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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)

#81

Post by mpyne »

asdfdsa1234 wrote: post #67
moxie wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Inca were easy to conquer because they had no steel and no horses. The Spanish were so unimaginably horrible that I can't imagine their presence having anything other than a uniting effect. The book "The Last Days Of The Inca" describe a scene were ~20 armored conquistadors are in a town that's surrounded by mountains on all sides. The Incas managed to call in enough people that the hillsides were all completely…

That doesn't pass the sniff test. Slaughtering a few thousand stunned pigs would be exhausting. Killing that many people who are trying to kill you? Not gonna happen.

Especially given the types of firearms available to conquistadors of the age. They weren't crew-served weapons, or machine guns, or even breech-loaded rifles. If you were lucky it was a flintlock, and even with that you're not going to be firing very frequently or accurately.

Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)

#82

Post by mpyne »

mseebach wrote: post #78
nhaehnle wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But almost every implementation of Marxism in recent history involved totalitarianism and ignored the part about decentralization of power post-revolution. I recently came across a very interesting thought, which is that this observation (which I also believed until coming across that thought) is induced by a kind of selection bias. The original article in which I encountered this thought is here: http://www.pieria.c…

"Explaining why communism always fail without faulting communism even slightly" is a very rich genre. It is also disingenuous in failing to consider the single most likely (by way of Occam's razor) cause of communism's failure, which is the ideology itself. But to apply some historical facts to the theory: From its founding, the Cheka was an important military and security arm of the Bolshevik communist government. I…

Also instructive is the history of the French Revolution itself (including the "Reign of Terror"), where you can see the idea of "the government is the people" writ large, but with only the political side beginning to be fleshed out, not the economic side.

Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)

#83

Post by mpyne »

freehunter wrote: post #25
s_baby wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People don't fight hard against invaders if their "home" rulers are dictators--World War II provides other examples of that principle. You don't think the Russians fought hard?

I assume I have a limited knowledge of WWII history on that front, but from what I was taught in history class, the biggest deterrent of the Nazi invasion of the USSR was the weather. What we learned was that the Russians were invading Germany more than the Germans could invade Russia. Basically the Russians weren't fighting to keep the Nazis from invading, but were focused on a counter-invasion. I could very well be…

Well when I took WWII history in the U.S. it had no such inaccuracies, though it did tend to gloss over the Eastern Front in general.

Of course the schools I've been to have also stayed away from trying to teach creationism as biology so maybe it's different elsewhere in the U.S.

Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)

#84

Post by shuffleshuff »

asdfdsa1234 wrote: post #67
moxie wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Inca were easy to conquer because they had no steel and no horses. The Spanish were so unimaginably horrible that I can't imagine their presence having anything other than a uniting effect. The book "The Last Days Of The Inca" describe a scene were ~20 armored conquistadors are in a town that's surrounded by mountains on all sides. The Incas managed to call in enough people that the hillsides were all completely…

That doesn't pass the sniff test. Slaughtering a few thousand stunned pigs would be exhausting. Killing that many people who are trying to kill you? Not gonna happen.

It was a siege of a well-fortified town, and the Spanish had non-negligible support from non-Incan people unsatisfied with the Incan rule. That said, a Spaniard on a thousand pound horse, wrapped in steel, on an open, unobstructed field, against people wearing mostly cloth armor, with stone or copper weapons, was effectively unstoppable. Again that said, many of the non-Spanish troops supporting Pizarro and Co. died.

Most of the defeats the Spanish suffered were when some of the more clever Incan generals used the brutal terrain against them: triggering landslides, creating obstructions to disrupt a cavalry charge, etc. While that works in mountain passes, places like Lima (established by Pizarro mid-1500s), were on flat terrain known by the Spanish, so those sorts of tactics did not help during those sieges. The siege of Cuzco (or Cusco, whichever) was in a similar situation to that of Lima.

Something that I felt was missing from the Last Days of the Inca was an emphasis on the number of Spaniards, and ignoring the number of shock troops that Pizarro & Co. had recruited by that time. Remember, by the time Manco Inca had decided to "rebel", the Spaniards had been in Cuzco and some neighboring cities for several years.

Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)

#85

Post by soperj »

ahomescu1 wrote: post #70
consonants wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. Incan society had a caste system, nobles, royalty, etc. Nobles owned estates and laborers. Workers did not own the means of production.

Well, theoretically, workers own the means of production in communism, but that's now how it happened in practice. In practice, the Party owned everything, and its high ranking members were effectively nobility. Workers in communism were nothing more than indentured servants.

That seems a best a very bad caricature of what happened in the Soviet Union. What's happening in Communist China now?

Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)

#86

Post by shuffleshuff »

consonants wrote: post #46
vijayboyapati wrote: post #14

A comment from a Peruvian friend of mine, who I passed the article onto: "This is incredibly misleading. There was no market because that culture was run by theocratic totalitarian blood thirsty central planners. The vast majority of people were a form of slave and trapped in basically a completely rigorous caste system. They were a mix of India and NK, ruled by a Mao "god" Inca who had total control of everything. T…

Sounds like feudalism to me. Your friend seems to have a tenuous grasp on what Marxism is, but still uses it as a pejorative; which is unfortunate. >There was no market because that culture was run by theocratic totalitarian blood thirsty central planners This implies that markets would have arisen in Incan society but were suppressed. Is there evidence of markets organically manifesting in Incan society?

"Incan society" is a bit of a misnomer. "Inca" refers to either the ethnic group, or the ruler of the empire (so "Manco Inca" is roughly "King Inca"). About 100 years before contact with the Spanish, the Inca defeated the groups of people surrounding them (including the Chimu and Chanca), establishing the Incan empire. The last Inca to rule over a unified empire, Huayna Capac, was consolidating the rule in what is now northern Ecuador at the time of his death (probably from smallpox). His grandfather, Pachacuti, was the Inca who initially defeated the Chanca to establish the empire (or Tahuantinsuyu, as they called it).

Anyway, the point is, some of the people the Inca conquered, like the Chimu, may have had the beginnings of markets. However, the conquest of the Incas (who tended to claim that anyone they conquered were uncivilized and barbaric), and then the Spanish (who also waged an informational war), and compounded with the smallpox (which may have killed 90% of the large urban populations of South America), meant that most oral history was lost, and the method of reading the written history (if there is any, there's some debate there) was seriously crippled.

ANYWAY, getting to the point, there's some evidence but we don't really know.

Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)

#87

Post by venomsnake »

jeltz wrote: post #21
zeteo wrote: post #10

The 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…

Agreed, there is nothing strange about the Incan system. It is one of the oldest forms of taxes.

And actually one of the fairest. We all are equally rich in time so requiring labor in equal amount makes sense.

Then you can give everyone equal money for their labour and let them trade the surplus goods and services on the free market.

Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)

#88

Post by soperj »

mseebach wrote: post #78
nhaehnle wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But almost every implementation of Marxism in recent history involved totalitarianism and ignored the part about decentralization of power post-revolution. I recently came across a very interesting thought, which is that this observation (which I also believed until coming across that thought) is induced by a kind of selection bias. The original article in which I encountered this thought is here: http://www.pieria.c…

"Explaining why communism always fail without faulting communism even slightly" is a very rich genre. It is also disingenuous in failing to consider the single most likely (by way of Occam's razor) cause of communism's failure, which is the ideology itself. But to apply some historical facts to the theory: From its founding, the Cheka was an important military and security arm of the Bolshevik communist government. I…

What is labelled as communism doesn't always fail, see China, Venezuela, Cuba.

Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)

#89

Post by r00fus »

shuffleshuff wrote: post #84
asdfdsa1234 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't pass the sniff test. Slaughtering a few thousand stunned pigs would be exhausting. Killing that many people who are trying to kill you? Not gonna happen.

It was a siege of a well-fortified town, and the Spanish had non-negligible support from non-Incan people unsatisfied with the Incan rule. That said, a Spaniard on a thousand pound horse, wrapped in steel, on an open, unobstructed field, against people wearing mostly cloth armor, with stone or copper weapons, was effectively unstoppable. Again that said, many of the non-Spanish troops supporting Pizarro and Co. died.…

> That said, a Spaniard on a thousand pound horse, wrapped in steel, on an open, unobstructed field, against people wearing mostly cloth armor, with stone or copper weapons, was effectively unstoppable

This is ridiculous. The problem was that the Incans didn't have access to (or had developed) the polearm (ie, spear axes), guerilla warfare or basic combat engineering (read: trenches/moats). 10 decently trained pole-armsmen could easily best an armored horse, and well-laid traps or ambushes could easily have netted them closer to 1:1 numbers. An occasional ditch or two could easily have prevented any charges, nullifying the mobility advantage.

More likely, the Incan slave/poor populace was split and easily co-opted by the Spaniards.

Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)

#90

Post by aneth5 »

zeteo wrote: post #45
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the key point is that they didn't have money at all .

The article has two main points: 1. The Inca state had no internal trade system whatsoever. This is, if accurate, indeed unusual for a society of its size. 2. Despite this, they still managed to acquire great "wealth", which the article defines as infrastructure and public works. This is not surprising at all, since historically even societies that had markets did not usually rely on them for civil engineering projec…

> 2. Despite this, they still managed to acquire great "wealth", which the article defines as infrastructure and public works. This is not surprising at all, since historically even societies that had markets did not usually rely on them for civil engineering projects.

Wouldn't civil engineering be financed by payments in some sort of coinage, valued because of its use in markets?

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