The Aztec Economic World Merchants and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica

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.

Kenneth G. Hirth is Professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on the origin and development of ranked and state-level societies in the New World. He is especially interested in political economy and how forms of resource control lead to the development of structural inequalities within society.