The Aztec Economic World
Merchants and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica

The first discussion of Aztec economy to include cross-cultural comparisons with other ancient and premodern societies around the world.

Kenneth G. Hirth (Author)

9781107142770, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 July 2016

404 pages, 50 b/w illus. 20 tables
23.5 x 16 x 2.3 cm, 0.77 kg

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.

1. Introduction to the Aztec economic world
2. The structure of Mesoamerican economy
3. The Mesoamerican marketplace
4. Merchants, profit and the pre-Columbian world
5. Often invisible: domestic entrepreneurs in Mesoamerican commerce
6. The professional retail merchants
7. Merchant communities and pochteca vanguard merchants
8. The tools of the trade and the mechanics of commerce
9. Conclusions.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], Archaeology [HD], Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500 [HBLC], History of the Americas [HBJK]