Liberty Matters
What came before and after the conquest
Dr. Paul Schwennesen makes an interesting point by considering what came before the Spanish conquest. He says that “the least free places in Latin America today are the former strongholds of the Inca, Aztec, and Maya after all, and the coincidence seems more than passing.” Income inequality is another Latin American ailment laid at the feet of the Spanish Conquest. However, if one looks further back, as Guido Alfani of Bocconi University and Alfonso Carballo of the NEOMA Business School did in a recent study, the much talked about income inequality in Latin America appears to have pre-dated Spanish conquest, given that within the Aztec Empire:
…the richest 1% earned 41.8% of the total income, while the income share of the poorest 50% was just 23.3%...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.[1]
Alfani and Carballo's study blurs the utopian vision of the Aztec empire, as Louis Baudin (1928) had previously done with the Inca empire. When Hernán Cortés arrived in what is now Mexico, he did not come across a peaceful civilization, but rather a population subjected to a constant state of war, where the dominant faction subjected it to increasingly extractive taxes and “pro-elite political reforms that exacerbated social stratification throughout the empire. The nobility took possession of the land and controlled the commoners through various mechanisms, which led to a clear demarcation between the landowning class and the landless class.” In some cases, Europeans adapted or maintained pre-existing extractive institutions, such as the tribute system of the Incas in the Andean region.
Coming back to Baudin, his book A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Perú is an expose of how inhumane such a society was. The American edition published in 1961 bears a foreword by none other than Ludwig von Mises which claims that Baudin “did not approach the subject of his studies with any preconceived idea. He proceeds, as the great historians have ever tried to proceed, sine ira et studio”.[2] He adds:
…From the pages of his treatise there emerge shadowy outlines of life under a collectivist regime, the spectre of a human animal deprived of his essentially human quality, the power to choose and to act. These wards of the Inca were only in a zoological sense human beings. Actually they were kept like cattle in a pen. Like cattle they had nothing to worry about because their personal fate did not depend on their own behavior but was determined by the apparatus of the system. They could in this sense be called happy. But theirs was a peculiar brand of happiness…[3]
On what happened during the more than 200 years after independence from the Spanish Empire, we should also give the locals some agency and, thus, a fair share in the distribution of blame.
Endnotes
[1] Alfani, G., Carballo, A. “Income and inequality in the Aztec Empire on the eve of the Spanish conquest”. Nature Human Behavior 7, 1265–1274 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01636-3
[2] “without anger and bias”
[3] Baudin, Louis. A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru. D. Van Nostrand Company, 1961.
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