The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)
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Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)
#2Seems like a centralized economy does not have to be inefficient after all.
Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)
#3The book _1491_ is a great read to learn more about what the Americas were like before the European arrival. Recent archaeology is finding that the societies in the Americas were way more complex and interconnected than most of us understand. http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colum...
Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)
#4The secret of the Inca's great wealth may have been their unusual tax system. Instead of paying taxes in money, every Incan was required to provide labor to the state. In exchange for this labor, they were given the necessities of life.
Of course, not everybody had to pay labor tax. Nobles and their courts were exempt, as were other prominent members of Incan society.
Isn't this just a variant of feudalism?
Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)
#5The book _1491_ is a great read to learn more about what the Americas were like before the European arrival. Recent archaeology is finding that the societies in the Americas were way more complex and interconnected than most of us understand. http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colum...
Saw a documentary about Gauls where they reshaped the view on what was said to be a simple civilisation (~hunters) where in fact they had a non trivial economy based on manufacture of goods (amphoras) backed by recent discovery of burried factory remains.
Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)
#6"This io9 flashback previously ran in January 2012."
This note on the submitted article prompted me to look for earlier discussion of the Inca empire through the HN Search tool. This article appears not to have been submitted before, but we have had other discussions here about the Inca empire and its conquest by the Spanish.
The submitted article correctly notes that the history of the Inca empire is fragmentary because of a severe lack of written sources. Archeology is a poor substitute for history (relying on actual written records from the time studied) because it is hard to figure out what people were thinking. The rather rapid conquest of the Inca empire by a badly outnumbered group of Spanish explorers surely relied most on the epidemic diseases that the Spaniards inadvertently brought with them, but it appears to have relied as well on dissatisfaction with Inca rule on the part of many Inca subjects. People don't fight hard against invaders if their "home" rulers are dictators--World War II provides other examples of that principle. Maybe the greatest mystery of the Inca empire is that it lasted any length of time at all. The empire collapsed rapidly once a new, tiny group of potential rulers arrived. South America's Andean territories soon became viceroyalties of Spain, far away.
Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)
#7Seems like a centralized economy does not have to be inefficient after all.
The article doesn't make many comments about efficiency. Achieving an empire through forced labor is different than doing it efficiently.
Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)
#8The secret of the Inca's great wealth may have been their unusual tax system. Instead of paying taxes in money, every Incan was required to provide labor to the state. In exchange for this labor, they were given the necessities of life. Of course, not everybody had to pay labor tax. Nobles and their courts were exempt, as were other prominent members of Incan society. Isn't this just a variant of feudalism?
It is called Corveé:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvee
While a part of feudal practice, it is far more ancient and widespread, having been part of Sumerian culture.
Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)
#9Seems like a centralized economy does not have to be inefficient after all.
The article doesn't make many comments about efficiency. Achieving an empire through forced labor is different than doing it efficiently.
Could you say labor is forced if you have a choice between starvation and labor? If such is the case, I wish I wasn't forced to work for money in this society and then exchange it for goods and seek out the most favorable deal.
Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)
#10The extent to which the Incas did it is remarkable, but historically civil engineering had little to do with markets. The ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, Persians etc. pretty much built their infrastructure and monumental buildings with drafted, unpaid labor. The French monarchy, one of the most advanced states in the world, relied on the corvée to build roads up until 1789 [1]. The decisive turn in the situation took place in Holland around the 16th century, when Dutch cities discovered they could build canals and recoup costs by charging moderate usage fees. This system of financing civil engineering, adapted to e.g. turnpikes and later railroads, increasingly became widespread, and displaced earlier arrangements in Western countries during the 18th and 19th centuries. So what would be truly surprising is if the Incas had done it with money.