ABSTRACT: Revisiting the Tawantinsuyu: an economic analysis of pre-Columbian Inca political economy
Despite centuries of scholarly neglect, the past 50 years of anthropological research has unearthed a wealth of new information about the civilizations of pre-Columbian South America. These findings have dramatically shifted researchers’ perceptions of these diverse societies that built empires of great vastness and complexity. The Inca Empire, or “Tawantinsuyu,” was of particular interest to social scientists due to discovered evidence of a centralized command structure. This paper summarizes the recent advances in pre-Columbian Andean scholarship and analyzes the findings from a new institutional economic perspective. This paper also details some of the most popular approaches to pre-Columbian Andean analysis and highlights some of their strengths and shortcomings.
The diversity and autonomy of the various regions controlled by the Inca Empire determined the characteristics of its political economy. Coastal communities to the west of the Andes developed complex irrigation systems to mitigate constant floods. Mountain communities developed a process of maize farming that minimized land usage with agricultural terraces. Since vertical trade and communication between communities was virtually impossible across a harsh mountain range, coastal communities and mountain communities tended to barter horizontally for needed resources. Beyond this limited contact, communities tended to be bonded by deep mutual trust and reciprocity along with, in many cases, a unique language and religion. This paper presents an argument that the norms and technology developed by these decentralized communities formed the of backbone of the Inca Empire.
In the 15th century, Pachacuti-Cusi Yupanqui, the “Sapa Inca,” or paramount leader of the Incan tribe, consolidated the autonomous communities into a larger polity. The Sapa Inca sent his soldiers to these communities and promised riches if the leaders would consent to state rule. In return for a peaceful abrogation of autonomy, the leader would be erected into the ranks of the nobility as a “curaca.” In this fashion, the Sapa Inca developed an expansive administrative bureaucracy to collect and manage the stream of taxation and oversee large conscripted labor projects. The Inca Empire saw a meteoric rise through their steady sources of tribute and free labor and suffered a premature collapse through the transmission of deadly viruses from the Old World in the 16th century.
The interpretations of these findings were initially marred by researchers’ ideological priors; many early analyses of the Incan political economy conformed suspiciously well to contemporary theories of the welfare state despite a lack of substantial evidence. This projection of ideological biases continued until Karl Polanyi developed his “substantivist” approach to studying “archaic” societies. This framework aimed to redirect researchers’ attentions to the social and political contexts in which economic decisions were made in Pre-Columbian economies in an attempt to minimize incompatible Western assumptions in interpretations of the evidence. Practitioners of the substantivist approach differentiate market economies, which autonomously operate independent of the state or family, from “archaic” economies, which are driven by non-economic institutions. This paper details the problems that this distinction creates for effective economic analysis; in particular, the flawed definitions on which this analysis is founded and the tautological logic of assuming that universal economic principles do not hold because an ancient institution does not immediately resemble its modern counterpart.
This new body of scholarship has largely been conducted away from the scrutinizing lens of new institutional economic analysis. While substantivism and new institutional economics share an emphasis on contextual institutional analysis, the substantivist approach selectively suspends conventional economic assumptions when studying certain societies while holding them for others. This paper presents an alternative analysis of Incan political economy based on a new institutional framework that finds that the centralized command structure was not the source of wealth for the Incan people but rather was an external structure that was pressed upon traditional Andean customs and technologies to enrich the nobility at the great cost of the common people.
