Review article
Aztec political economy: a new conceptual frame
Gary M. Feinman∗
Kenneth G. Hirth. The Aztec economic world:
merchants and markets in ancient Mesoamerica. 2016.
xviii+382 pages, 50 b&w illustrations, 20 tables.
New York: Cambridge University Press; 978-1-107-
14277-0 hardback $125.
Deborah L. Nichols, Frances F. Berdan &
Michael E. Smith (ed.). Rethinking the Aztec
economy. 2017. vi+310 pages, b&w illustrations,
tables. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; 978-0-
8165-3551-4 hardback $65.
Deborah L. Nichols & Enrique Rodríguez-
Alegría (ed.). The Oxford handbook of the Aztecs.
2017. xxix+748 pages, several b&w illustrations.
Oxford: Oxford University Press; 978-0-19-934196-
2 hardback £97.
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 insight-
ful vantage on what we
presently know about this pre-Hispanic Mesoameri-
can 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
∗
Field Museum of Natural History, 1400 South Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, IL 60605–2496, USA
(Email: gfeinman@fieldmuseum.org)
© Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2017
antiquity 91 360 (2017): 1663–1666
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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 (1959: 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
(1959) contrasted the ‘theocratic’ organisation of
the Classic with the more ‘militaristic’ Postclassic.
Wolf (1976) himself helped usher in a more
processual framework that drew heavily from the
comparative analyses of Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi
Book reviews
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
doi:10.15184/aqy.2017.191
 Book Reviews
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 homo-
geneity, 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 per-
© Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2017
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spectives. 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.
 Book Reviews
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 150 000–200 000 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
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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 un-
derpinned 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, includ-
ing 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
Book reviews
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.
© Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2017
 Book Reviews

References Wolf, E.R. 1959. Sons of the Shaking Earth. Chicago

(IL): University of Chicago Press.
Peterson, F. 1959. Ancient Mexico: an introduction to
the pre-Hispanic cultures. New York: Capricorn. – (ed.) 1976. The Valley of Mexico. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press.

© Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2017

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