know about this pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican empire, as well as how new discoveries over the last 60–70 years force serious rethinking of both the long-term history of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and key tenets that underpin pre-industrial political economies more broadly. Empires were a relatively rare phenomenon in the pre-industrial world, especially in the ancient Americas, and few have been so skilfully studied through a multi-disciplinary approach that integrates both historical texts and archaeology.
What space does not afford me to offer here is an exhaustive enumeration of both the in-depth discussions in The Aztec economic world and the 61 essays (50 in The Oxford handbook and 11 in Rethinking the Aztec economy) that make up the two other works. Instead, I begin with a brief review to contextualise how scholarly visions of this ancient empire, which had its nexus in the central highlands of Mexico, have radically shifted, and offer a capsule synopsis of each book. I then turn towards broader themes inspired by my recent Aztec immersion—identifying perspectives on the historical processes that culminated in the rise of the empire and a re-evaluation of Aztec economic practice and institutions that requires serious reconsideration of long-held comparative views of economic history and change.
Over the course of my academic career, three basic theoretical frames have guided scholarship on the Aztec empire, which dates to late in the Postclassic period. In the early years of my studies, the conceptual perspectives were heavily culture-historical and drew on rather literal readings of available texts (indigenous and Spanish). Aztec archaeology was still in its infancy, time frames were compressed and demographic migrations and population replacements were emphasised. Stark contrasts were drawn between broad temporal periods, specifically the Classic and Postclassic. For example, Peterson wrote (Reference Peterson1959: 65): “The Classic period faded almost imperceptibly away and was followed by a much shorter period in which warrior peoples invaded the central highlands [. . .] and brought a new vigor to bear on every phase of the older cultures”. While in his early work, Wolf (Reference Wolf1959) contrasted the ‘theocratic’ organisation of the Classic with the more ‘militaristic’ Postclassic. Wolf (Reference Wolf1976) himself helped usher in a more processual framework that drew heavily from the comparative analyses of Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi and Karl Wittfogel. This conceptual frame guided decades of archaeological investigations on the Aztec and their central Mexican antecedents by generations of multi-national researchers, while cleaving to doctrinaire positions of pre-industrial polities as despotic and pre-modern economies as politically controlled and redistributive. The collection and integration of findings from multi-scalar and interdisciplinary archaeological projects in conjunction with more analytical readings of the rich corpus of texts has led to the advent of a third theoretical frame—one typified by these volumes—that weaves a comparative awareness more focused on understanding diversity than homogeneity, with the recognition that social change is path-dependent.
Of these works, The Oxford handbook offers the most comprehensive and holistic perspective on Mexica/Aztec scholarship, with a strong emphasis on recent trends. The component chapters cover a wide range of topics, from cultural heritage to central Mexico after the Spanish conquest, from religion and ritual to the neighbouring foes and friends of the Aztec empire, and from social and gender relations to settlement and landscape. Long-held opinions regarding the rise and nature of the empire and its historical roots are challenged. For example, Florescano contextualises and critiques the literal reading of Mexica migration tales, while the politico-economic mechanisms and processes that mark the era from the fall of Teotihuacan (c. AD 600–700) to the rise of the empire are outlined (Fargher et al.), with stress on the historical continuities as well as key elements of change. The multi-ethnic composition of the capital, Tenochtitlan, and the great linguistic variability of the imperial realm, with 40 languages that belong to five language families (Hill), serve to highlight the cultural and historical diversity and political rivalry that underpinned the rise of this imperial formation, as well as the mix of practices—sacred, commercial and military—that interconnected this far-flung domain. “Taxes and rents were primary mechanisms by which commoners supported nobles” (Smith & Hicks, p. 433), and contrary to traditional wisdom, tribute, in the comparative sense, was not the foundation of governance in the Aztec world. Many of the authors emphasise the significant role of households as the fundamental economic unit for production, consumption and exchange, that most agriculture was smallholder farming (Morehart) and that “The marketplace was the centerpiece of the Aztec” economy (Hirth & Nichols, p. 294).
The two other volumes build on these latter economic themes and offer complementary perspectives. The Aztec economic world is a masterful synthesis that draws almost entirely on textual sources to construct a model of the pre-Hispanic highland Mexican economy relevant for comparative analysis. The volume deftly weaves elements of formal and substantive approaches. Formal economic terminology is applied, yet with the recognition that historical context shapes and structures the values and ‘rules of the game’ in which economic behaviour is embedded, as is the case for all economies past and present. As outlined below, the volume challenges many long-accepted beliefs regarding the Aztec economy as well as pre-industrial economies more generally. Rethinking the Aztec economy relies almost entirely on object-based archaeological and art-historical approaches to examine Aztec economic practices. Both of these books give heavy analytical consideration to a bottom-up, household-based vantage, which serves as a means to lift the heavy cloak of doctrinaire substantivist thought that has largely framed pre-industrial economic interpretation (Introduction, Berdan et al.). At the same time, collectively, the papers in Rethinking the Aztec economy add to De Lucia's observation in The Oxford handbook that “archaeology does not merely serve as a complement to documentary evidence but can offer new insight into the day-to-day activities and interactions of ordinary commoners since these aspects of daily life are frequently ignored in historic accounts” (p. 250).
In the remainder of this review, I weave together strands from these collective works to explore two thematic topics of broader cross-cultural concern: the socio-economic processes that led to the Aztec empire and the imperial-era economy. In regard to the former, an episode that now can be historically subdivided more finely than in the past, two mutually reinforcing sequential models are outlined (Fargher et al. in The Oxford handbook, Smith in Rethinking the Aztec economy). Fargher and colleagues delve deeper in time, noting the scalar parallels between the multi-family, Classic-period apartment compounds at Teotihuacan and the Epiclassic city-states (altepemeh) that were dispersed across central Mexico following the fall of the great metropolis. They further propose that two institutions were elaborated during this era of political fragmentation: the regional commercial institutions that linked local political units (altepetl) across the region and inherited leadership (tlatoani), with accompanying royal and palace symbolism, which had been less pronounced at Teotihuacan. In this subsequent politically competitive landscape, population increased, in part through immigration, while polity size, and the cities that were at the centres of them, also grew in size and as commercial nodes (Smith, Rethinking the Aztec economy). According to textual sources, Tenochtitlan was founded in AD 1325, so its later growth to at least 150000–200000 inhabitants over the less than 200 years prior to the Spanish conquest was rapid.
The final two centuries of the pre-Hispanic era in central Mexico were marked by a succession of political confederations, of which the Aztec Triple Alliance (founded AD 1428) was the last (Berdan, The Oxford handbook). As Smith (in Rethinking the Aztec economy) relates, the processes behind basin-wide political consolidation, urbanisation, commerce and broad-spread imperialism were intertwined. Yet, Stark (in the same volume) also reminds us that the impact of the Aztec on the peoples of Mexico's Gulf Coast (as compared to the lesser material signals of earlier Teotihuacan in this region) in part reflects the comparative weakness and smaller populations of the coastal polities in the later period. Holistically, these analyses of empire formation do not all integrate a slew of evidence from multiple disciplines, but they illustrate that comparatively informative investigations of political economic transition require deft awareness of both history and process, as opposed to an either/or juxtaposition between the two.
These new directions concerning the rise of the Aztec empire are significant and seem to have reached a rewarding degree of consensus in these works. Nevertheless, the reframing of the Aztec economy is a development that should have ramifications across academic disciplines. What makes the new findings so impactful is that in relation to other pre-industrial contexts, one might expect that the tenets of substantivist thought (e.g. localism, political control, redistribution, high degrees of domestic self-sufficiency, low degrees of commercial exchange) would apply most firmly in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. “The Aztec world lacked beasts of burden, wheeled vehicles, and paved roads and had few navigable rivers and very limited maritime trade. Staple and luxury goods moved primarily by human porters” (Hirth & Nichols, Rethinking the Aztec economy, p. 281). And yet, this economic world “revolved around the marketplace where household producer-sellers interacted with both full-time professional merchants and household consumers” (The Aztec economic world, p. 150). “Marketplaces shaped the face of highland Mesoamerican society” (p. 89); they “were large by European standards and probably were both more numerous and held more regularly” (p. 289).
Domestic producers, sellers and consumers underpinned the Aztec economy. As the main role of the market was to provision households, food (hot and cold) was the main item exchanged. “Households across the Aztec economic world never were completely self-sufficient” (The Aztec economic world, p. 277), nor were commoners passive or impoverished. Farmers were highly valued, and the elite strived to attract subalterns to their domains, as they were the primary producers, craft-workers, corvée labourers and served in semi-professional militias. Counter to long-held conceptual positions, the Aztec economy also featured currencies, including cloth, cacao seeds, copper axes and quills of gold dust, in addition to a well-developed motive to make a profit, at times through deception, as well as a means to sell day-labour and broker between currencies. Redistribution, large-scale state storage and political dominance of production and exchange were not core features of the Aztec economy.
This emerging economic picture of the Aztec forces a more holistic reconsideration of pre-modern economies as well as recognition of important axes of variation. In contrast to more modern economies, the weakness of Aztec factor markets (markets for land, labour, capital) was certainly a key difference, yet are the distinctions sufficiently broad to require two largely independent bodies of theory and interpretation as is presently the case? As evidenced by testamentary wills from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, indigenous households in central Mexico were able to adjust rapidly to this shift in ‘new rules’ and the opportunities that followed the Spanish conquest.
In sum, although this review cannot do justice to the breadth and scope of these collective and interdisciplinary contributions, it hopefully makes clear that examination of the Aztec polity and economy has arrived at a new paradigmatic era. Many of those responsible for these recent scholarly advances are represented in these volumes. Together, they offer a full array of comparatively framed questions of significance well beyond Mesoamerica.
