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

http://io9.com/the-greatest-mystery-of-the-inca-empire-was-its-strange-1198541254

by dboles99 • 13 years ago

219 147 13 years ago

kirab• 13 years ago

Seems like a centralized economy does not have to be inefficient after all.

mathattack• 13 years ago

The article doesn't make many comments about efficiency. Achieving an empire through forced labor is different than doing it efficiently.

Demiurge• 13 years ago

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.

marcosdumay• 13 years ago

The hard to cultivate terrain where the Inca prospered already tells enough about efficiency.

Ayway, it's easier to organize efficiently an economy based on a dozen of stable products with well known necessities than it is to organize one on our times.

Also, an ecomomy being efficient does not make it a good one to live under.

mason240• 13 years ago

When using slaves, anything is possible.

consonants5• 13 years ago

Can you provide evidence that a centralized economy is inefficient?

contingencies3• 13 years ago

Bureaucrats and the growth of bureaucracy.

NelsonMinar• 13 years ago

The 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...

agumonkey2• 13 years ago

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.

contingencies3• 13 years ago

Sounds good... link please!

mseebach7• 13 years ago

The 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?

samatman• 13 years ago

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.

ahomescu16• 13 years ago

It also sounds a lot like communism.

consonants5• 13 years ago

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.

tokenadult2• 13 years ago

"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.

oarevalo• 13 years ago

Actually, Pizarro took advantage that at the time of his arrival at Peru, the Inca's were in a somewhat state of civil war due to the two heirs (Huascar and Atahualpa) of the recently deceased Inca (Huayna Capac) fighting each other.

s_baby• 13 years ago

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?

freehunter• 13 years ago

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 wrong, as I took WWII history in the US (which tends not to focus on European involvement in WWII).

tokenadult2• 13 years ago

I had Ukraine in mind as one outstanding example. For some parts of the territory Japan invaded, too, the local people thought at first that maybe the invaders would be better rulers than their previous rulers.

jeltz4• 13 years ago

What examples from WW2 do you have? I can see no pattern between countries ruled by dictators and not.

int_19h5• 13 years ago

I think this was a reference to the fact that Soviet Union had extremely high (compared to average) rates of collaboration with the enemy among both civilian population on occupied territories, as well as and POWs.

Some keywords to look up: Hiwi, Russian Liberation Army, Lokot Republic, Ostlegionen.

Florin_Andrei2• 13 years ago

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.

Any society would collapse like a house of cards if it wasn't in its prime, but was instead just a bunch of bewildered, shell-shocked survivors of a 90% die-off event triggered by new microbes. Pizarro was dealing with people who were basically living in a post-apocalyptic universe. The gods were angry and all that stuff.

soperj9• 13 years ago

Just wondering about this: "World War II provides other examples of that principle" care to elaborate on that?

asdfdsa12343• 13 years ago

Why do you call them "dictators" instead of "royalty?"

mercurial2• 13 years ago

Basically the Russians weren't fighting to keep the Nazis from invading, but were focused on a counter-invasion.

The thesis of Icebreaker [1], a controversial history book by an ex-GRU officer, is that Stalin was planning an invasion of Germany right when Operation Barbarossa happened. However, his interpretation is disputed by most historians.

What is certain is that the Red Army was caught with its pants down and got a sound beating at the beginning. However, they did fight with tremendous tenacity (eg, at Stalingrad) later on, and eventually pushed back the Germans.

You'll also note that Germans and Japanese troops fought with particular determination even when it became clear that defeat was the only possible outcome. Contrast this with the dismal performance of French and British troops during the Battle of France.

int_19h5• 13 years ago

You'll also note that Germans and Japanese troops fought with particular determination even when it became clear that defeat was the only possible outcome.

I actually recall reading regarding Germans that there was a very peculiar distortion of perception there when even during late 1944 and early 1945, with Soviet armies literally at the door, a lot of people genuinely still believed that a victory (at that point defined as peace on non-debilitating terms) was highly likely - based on letters and other personal correspondence from that period, journals etc.

ekianjo4• 13 years ago

Contrast this with the dismal performance of French and British troops during the Battle of France.

Contrast this with the millions of people who died in Germany and Japan because of that determination (or should I say their rulers' determination!), without avoiding the final outcome at all. The French government understood very fast they were completely behind and were going to lose and they did the right thing to avoid a massacre which would have prevented nothing.

And besides, in Germany and Japan people were forced into fighting until the end (even teenagers in Germany), it's not like it was the "nation in arms" or something. Nobody wants to lose their life on purpose.

zeteo4• 13 years ago

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 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.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvee#France

jeltz4• 13 years ago

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

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

However I shared the paper's central question which was the complete lack of existence of a trading class. In other cultures there were always traders and markets and points of exchange. Perhaps as a mono-culture the Incans never had to develop such systems (or the need was small enough, as pointed out in the paper, that they did so on a case by case basis).

venomsnake• 13 years ago

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.

Florin_Andrei2• 13 years ago

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

zeteo4• 13 years ago

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 projects.

astine• 13 years ago

There were a lot of ancient societies that didn't have money but still engaged in commerce. The ancient Egyptians payed taxes in food for example. What the article stresses is that we don't have a record of the Incas' merchant class. This doesn't mean they didn't have one; they had no writing system either so it's possible that Inca trade was simply never recorded.

One thing to remember about the Inca's though is that though they had no written language, they did have a record keeping system involving knots in string. Only a very few Incas knew how this system worked so it's possible that here was no efficient reckoning system available to the masses so large scale trade would have been impossible in a lot of ways.

Another thing to think of, is that when talking about the 'Incas' we should avoid conflating the Incas themselves, who were relatively few in number, and the vast number of peoples that they ruled over. The bulk of the Incas themselves were soldiers in the military and were provided for directly by the government, while the conquered peoples were reputedly pressed into labor and made to wear uniforms corresponding to their social statuses. It's possible that the various tribes traded amongst themselves before they were conquered by the Incas and had their societies radically transformed.

dsizzle4• 13 years ago

The story of Atahualpa’s Ransom (http://latinamericanhistory.about.com/od/theconquestofperu/p...) -- the king offered a ransom of gold -- seems to cast doubt on the claim the Incans didn't have money.

user97563• 13 years ago

Actually I remember a documentary were it stated that the Persians paid men and women for their skills working on projects. I can't remember the name of the documentary (probably from the discovery channel).

A quick google search - http://hsc.csu.edu.au/ancient_history/societies/near_east/pe...

And - "Men, women and children worked in ancient Persia to support a diverse economy. Workers were paid in wine and grain, with skilled laborers paid more than unskilled, and supervisors paid more than workers. Men were paid slightly more than women, but female supervisors were paid more than the men working under them. Young women received maternity leave and were paid money for each child they had."

http://www.ehow.com/about_5414474_jobs-did-ancient-persians-...

dhughes• 13 years ago

skilled laborers paid more than unskilled, and supervisors paid more than workers. Men were paid slightly more than women, but female supervisors were paid more than the men working under them. Young women received maternity leave and were paid money for each child they had."

It makes sense, people were paid for their ability to add to society. Men paid more possibly due to their greater strength; carry more, build more faster and women for having children.

zeteo4• 13 years ago

Workers were paid in wine and grain

That's not pay, it's logistics. Even on the worst forced labor projects they're still usually feeding the prisoners.

thomaslangston• 13 years ago

I've watched one documentary which claimed the Egyptians were paid, in beer.

vijayboyapati• 13 years ago

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. The article gets right that people had to pay tax as labor but in some cases also as a percentage of the food they gathered, and a non-trivial percentage was stored in "tambos" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tambo_(Incan_structure)) to support the military and state-controlled trading routes.

OTOH the Spanish monarchy was totally evil, purposefully wiping out millions of people and creating basically what amounts of royal satraps in the new world from which to extract cheap/free labor and tons of gold and other wealth.

That said, the Incas were also primitive--no real written language and barely a minimum system for tracking amounts and numbers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu).

I took 12 years of Peruvian history and it wasn't until recently that I realized how utterly terrible the Incas were. They were proto Marxists."

PavlovsCat3• 13 years ago

Lost me at "Marxists". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism

edit: this came out kinda snarky, sorry.. I found all of that very interesting and insightful, just not the very end of the ending.

dmix• 13 years ago

It definitely didn't share Marx's original concepts of decentralized states and communal distribution. But almost every implementation of Marxism in recent history involved totalitarianism and ignored the part about decentralization of power post-revolution. So it's a fair statement, if taken as the commonly held meaning.

chrismealy• 13 years ago

You mean feudalists.

It's been a long time since I've read any pre-Columbian history, but I seem to remember that in addition to infectious disease, a lot of the South American empires were easy to conquer because the subjects generally hated their rulers, and the Spanish had no trouble finding indigenous allies.

moxie• 13 years ago

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 covered with tens of thousands of people waiting to attack. When they did, the entire population was slaughtered by the 20 conquistadors on horseback (there were so many dead bodies that new waves of attackers had to struggle to climb over them), and the Incas managed to kill only a single conquistador.

If you want to finally abuse yourself of the fairy tale notion that somehow justice will always prevail in the world, I recommend reading "The Last Days Of The Incas."

consonants5• 13 years ago

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?

shuffleshuff3• 13 years ago

"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.

sinkasapa2• 13 years ago

Quipu are hardly primitive and it is still debated as to whether they encoded natural language.

Here are a couple of good books that go in to detail on exactly how complex these devices were.

Signs of the Inka Khipu by Gary Urton http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/urtsig

Signs of the Inka Khipu goes into detail describing the binary coding mechanisms used in quipu which included not just a dimension of relative placement of knots. Color coding, left or right twisting, sub threads and top or bottom position relative to the central cord were a number of other mechanisms used to communicate binary information. I think that if x86 or MIPS are primitive, so are the quipu.

Mathematics of the Incas: Code of the Quipu by Marcia and Robert Ascher http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Incas-Code-Quipu/dp/048629...

This is a demonstration and exercise book demonstrating some of the mathematical expressiveness of quipus. Again, it is hardly primitive.

These devises were used for accounting, recording keeping and other ceremonial uses for an empire stretching most of the length of the South American continent at a time when the major communication mechanism was relay runners. These were likely detail documents, whether more like a spreadsheet or a database or also involving prose is debatable. The complexity and flexibility of the system could have supported both. Like a Turing machine, if there were an infinitely long quipu, there is nothing it could not calculate.

ekianjo4• 13 years ago

OTOH the Spanish monarchy was totally evil, purposefully wiping out millions of people

As far as I know viruses imported from Europe to America wiped millions of people, not the Spanish themselves. It's well known that Pisaro's forces were minimal in the New World and the fights usually just involved a few hundred or thousands men. Viruses, OTOH, did wipe millions of people, and this was widely reported and observed in many tales of the New World.

mikegagnon• 13 years ago

"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."

I find it fascinating that this article compares the labor system more to socialism than to slavery.

drothlis• 13 years ago

It certainly wasn't socialism, but it wasn't exactly slavery either. The "labor tax" was 2 years of labour (out of your entire life).

contingencies3• 13 years ago

More like national service as per Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland then?

consonants5• 13 years ago

The labor system is not at all comparable to socialism. Try feudalism.

dsego• 13 years ago

Not sure why, but this reminds me of youth work actions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_work_actions

MichaelMoser123• 13 years ago

Centralized states that pretend to be egalitarian need terror so that the peons don't forget to shore the line. Maybe that's why the Inca's had the habit of human sacrifices; (interesting, this seems to have been a common 'feature' of both Aztec and Inca culture)

Also without the terror component the Soviet state became stagnant.

sologoub2• 13 years ago

Reading this, it doesn't sound all that different from Serfdom in Europe. Essentially, people were tied to the land, and in return the noble provided protection.

The main difference seems to be the centrality of supply distribution. With serfdom, the serfs were basically required to work for the lord/noble and then had to also do their own food growing/production to survive. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom)

Having a central authority ensuring no-one starves and everyone had all the essentials allowed for much better specialization and efficiency. Other cultures evolved into similar specialization via trade and offered distributed societies. The Inca-style state would have similar limitations to Soviet Union, where all goods that were not produced within its boundaries were virtually unattainable by the common people.

This also stifled innovation in areas that the state was not focusing on. Just look at the Soviet consumer car manufacturing sector - an automatic transmission was virtually unheard of until 90s imports started pouring in.

rrtyyyy• 13 years ago

Just like the Federation

mistercow2• 13 years ago

Another hypothesis, which is probably mostly wrong but still extremely interesting, is that put forth by Julian Jaynes: that the Incas, and most other early peoples, were not conscious (by Jaynes' very specific definition of "conscious"), but instead were unconscious agents guided by hallucinations, and that attempts to reason about them with modern models of volition and awareness are doomed.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)

Roboprog• 13 years ago

Hey, savage, wanna try some Snow Crash?

(see one of the plot elements from the book)

mistercow2• 13 years ago

Yeah, apparently several of Stephenson's earlier books drew from Jaynes' work, although Snow Crash is the only one of them I've read.

bayesianhorse• 13 years ago

I believe the point is the "missing" markets. In the old world markets arise all over the place, using some form of currency, for example cigarettes in prisons, laundry detergent-driven drug market in the US etc.

Probably no Incan had gotten around to inventing the concept of token economies yet. I don't actually believe this lack of markets benefited them. It must have been an awkward way to run a society with a couple of thousands of members.

sinkasapa2• 13 years ago

I am not familiar enough with the Incan economy specifically to say whether this lack of internal markets claim is accurate. I do know that the Inca would not have to "invent" markets because there were preexisting markets in the Andean region. In "Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas: The Political Economy of North Andean Chiefdoms" Frank Salomon describes pre-Incan trade in the region surrounding Quito. http://www.amazon.com/Native-Lords-Quito-Age-Incas/dp/052104...

They would also have been familiar with the primitive currency used by the groups they conquered. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axe-monies

Granted, this was in the most recently conquered area of Incan expansion. The blood had hardly dried before the Spanish came but the subjects of the Inca would have been familiar with these concepts.

I also think that it wrong to talk about the descendants of these people as though they don't exist any more. Indigenous culture is quite strong and in the Andes. There was a change in power but it wasn't like turning out a light switch. Even the Inca, themselves, (who were really just a noble class) were able to self identify and organize a rebellion in the late 1700's, 200 years after the initial conquest.

ctdonath• 13 years ago

Perhaps not so strange if religion is taken into account, which the article completely neglects. People will do a great deal if they believe it is for a higher cause - and especially if sacrifice is an ingrained social imperative. Between the society living very close to the edge of survival (no matter how prosperous, they were one season from possible pervasive disaster so everyone's contribution counts), and service to their gods going so far as human sacrifice (societal maintenance deemed so important people are ritualistically killed, instilling devotion to the system), people become quite content living in an abundant theocracy.

thret• 13 years ago

Guns, Germs & Steel discusses the Spanish invasion of the Inca Empire in some detail. Well worth a read.

More surprising to me than the lack of money is the fact that they did not have the wheel.

dusklight• 13 years ago

It is not clear to me from the article and from the brief googling I did, how they came to the conclusion that there was no trading class? What evidence did they use to prove this absence? It seems to me the ruling class of any society works by trading with each other, in promises if not in currency. I don't see how it could work any other way?

teeja• 13 years ago

Perhaps they were rich in sanity. Unlike the 20th century. (Stalins, Hitlers, nuclear brinkmanship, massive pollution, tens of millions killed in war ...)

Sanity alone explains their remarkable success. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Money is a symptom.

That and (towards the end) a couple of kings who had absolute power. Like ... Stalin.

beloch• 13 years ago

Mita (taxation by labor) is not that weird really. Think of the most basic form of exchange in a barter society. You show up to a market with potatoes you've grown and leave with bread, pots, etc.. Well, what if you don't have potatoes and want bread? You could offer to chop wood for the baker. Work can be bartered just as easily as goods, and credit can be accrued. We do this all the time, even today. Say your sister helps you move. When she next moves, you're going to feel like a scumbag if you're not there to help her! Some campesino villages in Peru still barter labor this way on a rather large scale. Mita in such communities is a bit like a socially enforced volunteer spirit. People are socially obliged to do things for their community. The Inca empire just took that to a completely different scale!

The unusual thing about the Inca is that they preferred to tax labor even from those who produced goods. Potato farmers wouldn't tithe potatoes. They'd spend some of their time working government lands that grew potatoes. The fact that farmers were feeding themselves and the state out of different fields probably had some rather interesting effects.

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

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