Let’s get fiscal: The social relations of finance and technological change in Aztec and Colonial Mexico

Abstract

This paper argues that finance should matter to archaeologists and shows how archaeological research enhances our understanding of the history of finance. It presents archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence of saltmaking, finance, and technological change in the Basin of Mexico during the Aztec and Spanish empires. Studies of past technological change often leave unasked how people finance their adoption of innovations. The means of finance—surplus production, saving, debt, cost sharing, etc.—are applied in culturally and historically specific ways that have systemic and long-term consequences for adopters. Saltmakers’ widespread adoption of new technologies in the Late Postclassic (CE 1350–1521) was enabled by finance at the household scale. In the sixteenth century, Indigenous saltmakers adapted existing tools to manufacture new products, like saltpeter, for Spanish consumers without new financial arrangements. Eighteenth-century innovations in the production of saltpeter required equipment that was beyond the financial means of most Indigenous saltmakers. Nevertheless, I suggest that some saltmakers solved the problem and continued to produce salt and saltpeter by expanding their social relations of finance beyond their households. These findings show how finance operated in a non-Western, preindustrial context and in an economic sphere that was relatively independent of the political economies of states and empires.