Kenneth Hirth is most widely known for his work on Mesoamerican obsidian technology, particularly at the Epiclassic (ad 700–900) site of Xochicalco. In this new book, he moves forward in time to the Aztec period, and switches gears from archaeology to the historical record. In the process, he contributes to a trend of scholarship that has moved Mesoamerican economic studies away from the distortions of Karl Polanyi's models. As recently as a few decades ago, most Mesoamericanists still accepted Polanyi's erroneous views about ancient economies: that they lacked market exchange, and that most exchange and production activity was controlled by the state. The Polanyi model was part of a broader ‘statist’ perspective that viewed all ancient rulers as powerful autocrats who tried to control all aspects of life within their realm.
Led by Richard Blanton, Mesoamericanists came to see that Polanyi's distorted models do not fit the available data. The last three decades have produced a steady stream of works on the Aztec economy that emphasize commercial exchange and its implications. Scholars such as Frances Berdan, Gary Feinman, Barry Isaac, José Luis de Rojas and myself joined Blanton in opening up our view of the Aztec economy. Hirth continues this tradition by focusing on entrepreneurial merchants and market exchange. This book is by far the most complete and incisive analysis of Aztec merchants. Strangely, though, Hirth's insistence on the entrepreneurial nature of Aztec merchants, convincingly argued, is coupled with remnants of the old statist view that, outside the marketplace, rulers kept a tight rein on people and the economy. This seeming contradiction—an open sector of markets and merchants with widespread popular participation, coupled with a state that controlled other sectors—is not explicitly addressed in the book.
Hirth deliberately limits his consideration to the historical record, suggesting that his models and interpretations can then be tested by archaeologists. After a brief introduction and a chapter on the Mesoamerican economy (chapters 1 & 2), the book begins its major empirical section with a chapter on Mesoamerican marketplaces (chapter 3). Hirth defines his concepts, and then describes markets and their institutions. The heart of this book consists of four chapters on different types of merchants (chapters 4 through 7) and one chapter (8) on the mechanics of exchange. Chapter 4 introduces Aztec and other Mesoamerican merchants. Hirth shows that merchants definitely had a profit motivation. He backs up his discussion with key quotations from the chronicler Sahagún. The chapter closes by showing that petty vendors, selling their family's agricultural or craft goods in the market, fit his definition of merchant and need to be included in any discussion of merchants and commerce, a useful departure from past works on merchants.
Chapter 5 is devoted to the petty vendors, labelled ‘domestic entrepreneurs’ by Hirth. Household production strategies were diverse owing to ‘the need for survival, the desire for social enhancement, and maintenance of resource self-sufficiency’ (p. 108). In this and the following chapters, tables of native categories carry much of the weight of the argument. Table 5.1, for example, lists 32 types of producer-sellers of food products identified by Sahagún, from the chili seller to the fish and lake food vendor. Hunters and foragers sold goods—from rubber to honey to quail—in the markets (table 5.2), while artisans and craftsmen plied their trade, including papermakers, obsidian toolmakers and rabbit-hair dyers (table 5.3). Service providers in the markets included physicians, prostitutes, scribes and attorneys (table 5.4). These tables make two important points: the marketplace was the setting for a wide range of specialist vendors, and most of these vendors were farmers or other specialists who sold the goods produced by their households.
The next chapter is devoted to ‘professional retail merchants’. Following the format of the previous chapter, table 6.1 lists 39 different types of retailers. These sellers are distinguished from the petty vendors by their Nahuatl-language labels in Sahagún and by Sahagún's descriptions. For example, the petty vendor of chilis is described as ‘a worker of the fields’, whereas the professional chili pepper dealer is ‘a retailer’ who sells multiple varieties of peppers from a variety of places. This table is divided into dealers of food, staple goods, textiles and clothing, high-value merchandise, speciality items and commercial specialists. Hirth then discusses how the retail merchants obtained their goods and closes with a general profile of Aztec retailing.
Chapter 8 covers two main topics. The most original discussion is of the merchant community of Santa María Acxotla in Tlaxcala, one of several communities included in a 1560 pictorial census, the Matrícula de Huexotzinco. While this document has been analysed by many scholars over the years, Hirth is the first to focus on the organizational implications of the single merchant community. Fully 86 per cent of the household heads were merchants, making this an unusual Aztec community. Hirth also briefly discusses the merchant community of Otumba, temporarily setting aside the book's avoidance of archaeological data. The second topic is the long-distance professional merchants, typically called the pochteca. Hirth covers variation in the types of long-distance merchant, and discusses their relationship with the state. Scholars know quite a bit about these merchants, largely because one whole book of Sahagún's 12-book Florentine Codex is devoted to them. By placing them into the context of his overall framework, Hirth makes some interesting advances.
For me, chapter 9 (‘The tools of the trade and the mechanics of commerce’) is the most interesting, bringing together scattered historical data on key commercial institutions. Hirth covers the nature of transport in an economy without beasts of burden or wheeled transport. A discussion of supply and demand follows, structured around a list of 24 Nahuatl verbs (e.g. to wholesale, to owe money, to sell, to loan with interest) and nouns (e.g. merchant, marketplace, currency, porter, investor). Hirth also covers money, and a section on ‘the rules of the road’ focuses on the mechanics of merchant travel. Sections on commercial agents and loans close the chapter. Chapter 10 summarizes and synthesizes the book's findings.
I have two criticisms of this generally excellent book. The first concerns historiography: Hirth's treatment of documentary sources is not as rigorous as one might like. For example, in chapter 3 he admirably presents many ‘eyewitness accounts’ of markets, with block quotes from the conquerors who observed Aztec markeplaces in action. But he also includes numerous quotes from Francisco López de Gómara, a Spanish writer who never set foot in Mexico! Far from an ‘eyewitness account’, this work was derived almost entirely from the writings of Cortés. The work was so full of errors that it was banned by Philip II, and it inspired Bernal Díaz del Castillo to write his well-known history of the Spanish conquest to set things straight.
In another example, Hirth criticizes Lawrence Feldman for drawing conclusions about markets from lists of terms alone (pp. 183–4). Yet in chapter 2, Hirth himself is guilty of just this practice. He interprets a list of 17 native terms for land tenure (p. 37) as indicating 17 different types of land. But James Lockhart (Reference Lockhart1992), working from additional evidence, shows that this diversity of terms can be reduced to two basic types of land tenure. Partly because of historiographical issues like this, the discussion in chapter 2 is not up to the same empirical standards as the rest of the book.
My second criticism is Hirth's adherence to the old view of a powerful state that controlled society and the economy, except in the commercial realm. One manifestation is his use of the term ‘tribute’ to describe regular, institutionalized payments to the state that are normally—outside Mesoamerican scholarship—called taxes. Although he does cite my work on this topic and gives a reason for his choice of terms (pp. 35–6), I am not convinced by his argument. Hirth further claims that everyone was a member of a ‘tribute cadre’ that determined a person's economic position and activity. He suggests that the state organized labour and regulated communities through these institutions. But his description of ‘tribute cadres’, the tlaxiclacalli and calpolli (pp. 35, 197, 225), does not fit standard models of Aztec local groups and structures as analysed by Hicks, Berdan, Lockhart, or me. Hirth views these institutions as top-down impositions by the state, whereas most others view them more as bottom-up structures generated from local social and economic forces.
The ‘tribute cadre’ concept is used to justify one of the more controversial assertions in the book: that the long-distance merchants and elite artisans were not organized into guilds or guild-like institutions (pp. 153, 192–4, 209). Nearly every scholar who has written on the pochteca and elite artisans concludes that they organized themselves into something very much like European guilds. Yet Hirth claims that ‘craft guilds did not exist in Mesoamerica’ (p. 153). His argument seems to be that, because merchants and crafters were already organized into tribute cadres, they could not also have formed guilds (p. 192). It is unfortunate that Hirth does not develop a more systematic comparative approach. He makes scattered comparisons with medieval European traits. In some cases, he sees similar patterns (e.g. p. 266, on exchange dealers), and in other cases—such as tax/tribute and the lack of guilds—he claims major differences. But in the absence of a more systematic comparative method, it is hard to judge the extent to which his comparative claims are based on evidence, as opposed to adherence to a statist view of Mesoamerican economies.
In sum, The Aztec Economic World is an outstanding treatment of Aztec merchants and their institutional context. Additional attention to a few key historiographical and conceptual issues would improve the volume, but these issues affect his general contextual discussions more than his key chapters on merchants and their trade.
