
The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012) - dboles99
http://io9.com/the-greatest-mystery-of-the-inca-empire-was-its-strange-1198541254
======
vijayboyapati
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)](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](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."

~~~
chrismealy
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
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."

~~~
asdfdsa1234
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.

~~~
shuffleshuff
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.

~~~
r00fus
> 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.

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

Why is this either/or? The above statement is undoubtedly true, but that
doesn't mean what I said is false.

The problem, is, as you say, that the Incans only had access to cloth armor,
copper axes, and stone clubs, as I said in my comment. They eventually
developed guerilla tactics, but such tactics are not effective when you are
sieging your capital, trying to take it back from invaders. Also, I cordially
invite you to try and organize the digging of ditches when 50 to 90 percent of
your population has been killed, most of the rest are in rebellion because
your rule was, frankly, never terribly popular, and the remaining percentage
are currently facing down a thousand pound warhorse. I would also like to
point out that decently training a pole-armsmen is no easy feat when you have
never done it before, and your empire is in disarray.

Also, the Spanish had plenty of experience in the European style of warfare
based on cavalry supported by foot, since the European cultures had access to
horses for many centuries at this point, whereas the Incans and other cultures
and empires that arose in the Andes had access to the llama. Llamas are not,
shall we say, renowned for their martial prowess. It takes time to develop new
ideas and technologies in the face of change in the best of time. Saying "oh
come on, just dig ditches and train spearmen" is a tad unrealistic.

~~~
winter_blue
> _Llamas are not, shall we say, renowned for their martial prowess._

The idea of someone riding a llama and going out to battle gives me laughs.

Obligatory llama pictures:

* Llama face: [https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/269279233/llama270977_s...](https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/269279233/llama270977_smiling_llama.jpg)

* Llama standing on steppe: [http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/0...](http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/006/cache/llama_613_600x450.jpg)

------
zeteo
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvee#France)

~~~
Florin_Andrei
I think the key point is that they didn't have money _at all_.

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

~~~
wpietri
Why's that? It's clear they recognized various things as valuable. And that
the Spanish told them they wanted gold.

But money is special: it's a unit by which all economic value is measured, and
it's universally swappable for any other kind of value.

~~~
dsizzle
It's possible, in principle, that this "transaction" was the first of its kind
in Inca civilization and only happened to involve gold because that's what the
Spanish wanted. But since gold is the quintessential commodity currency and
has much of its value tied to others' valuing it [1], I think the burden of
proof is on the claim they didn't have money. (And that's even before
considering this famous anecdote -- one of only a few available, about any
aspect of Inca culture.) They don't even address it though.

[1] Unlike bartered goods or services, gold (like other good currencies) is
readily divisible and transportable, transfers without any skill, and stores
indefinitely. Unlike many commodities, gold is not valued primarily for its
functional value (food can be eaten, cloth provides warmth, etc.)

~~~
wpietri
I guess you're entitled to use whatever standard of proof you want. But
"random guy on the internet doesn't like it" is not the kind of thing you
should expect to persuade others. For me it certainly doesn't outweigh the
opinion of professional scholars.

The reason we know Romans had money is that we still have some of their money.
If they did have money and you're asserting it was gold, then it should be up
to you to come up with some of their golden money. There are certainly plenty
of other artifacts from the era.

------
tokenadult
"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.

~~~
mercurial
> 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.

~~~
ekianjo
> 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.

~~~
mercurial
> 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.

I was more thinking in terms of low troop morale and lack of aggressivity of
(in particular) French high command.

A contrario, German troops, although outclassed both on the Western and
Eastern fronts by the end of the war, managed a fighting retreat in mostly
good order, even mounting a daring counter-offensive in the Ardennes in 1944
which caught Allied troops flat-footed.

> 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.

You are thinking of the Volkssturm, which had a relatively minor impact on the
war, and only existed for a few months. On the other hand, regular German
units did not collapse and disintegrate under pressure, when they could simply
have surrendered to the Allies (at least on the Western front). As for
Japanese units, just read about the battle of Iwo Jima. I'm not aware that
Japanese units on the island were more "forced to fight" than any other body
of troops, but still fought almost to the last man, in spite of their poor
physical condition.

~~~
ekianjo
> I'm not aware that Japanese units on the island were more "forced to fight"
> than any other body of troops, but still fought almost to the last man, in
> spite of their poor physical condition.

They fought out of despair since they were told they would be tortured if they
ever get caught (and most of them killed themselves instead of surrendering in
the end). And it's not like they had anywhere to go at Iwo Jima. They were on
an island.

------
NelsonMinar
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...](http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-
Columbus/dp/1400032059/)

~~~
agumonkey
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.

~~~
contingencies
Sounds good... link please!

~~~
agumonkey
You're lucky someone put it online
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8S4BbWhayk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8S4BbWhayk)

Some additional info from the tv channel who broadcasted it
[http://www.arte.tv/guide/fr/047580-000/les-gaulois-au-
dela-d...](http://www.arte.tv/guide/fr/047580-000/les-gaulois-au-dela-du-
mythe)

------
mseebach
_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?

~~~
ahomescu1
It also sounds a lot like communism.

~~~
consonants
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.

~~~
ahomescu1
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.

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

~~~
ahomescu1
After thinking about it, I feel like the comparison to China deserves a
discussion. China moved away from pure communism a long time ago, and
basically implemented a form of capitalism-on-communism. They're now arguably
the most dog-eat-dog capitalist country in the world, very far from a worker's
paradise that communism is supposed to be.

A more fair comparison would be to North Korea. They're still old-school
communist, and really not doing well.

~~~
soperj
And the US isn't purely capitalistic either; public police/fire dept/sewer,
has semi public health care in medicare.

------
sologoub
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](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.

------
mistercow
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)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_\(psychology\))

~~~
Roboprog
Hey, savage, wanna try some Snow Crash?

(see one of the plot elements from the book)

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

------
sinkasapa
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...](http://www.amazon.com/Native-Lords-Quito-Age-
Incas/dp/0521040493)

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

------
beloch
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.

------
mikegagnon
"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
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).

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

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

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

~~~
Demiurge
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.

~~~
eloisius
There's a big difference between being compelled by the laws of nature and
being forced by the bidding of another man.

~~~
rayiner
The situation with the Incas was that, without the force coordination
necessary to conduct agriculture in the mountains, everyone would die. Where
does that fall on the nature versus man spectrum?

~~~
icambron
The Inca used forced labor to build temples and roads and provide food and
other goods to the military. Cooperative farming can certainly become more
efficient with additional infrastructure like irrigation and food storage, but
I find it hard to believe that the tradeoff here is starvation vs massive
cleptocratic absolute monarchy. It went way beyond the need to grow food
cooperatively. And in fact, the only way that you would end up with all of
this labor available for armies and temples and so on is by generating large
food surpluses, so it's clear they weren't on the boundary of starvation. How
did I work, I wonder, before there was an emperor?

That said, we currently use money to build roads and provide food and other
goods to the military, which we fund through taxes. Taxes are just a more
nuanced, easier-to-administer form of "provide x% of your labor to the central
authority". The evil part here is the absolute monarchy that makes self-
interested decisions about what to do with that labor, but the Inca were
hardly alone in that respect.

------
MichaelMoser123
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.

------
ctdonath
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.

------
dsego
Not sure why, but this reminds me of youth work actions
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_work_actions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_work_actions)

------
thret
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.

------
bayesianhorse
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.

------
dusklight
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
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.

------
rrtyyyy
Just like the Federation

