“Income and Inequality in the Aztec Empire on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest”, 2023-06-26 ():
[Twitter, blog] Today, Latin American countries are characterized by relatively high levels of economic inequality. This circumstance has often been considered a long-run consequence of the Spanish conquest and of the highly extractive institutions imposed by the colonizers.
Here we show that, in the case of the Aztec Empire, high inequality predates the Spanish conquest, also known as the Spanish-Aztec War. We reach this conclusion by estimating levels of income inequality and of imperial extraction across the empire.
We find that the richest 1% earned 41.8% of the total income, while the income share of the poorest 50% was just 23.3%. We also argue that those provinces that had resisted the Aztec expansion suffered from relatively harsh conditions, including higher taxes, in the context of the imperial system—and were the first to rebel, allying themselves with the Spaniards.
Existing literature suggests that after the Spanish conquest, the colonial elites inherited pre-existing extractive institutions and added additional layers of social and economic inequality.
…Overall, the Aztec Gini index of income inequality amounted to 50.4. This is higher than the 36–39 found in the Roman Empire in 14 AD, the 41–43 reported for Byzantium around 1,000 AD and the 33–37 of England and Wales in 1290, but in line with the 50 of the northern Low Countries around 1500 and the 52 of the southern Low Countries around 155033,34,42–44. However, the Aztec Empire was much poorer than the Low Countries, and hence similar Gini indexes have deeply different implications. This is revealed by inequality extraction ratios, which measure how close a society is to the maximum inequality that it could theoretically experience without pushing all of its members (except for a single super-rich) below subsistence42,44. With a ratio of 89%, the Aztec Empire was much closer to the boundary than the northern Low Countries (71%), which implies a social organization strongly modified in favour of a small elite. Within the empire, inequality reached even higher peaks: >60 in some of the richest provinces and almost 80 in the city of Tenochtitlan.
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